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to make it the unconditional vassal of England, there appeared in Spring 1801, an enormous English fleet before Copenhagen and opened on the 2nd day of April a bombardment on the peaceful city and its fortifications. This unwarranted assault, which took place while the two nations were at peace, worked great havoc everywhere. Though the Danes could not hope for victory, they nevertheless sturdily defended their city, causing the English a loss of one thousand men and considerable damage to their ships. The hostilities ceased when the news arrived of the assassination of the Czar Paul whereby the neutral confederacy appeared to be dissolved. Averse to becoming a vassal of England, Denmark maintained its neutral position also during the following years, thereby provoking the wrath of England to an even greater degree. It was July 31st, 1807, when Lord Castlereagh in open Parliament declared: "A large expedition will be fitted out, but those, whom it concerns, will not hear of it until they feel the death-blow in their neck." And indeed, on the 16th of August there appeared before unsuspecting Copenhagen thirty-six English warships and five hundred large transports. While the latter landed an army of 30,000 men which besieged the city from the landside, the fleet blockaded the harbor and shelled the city five days and nights. After twenty-eight streets with all the palaces, houses and churches had been utterly destroyed and more than 2,000 inhabitants had perished, the survivors submitted to the terms of the brutal intruders. Denmark was forced to surrender her whole navy, consisting of eighteen battleships, fifteen frigates, six briggs and twenty-five gunboats to the English, who, before their departure, destroyed also on the wharves all machines and equipment which they could not carry off. With one blow Denmark's commerce and defense were destroyed for decades to come. All this was done in a time of peace between the two nations, and without declaration of war by the nation, which to-day poses as the protecting arch-angel of Belgium and as the upholder of morals in the international dealings.
The celebrated German historian Onken declared this act as an outrage unparralleled in history, committed against a neutral state, the only transgression of which was its weak defense and which, in consequence was attacked from ambush, pirate-fashion, strangled almost to death, robbed and then left bleeding by the way-side, a glaring example of the tyrannical depravity the armed English shop-keepers were capable of and who on their domain,—the sea, feared no longer any rival."
After this ignoble exploit the English Government declared
