FRENCH INVASION.
Glasgow, let .Tammary 1852.
Stn—In thinking over the portentous vaticination in which your alarmist correspondents indulged to such an extent lately, I very much doubted the propriety or necessity of such agitation ; especially at a season of gratula- tion, when men's minds should have been occupied with the thoughts of an advent of so very different a kind. I wondered also, if the French people are at all given to such fears and forebodings with regard to hostile incursions from England ; seeing that their seaboard may perhaps present as many points of attraction to an invader as our own. Why should all the alarm, or the cause of it, be on one side ? It might have been imagined that the events of last summer had donee:loth to neutralize all such feeling of aggres- sion on either side ; and it surely presents one of the most striking illuatra- dons of the saying that " truth is stranger than fiction "-and, moreover, one not overly creditable to British magnanimity-that within a few short months, after giving the cordial grasp of friendship to so many of the French people in the English metropolis, your correspondents should be found con- juring up the bugbear of invasion, as coming from a people who, for a good while to come, must have enough to do in managing their own domestic concerns ; and who, when they do fall out with their neighbours, are as likely to be involved in quarrel with some other countries as with this. Un- less we are to suppose the French Government as likely to result in nothing else than a combination of despotism and brigandage, why should it be anticipated that a nation, numbering so many thousands of the lovers of freedom and humanity would be guilty of attacking surreptitiously a state than which there is perhaps not another in Europe so anxious to re- ciprocate with it terms of peace and good-will? And, even on the suppo- sition that danger were to be apprehended from such a quarter, fear is a feel- ing to which Englishmen are generally supposed to be unwilling to confess ; while to show that you fear an enemy, is the surest way to invite his ap- proach. Within this United Kingdom there are millions of men who would reckon it a disgrace to survive the ruin of their country. There is no other nation that knows this so well as the French, or that, consequently, may be expected to be more wary in provoking to such a contest. If the foregoing remarks may be regarded as the exponent of national feeling on this side of the Tweed, that feeling cannot be ascribed either to our insensibility or local security. When London is to be found in peril, it will be time for Edinburgh and Glasgow to think of buckling on their ar- mour. And it is questionable if we could now retire, as did our fathers of old where the Romans could not follow, to maintain an independence which has often been menaced but never yet overthrown.
A. THISTLE.
Previous page
