CASSELL'S ILLUSTRATED

HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

New and Revised Edition.

FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE III. TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (JULY, 1792).

PREFACE.

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

interference with the affairs of the French nation, the cause of whose exiled dynasty we had chosen to espouse, involved this nation in the horrors of a Continental War, which lasted far on into the next century, failing, after all, of its original object, and in which the splendid victories gained by our forces, both by land and sea, scarcely half compensated the country for the prodigious loss of blood and treasure, and the crippling of her commerce, which she had to undergo.

In fact, two great mistakes marked the policy of the English Government during this reign they endeavoured to rule our colonies by coercion, and they interfered to force on the French nation a dynasty it had repudiated. In both of these efforts they were eventually foiled, and from these defeats they learned two grand principles of international law-that colonies must be left to govern themselves, if they are to be retained; and that no people has, on any pretence whatever, a right to intrude itself into the domestic affairs of another people.

We have closed this volume with a careful and minute picture of the excesses of a nation renouncing Christianity. We shail open the next with the grand error of England in commencing war to replant an impossible dynasty.