ONE:On the 12th of February Sir James Graham moved for the reduction of the salaries of all persons holding offices under Government, in proportion to the enhanced value of money produced by the Bank Restriction Act, which added to the weight of all fixed payments while it lowered wages and the price of provisions. "Hence," he said, "the miserable state to which the people of this country were now reduced, and the necessity for rigid, unsparing economy; and in that system of economy one great source of retrenchment must be the reduction of the salaries of those who had their hands in the public purse. Justice requires, necessity demands it." Ministers did not dare to resist this motion openly. They evaded it by an amendment, which was unanimously adopted, for an Address to the king, requesting him to order an inquiry to be made into all the departments of the Civil Government, with a view of reducing the number of persons employed in the various Services, and the amount of their salaries. On the 15th Mr. Hume attempted to carry retrenchment into the Army and Navy, moving a resolution to the effect that the former should be reduced by 20,000 men, and the latter by the sum of a million and a half. All the reductions he proposed would have effected a saving of eight millions annually. But neither the Whigs nor the Canning party were disposed to go such lengths. The motion was, therefore, defeated, the minority consisting solely of Radical reformers, who mustered fifty-seven on the division. Another assault on the Government was led on by Mr. Poulett Thompson, who moved for the appointment of a Committee for a Revision of the system of Taxation with a view to saving expense in the mode of collecting the revenue. The motion was resisted by Mr Peel on the ground that such important duties should not be delegated to a fraction of the members of the House. The motion was rejected by a large majority. A few days later, however, Ministers sustained a damaging defeat in the Committee of Supply on the Navy estimates. Two young men, who had been public servants for a few months only, Mr. R. Dundas and Mr. W. S. Bathurst, Junior Commissioners of the Navy, had been pensioned off on the reduction of their offices, the one with ��400 and the other with ��500 a year. The arrangement was attacked as a gross job and defended upon principle, and Ministers after[309] mustering all their strength were beaten by a majority of 139 to 121, on the motion that those pensions should be struck off. Several other motions, brought forward with a view of effecting retrenchments, were rejected by the House. This movement in the direction of financial reform, no doubt, received an impulse from the resentment of the leading Whigs, whose claims to take part in the Government were ignored by the Duke. But this remark does not apply to the efforts of Mr. Attwood and Mr. Baring, who moved that instead of a gold standard there should be a gold and silver standard, and that the Act for prohibiting the issue of small notes should be repealed. They strengthened their case by an appeal to the facts of the existing distress and commercial depression arising from a restricted currency. On the part of the Government, however, it was argued that a double standard of gold and silver would cause a loss of five per cent, to creditors if debtors were to pay in the silver standard��that the whole country would be a scene of confusion and ruin��that silver never was in practice the standard of the country, and that it never had been actually in a state to be used as a legal tender. Latterly the law had enacted that it should not be a legal tender beyond twenty-five pounds. By weight, indeed, it was a legal tender to any amount, but practically it had become so depreciated that there was no such thing as a standard by weight. Mr. Attwood's resolutions on the currency were negatived without a division. THREE:

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ONE:There, a council of war was called, and it was debated whether they should make a stand there or not. The conclusion was that they should not, but should abandon the sacred city��the Jerusalem of Russia��to the enemy, and, there can now be little doubt, to the flames. Rostopchin, the governor of the city, had for some time been preparing for the grand catastrophe. Under pretence of pouring down liquid fire on the French from a monster balloon, he had employed great numbers of women in making such a balloon, and men in preparing fireworks and combustibles��the accumulation of the latter being his real object.

