Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 5.djvu/11



HE History of the Reign of George III. is pregnant with the most momentous principles, and presents to the reader the most momentous lessons possible in the economy of Nations. A series of events is presented to our view to which there is no parallel to be found at any other period of the world's history. We see the whole of Europe in the throes of that terrible political convulsion which had its centre in France, to which country, happily, the worst of its effects were confined, though its motive principles were so wide-spread and so deep-rooted as to make the representative of almost every established dynasty tremble on his throne—a convulsion complete and universal, extending not merely to the dethroning of kings and the overthrowing of governments, but to the destruction of well-nigh every principle of morality and religion by which man tries to bind himself to his Maker and his fellow-man; in which respect for every tie of relationship, every feeling of humanity, was cast to the winds, and a great nation, drunk with blood, and mad with every evil passion and lust that can agitate the breast of man, dared to depose the Supreme Being Himself from his place as the object of their worship, and to set up in His stead—as if in the grimmest satire—the personification of that very Human Reason whose principles they had so amazingly outraged.

We shall see in the course of this volume how the evil poison of the French Revolution extended even to our own country, in which at one time it threatened to bear dangerous fruit, had it not been happily arrested in time by the wisdom and vigilance of our rulers.

Still, this period was to our country one of extreme peril and unfortunate consequences. While the nations of the European Continent had been worshipping but a marred and mutilated image of Liberty and Free Thought, a truer idea of these great principles had been growing in the breasts of our colonists on the other side of the Atlantic. It will be seen in these pages through what a series of errors, well-intentioned though they might have been, these possessions, which we had prized so highly, were alienated from the British Crown, and having shaken off the dominion of their mother country by a series of splendid successes in the field, and feeling themselves strong enough to walk alone, began their glorious career as the great republic of the United States of North America.

But the troubles of England were not confined to the American war. A mistaken policy of