Read Ebook: The Raid of Dover: A Romance of the Reign of Woman A.D. 1940 by Ford Douglas Morey

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 779 lines and 57704 words, and 16 pages

HISTOIRE DU CANADA DEPUIS SA D?COUVERTE JUSQU'A NOS JOURS.

PAR

TOME TROISI?ME.

QU?BEC IMPRIMERIE DE FR?CHETTE ET FR?RE, RUE LA MONTAGNE, N? 13.

HISTOIRE DU CANADA.

GUERRE DE SEPT ANS.

Quelle ?tait la situation de la France ? cette ?poque? Les principaux ministres ?taient le comte d'Argenson pour la guerre, M. Machault pour la marine et les colonies, M. Bouille pour les affaires ?trang?res, lequel fut remplac? en 1757 par le comte de Bernis, abb? et po?te; mais c'?tait madame de Pompadour qui gouvernait; elle changeait les g?n?raux et les ministres au gr? de ses caprices. Vingt-cinq ministres furent appel?s au conseil d'Etat et renvoy?s de 1756 ? 1763. Ce corps variait sans cesse; il n'avait ni unit? ni accord, et chaque ministre agissait ind?pendamment des autres . La nation, du reste, ?tait plus occup?e de vaines disputes religieuses que des appr?ts du combat. Le parti moliniste, soutenu par les J?suites, avait recommenc? la pers?cution contre les Jans?nistes; le parlement voulut interposer son autorit? pour la faire cesser, il fut dissous et remplac? par une chambre royale; mais le roi, fatigu? ? la fin de ces chicanes oiseuses qui troublaient et affaiblissaient son royaume, ordonna le silence et r?tablit le parlement.

<> Tout, en effet, ?tait en mouvement dans le monde moral comme dans le monde politique. Les opinions n'avaient plus d'harmonie, et le gouvernement lui-m?me, honteux de suivre d'anciennes traditions, marchait au hasard dans une route nouvelle.

De l'autre c?t? de la Manche, les choses n'?taient point dans cette situation qui annonce de loin une r?volution sociale. M. Fox, depuis lord Holland, se trouvait ? la t?te des affaires de la Grande-Bretagne, et cette nation ?tait dans l'?tat le plus prosp?re de m?me que ses colonies du Nouveau-Monde. Le peuple ?tait unanime et satisfait, et le commerce florissant; le gouvernement, assis sur les larges bases de la libert?, ob?issait ? l'opinion publique, et, en suivant les instincts du pays, assurait pour ainsi dire d'avance le succ?s de ses entreprises. Aucune guerre n'avait ?t? plus populaire en Angleterre que celle qui allait commencer. La chambre des communes accorda un million de louis pour augmenter les forces de terre et de mer; elle traita avec le roi de Prusse, vota des subsides au roi de Pologne et ? l'?lecteur de Bavi?re pour s'en faire des alli?s et contrebalancer la sup?riorit? des Fran?ais sur le continent europ?en, o? elle avait des craintes pour la s?ret? du Hanovre. L'enr?lement des matelots fut pouss? avec une vigueur extr?me, et tel ?tait l'enthousiasme du peuple que presque toutes les villes un peu importantes se cotis?rent pour augmenter la prime que l'on donnait aux soldats et aux marins qui venaient offrir leurs services volontairement; et qu'au lieu d'un million que le gouvernement voulait lever au moyen d'une loterie, trois millions 880 mille louis furent souscrits sur-le-champ .

Les forces arm?es des deux nations bellig?rantes durent pr?senter en Am?rique, et elles pr?sent?rent en effet sur le champ de bataille une diff?rence non moins consid?rable durant tout le cours de la guerre. Mais, par une sage pr?voyance, la France, donnant encore des signes de son ancienne sup?riorit? dans la conduite des affaires militaires, avait port? loin du centre du Canada sa ligne d?fensive, de mani?re ? obliger l'ennemi ? diviser ses forces. L'isthme ?troit de l'Acadie, la vall?e lointaine et sauvage de l'Ohio, la gorge montagneuse du lac St. Sacrement , tels furent les champs de bataille qu'elle se choisit, o? l'ennemi fut retenu cinq ans sans qu'il put s'en rendre ma?tre, et o? il essuya les plus sanglantes d?faites dont l'Am?rique e?t encore ?t? t?moin. C'est donc ? tort que des historiens ont bl?m? le syst?me d?fensif adopt? pour le Canada dans la guerre de Sept ans.