ONE:The marriage of the Prince of Wales with Mrs. Fitzherbert was notorious; but as it was not openly avowed by the Prince, no steps were taken to dissolve it. But in 1794 the Prince had got a new favourite, the Lady Jersey, already a grandmother, but a young one. For her Mrs. Fitzherbert was dismissed, showing how little the Prince thought of the reality of the marriage with[442] that fair lady, and he now lived openly and ostentatiously with Lady Jersey, Lord Jersey being well contented with the arrangement for the sake of the good things he hoped to gain by it, being at once appointed Master of the Horse to the Prince. But the Prince's extravagance and gambling, by the practice of which, notwithstanding his own losses, he reduced his friends, one after the other, as the Earl of Moira, Sir Wallace Porter, and others, to beggary, had now brought him into extreme difficulties. His debts, after having been more than once paid off by Parliament, now again amounted to six hundred and thirty thousand pounds! Another appeal to Parliament was absolutely necessary, for his creditors were grown excessively clamorous. The king seized the opportunity to induce the Prince to marry a foreign princess, representing it as the only plan by which they could apply to Parliament for such an increase of means as would enable him to liquidate his debts. But instead of allowing the Prince to go abroad and make his own selection, so that there might be possibly some degree of freedom of choice in the matter, the queen was anxious to have her own niece, the Princess Louisa Augusta Amelia of Mecklenburg, selected for him. This Princess, afterwards the popular Queen of Prussia, was a good creature, and might possibly have wrought some favourable change even in so depraved a nature as that of the Prince of Wales. But the king was equally determined to secure the unenviable post for his own niece, Caroline Amelia Elizabeth, the second daughter of the Duke of Brunswick, who was one of the petty princes of Germany. To effect this arrangement, an attachment between the Crown Prince of Prussia and this Princess Caroline had to be rent asunder. The Prince was ready to fall in with any such bargain, on condition that he was liberated from his debts. It was certain that he would please himself as to the lady or ladies with whom he would really live. All obstacles of nature, or of nearness of consanguinity, or of private attachments were overborne by diplomacy, and by the promise of the discharge of the Prince's debts. The Princess Caroline of Brunswick was selected��a young lady of not unpleasing person in her youth, according to the descriptions of the time, but of defective education, and coming to this country with the repugnance of a prior and rudely-sundered attachment. She landed at Greenwich on Sunday, the 5th of April, 1795, and the marriage ceremony was performed at St. James's, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, on the 8th. The Princess had not been ignorant of the dissolute character of her appointed husband, and his mode of receiving her was not calculated to inspire any brilliant hopes of his improvement. He had sent his mistress, the Lady Jersey, to meet her on landing, and he made no disguise of his connection with her before or after the marriage. The Memoirs of the time assert that Lady Jersey omitted no arts to render the Princess ridiculous and even disgusting to the Prince; but what chagrined him far more deeply was the breach of the promises held out to him of the discharge of his debts by a parliamentary grant or grants.

THREE:Next came the declaration of war by the King of Prussia, which Buonaparte styled a treachery; but, on the contrary, the King of Prussia had only preserved faith towards his oppressor and insulter too long. Not only all Prussia, but all Germany was on fire to throw off the detested yoke of the oppressor, and Frederick William would have been a traitor to his people and to common sense to have hesitated. Yet he proposed terms of a mutual settlement. To place himself in a position of independent treaty, he suddenly left Berlin on the 22nd of January, and made his way to Breslau, where he was out of the reach of French arms, and in certainty of the arrival, at no very distant date, of Russian ones. He invited, however, the French ambassador to follow him, and he there proposed an armistice, on the conditions that the French should evacuate Dantzic and all the other Prussian fortresses on the Oder, and retire behind the Elbe, on which the Czar had promised that he would stop the march of his army beyond the Vistula. But Buonaparte treated the proposition with contempt; he was determined to give up nothing��to recover everything.

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THREE:BENJAMIN DISRAELI.Early in the following year the mayor and the commanding officer, Colonel Brereton, were brought to trial for neglect of duty. The mayor was acquitted, as not having been adequately supported by the military; but Colonel Brereton's humanity led to the most painful consequences. His trial began on the 9th of January following, and lasted four days, during which, as the proofs against him accumulated, he was overwhelmed with agony of mind. On the night of the 12th he did not visit, as was his custom, the chamber of his two motherless daughters. He was heard walking for hours about his room during that night, and in the morning, when the court assembled, it was announced that the prisoner had shot himself through the heart.

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FORE: