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A KETROSPECTIVE ENQUIRY. 65 for continuous war; and the administrative CHAP makeshifts to which they resorted could scarce !_ fail to prove more and more serviceable with the progress of time. Then, again, the experi- ence gathered in the course of nearly seventeen years had of course a great worth — for incor- rigible indeed must England have been, if after so lengthened a discipline she had not begun to mend ; and there was one of her lessons — the one she learnt when called to arms for re- sistance to a foreign invasion — which especially helped to repress her strategic frivolity, and to steady her in the conduct of war. But again — and, if well based on fact, this denial concludes the whole question — it is not true, as supposed, that after 1809, England still carried on her great war without other aid than that furnished by the weak administrative system on which she before had been leaning. Far from being left helpless after 1809, and condemned to go on still floundering in the meshes of her old institutions, she even before the year closed, began to feel the propulsion of three new administrative forces working always together in harmony, and strong enough on the whole, though using some clumsy machinery, to compass the business in hand Two of these three new forces she owed to The three her Wellington. For the third, she was partly istrative indebted to Mr Eobert Dundas, but much more au-dtnusot tu that opportune fall of gross personal monarchy which at last began to make way for government at the will of the State. VOL. VII. B