Les forces r?guli?res du Canada, qui ne s'?levaient pas ? 1000 hommes, furent port?es en 1755 ? 2,800 soldats environ par l'arriv?e de quatre bataillons d'infanterie sous les ordres du g?n?ral Dieskau, qui avaient ?t? demand?s dans l'automne. Les milices avaient ?t? arm?es; le chiffre de ceux de ces soldats improvis?s qui ?taient en service actif, fut augment?, et l'on continua d'en acheminer de gros d?tachemens dans les postes des fronti?res, de sorte que l'on e?t bient?t tant en campagne et les garnisons int?rieures que dans les forts St. Fr?d?ric, Frontenac et Niagara ainsi que dans ceux de l'Ohio et de l'isthme acadien, une arm?e de 7,000 hommes, sans compter plus de 800 employ?s aux transports. Mais cette force ?tait encore bien insuffisante pour faire face ? celle de l'ennemi qui avait d?j? 15,000 soldats sur pied, dont 3,000 pour l'exp?dition de Beaus?jour, 2,200 pour celle du fort Duquesne, 1,500 pour l'attaque de Niagara, et 5 ? 6,000 pour le si?ge du fort St. Fr?d?ric, quatre entreprises qu'il voulait ex?cuter simultan?ment.

Si le travail secret qui se faisait dans la soci?t? en France paralysait l'?nergie de son gouvernement, en Canada les habitans, livr?s ? l'agriculture et ? la traite des pelleteries, ne portaient point leur esprit au-del? de ces sph?res humbles mais pleines d'activit?. Priv?s par la nature de leur gouvernement de prendre part ? l'administration publique, ils ne songeaient qu'? l'exploitation de leurs m?tairies ou ? la chasse de ces animaux sauvages qui erraient dans leurs for?ts, et dont les riches fourrures formaient la branche la plus consid?rable de leur commerce. Peu nombreux, ils ne pouvaient esp?rer non plus que leurs conseils et leur influence fussent d'un grand poids sur la conduite du gouvernement de la m?tropole envers ses colonies; mais tout en lui repr?sentant le danger de la lutte qui allait s'engager, ils prirent les armes sans murmurer, avec la r?solution de combattre avec le m?me z?le que si la France avait fait les plus grands sacrifices pour les soustraire aux attaques de ses ennemis; et ils montr?rent jusqu'? la fin une constance et un d?vo?ment que les historiens fran?ais n'ont pas su toujours appr?cier, mais que la v?rit? historique, appuy?e sur des pi?ces officielles tir?es des archives de Paris, ne permet plus aujourd'hui de mettre en doute.

La saison des op?rations ?tant enfin arriv?e, des deux c?t?s l'on se mit en campagne. M. de Vaudreuil, ignorant les projets de l'ennemi, achemina, suivant les ordres de sa cour, des troupes sur Frontenac afin d'attaquer Osw?go auquel on attachait toujours, avec raison, une grande importance. Le g?n?ral Dieskau, dont le mar?chal de Saxe avait la plus haute opinion, devait conduire of them, struggling to move back, fell to the ground, and were trampled under foot.

Renshaw was the only white prisoner among the Soudanese and Egyptians who thus endured the tender mercies of the Prophet--the Prophet for whom, it was said, the Angels had fought and would fight again, until every follower of the Cross accepted the Koran of Mahommed. For, like many of the greatest crimes that stain the annals of mankind, this prison discipline, in theory, was designed to benefit the souls of the captives. The White Kaffir, as an unbeliever, a dog and an outcast, was a special object of the Mahdi's solicitation. Only let him believe and his fetters should be struck off, or, at least, some of them. He had but to cry aloud in fervent faith, "There is but one God, and Mahommed is his Prophet!"

But it was a cry that never passed the lips of Wilson Renshaw. The lash was tried again and again. Fifteen to twenty lashes at first; then a hundred; then a hundred and fifty. But still the bleeding lips in which the white man's teeth were biting in his anguish would not blaspheme. "Will you not cry out?" the gaoler asked. "Dog of a Christian, are thy head and heart of stone?" No answer; and again and yet again the lash descended.

If only death would come, kind death to end this pain of mutilated flesh; this still sharper pain of degradation and humiliation! But death came not. Courage, indomitable pride of race, a godlike quality of patience, armed the White Kaffir to endure the slings and arrows of his dreadful fate. Death he would welcome with a sigh of gladness, but these barbarians should never, never break his spirit.

