even if a series of wars were to recommence. When we reflect on this, and contrast these thirty-six years with the period that preceded them—a period of violence, of tumult, of unrestingly destructive energy—a period throughout which the wealth of nations was scattered like sand, and the blood of nations lavished like water, it is impossible not to look with deep interest on the final crisis of that dark and dreadful epoch—the crisis out of which our own happier cycle of years has been evolved. The great battle which ended the twenty-three years’ war of the first French Revolution, and which quelled the man whose genius and ambition had so long disturbed and desolated the world, deserves to be regarded by us not only with peculiar pride as one of our greatest national victories, but with peculiar gratitude for the repose which it secured for us and for the greater part of the human race.
One good test for determining the importance of Waterloo is to ascertain what was felt by wise and prudent statesmen before that battle respecting the return of Napoleon from Elba to the imperial throne of France, and the probable effects of his success. For this purpose, I will quote the words, not of any of our vehement anti-Gallican politicians of the school of Pitt, but of a leader of our Liberal party, of a man whose reputation as a jurist, a historian, and a far-sighted and candid statesman was, and is, deservedly high, not only in this country, but throughout Europe. Sir James Mackintosh said of the return from Elba,
"Was it in the power of language to describe the evil? Wars which had raged for more than twenty years throughout Europe; which had spread blood and desolation from Cadiz to Moscow, and from Naples to Copenhagen; which had wasted the means of human enjoyment, and destroyed the instruments of social improvement; which threatened to diffuse among the European nations the dissolute and ferocious habits of a predatory soldiery—at length, by one of those vicissitudes which bid defiance to the foresight of man, had been brought to a close, upon the whole, happy, beyond all reasonable expectation, with no violent shock to national independence, with some tolerable compromise between the opinions of the age and the reverence due to ancient institutions; with no too signal or mortifying triumph over the legitimate interests or avowable feelings of any numerous body of men, and, above all, without those retaliations against nations
