Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 5.djvu/518

504 and privileges of the country, and on the 10th of December confirmed the convention of Reichenbach at the Hague with the plenipotentiaries of the three allied powers—Great Britain, Holland, and Prussia. There were some new articles introduced into this convention, one of which was that no laws should be introduced, or taxes levied, without the consent of the States; and another, that the troops should not be employed against the people, except in clear and direct maintenance of the law, and at the requisition of the civil magistrates.

The patriots of Paris were furious at this defeat of their efforts to revolutionise the Netherlands.

They asserted that there was no barrier to prevent the Austrians marching into France; and, on the 19th of December, it is said that Marie Antoinette found under her plate, on sitting down to dinner, a paper, on which was written—"At the very first cannon that your brother fires against the French patriots, your head shall be sent to him." That this paper really was thus placed is probable enough, from the fact that the statement was published in all the Jacobin papers; and they even made merry with the certainty that Louis XVI. was so completely watched that he could never escape. They published a caricature of his flying in a carriage drawn by hares, but hedged in by a circle so complete that he would never be able to break through it; and Blanchard was represented as offering a conveyance in his balloon, as the only way that presented a possible escape out of France. Such was the state of France at the termination of 1790.

During this time, the French propagandists had contrived to create disturbances in Poland, and to engage the Poles in a hopeless struggle for their freedom, the results of which we shall have occasion hereafter to narrate. The czarina Catherine still continued her war on the Ottoman empire. The Turks gained several advantages over the Russians on the shores of the Black Sea, and near the Danube; but they were severely repulsed in an attempt to drive the Russians from their conquests betwixt the Black and Caspian Seas, and suffered a terrible slaughter on the banks of the River Kuban. Then England, Prussia, Holland, and Austria, from the congress of Reichenbach, announced to Catherine that they were resolved not to permit further encroachments on Turkey; and the Russians themselves began to feel the necessity of a pause in these expensive expeditions, so that the war in this quarter evidently approached its temporary close.