At last the rigour of his sufferings was abated. Out of the mists of what seemed an interminable period of delirium, he awoke to a change of his treatment that caused him much surprise. No longer was he to be half starved. At night he was allowed to sleep alone in a rough, dark hut in a corner of the prison compound. Each day he was permitted, though still fettered, to go down to the river, on the banks of which the prison was placed, and wash in the waters of the Nile. From all of these changes it became apparent that his life, and not his death, was now desired. The motive for the change he had yet to realize. A whisper here and there, a chance word from his gaolers, with sundry indications, fugitive and various, at length convinced him that this amelioration of his fate could have but one sinister explanation, and one inspiring motive. If not the Mahdi himself, then some of the more covetous of his leading followers must be drawing payment from some mysterious source, a subsidy for holding him secure, here under the burning African sun, remote and cut off from all chance of rescue or escape.

Presently his condition underwent yet further betterment. He became a prisoner at large--though still fettered and still closely watched. Employment he had none, save the performance of a few menial offices. Books he had none, save Al-Koran, the volume containing the religious, social, commercial, military, and legal code of Islam. But here, in the heart of this dreadful land, among the dark people of the Dark Continent, he now learned to look upon the book of life itself from a new and startling standpoint. Before him was unfolded a new and terrible chapter of history in the making, a chapter which revealed the slow marshalling of millions of the dark-skinned races, eager to wrest dominion and supremacy from the white-skinned masters of the world.

THE RAID OF DOVER.

HOW NICHOLAS JARDINE ROSE.

The fall of England synchronised with the rise of Nicholas Jardine--first Labour Prime Minister of this ancient realm. When he married it was considered by his wife's relations that she had married beneath her! It fell out thus. In the neighbourhood of Walsall an accomplished young governess had found employment in the family of a wealthy solicitor, who was largely interested in the ironworks of the district. Her employer was conservative in his profession and radical in his politics. He took the chair from time to time at public meetings, and liked his family to be present on those occasions as a sort of domestic entourage, to bear witness to the eloquence of his orations. On one of these occasions a swarthy young engineer made a speech which quite eclipsed that of the chairman. He carried the meeting with him, raising enthusiasm and admiration to a remarkable height, and storming, among other things, the heart of the clever young governess.

The young orator was not unconscious of the interest he excited. Bright eyes told their tale, and the whole-hearted applause that greeted his rhetorical flourishes could not escape attention at close quarters. Fair and refined in face, with fine, wavy light hair, the girl afforded a striking contrast to this forceful, dark-skinned man of the people; but they were drawn to each other by those magnetic sympathies which carry wireless messages from heart to heart. It would be too much to say that he fell in love with her at first sight. Had they never met again, mutual first impressions might have worn off; but they did meet again, and yet again. Coming to her employer's house on some political business, young Jardine encountered the girl in the hall, and she frankly gave him her hand--blushingly and with a word or two of thanks for the speech which had seemed to her so eloquent. After that, in the grimy streets of Walsall and in various public places, the acquaintance ripened, until one winter day, outside the town, she startled him with an unusually earnest "good-bye." The children she had taught were going away to school; she, too, was going away--whither she knew not.

"Don't go," he said, slowly; "don't go. Stay and marry me."

She was almost alone in the world, and shuddering at the grey prospect of her life. Besides, she loved him, or at least believed she did. Within a month they were married at the registrar's office. Nicholas Jardine did not hold with any church or chapel observances. After the banal ceremony of the civil law, he took his bride to London for a week. Then they returned to Walsall. His means were of the scantiest; they lived in a little five-roomed house, with endless tenements of the same mean type and miserable material stretching right and left. The conditions of life, after the first glamour faded, were dreary and soul-subduing. All the women in Warwick Road knew or wanted to know their neighbour's business; all resented 'uppish' airs on the part of any particular resident. They were of the ordinary type, those neighbours, kindly, slatternly, given to gossip. Mrs. Jardine was not, and did not look like, one of them. She was sincerely desirous of doing her duty in that drab state of life in which she found herself, but she wholly failed to please her neighbours, whose quarrels she heard through the miserable plaster walls, or witnessed from over the road. Worse than that, she found with dismay, as time went on, that she did not wholly please her husband. She was conscious of a gloomy sense of disappointment on his part; and she, though bravely resisting the growing feeling, knew in her heart that disillusionment had fallen upon herself. The recurrent coarseness of the man's ideas and expressions jarred upon her nerves. His way of eating, sleeping, and carrying himself, in their cramped domestic circle, constantly offended her fastidious tastes.

When their child was born life went better; and all the time Jardine himself, though rather grudgingly, had been improving under the refining but unobstrusive influence of his cultured wife. One thing, at least, they had in common: a love of reading. Most of the money that could be spared in those days went in book buying. It was a time of education for the husband, and a time of disenchantment for the wife. She drooped amid their grey surroundings. The summers were sad, for the Black Country is no paradise even in the time of flowers. Everywhere the sombre industries of the place asserted themselves, and in the gloomy winters short dark days seemed to be always giving place to long dreary nights, hideously illumined by the lurid furnaces that glowed on every side.

Jardine himself was as strong as the steel with which he had so much to do in the local works in which he found employment. But his wife found herself less and less able to stand up against the adverse influences of their environment. It came upon him with a shock that she had grown strangely fragile. Great God in heaven!--men call upon the name of God even when they profess to be agnostics--could she be going to die?

Her great fear was for the future of the child; and her chief hope that the passionate devotion of Jardine to the little girl would be a redeeming influence in his own life and character. Both of them, from the first, took what care they could that their daughter should not grow up quite like the other children of the Walsall back streets. Their precautions helped to make them unpopular, and "that little Obie Jardine," as the Warwick Road ladies called Zenobia, was consequently compelled to hear many caustic remarks concerning the airs and graces that "some people" were supposed to give themselves.

Good fortune and advancement came to Nicholas Jardine too late for his wife to share in them. The once bright eyes were closed for ever before the Trade Union of which he was secretary put him forward as a Parliamentary candidate. The swing of the Labour pendulum carried him in, and Jardine, M.P., and his little daughter moved to London. They found lodgings in Guildford Place, opposite the Foundling Hospital. The child was happier now, and the memory of the mother faded year by year. Life grew more cheerful and interesting for both of them as time went on. Members of Parliament and wire-pullers of the Labour party came to the lodgings and filled the sitting-room with smoke and noisy conversation. Zenobia listened and inwardly digested what she heard. Sundays were the dullest days. She often felt that she would like to go to service in the Foundling Chapel, but that was tacitly forbidden. Religion was ignored by Mr. Jardine, and among the books he had brought up from Walsall, and those he had since bought, neither Bible nor Prayer Book found a place.

Jardine had other things to think of. He was going forward rapidly, and busy--in the world of politics--fighting Mr. Renshaw in the House of Commons. When the old Labour leader in the House of Commons had a paralytic seizure, the member for Walsall was chosen, though not without opposition, to fill the vacant place.

There were millions of voters behind him now; Nicholas Jardine had become a power. At last the popular wave carried him into the foremost position in the State. The resolute Republican mechanic of miry Walsall actually became the foremost man in what for centuries had been the greatest Empire in the world.

Before that great step in promotion was obtained, Jardine had removed from London to the riverside house, in which he still resided, when a certain young Linton Herrick came from Canada and stayed with his uncle--Jardine's next door neighbour.

According to the new Constitution, the Government held office for five years. The end of that term was now approaching, and every adult man and woman in the land would shortly have the opportunity of voting for his retention in office or for replacing him with a successor, man or woman. He talked much with his daughter of the struggle that was coming, as it had been his custom to do for years. She was his only companion, the only object of his affections, the one domestic interest in his life.

HOW ENGLAND FELL.

When Germany conceived that the fateful moment had arrived, Germany pounced. France was friendly, but not active, Russia active and not friendly, Italy was busily occupied in Abyssinia, and nominally allied with Germany. Austria had her hands full in Macedonia, and was actually allied with Germany. Spain and Portugal did not count. Holland disappeared from the map, following the example of Denmark. The German cormorant swallowed them up, and German squadrons appropriated the harbours on the North Sea, as previously those on the Baltic. While these European changes were being effected with bewildering rapidity, our former allies, the Japanese, who had learnt naval warfare in the English school, played their own hand with notable promptitude and success. Japan had long had her eye on Australia. She wanted elbow room. She wanted to develop Asiatic power. Now was the time, when British warships were engaged in a stupendous struggle thousands of miles away. The little navy that the Australians had got together for purposes of self-defence crumpled up like paper boats under the big guns of the Yellow Fleet. Australia was lost. It made the heart ache to think of the changes wrought by the cruel hand of time--wrought in only a quarter of a century--in the pride of Britannia, in her power and her possessions.

India, that once bright and splendid jewel in the British Crown, the great possession that gave the title of Empress to Queen Victoria of illustrious memory--India, as a British possession, had been sliced to less than half its size by those same Japanese, allied with pampered Hindu millions; and it was problematical whether what was left could be held much longer. The memorable alliance with Japan, running its course for several years, had worn sharp and thin towards the end. It had not been renewed. Japan never had really contemplated pulling chestnuts out of the fire for the sole benefit of Great Britain. They saved us from Russia only to help themselves; and now that Great Britain was derisively spoken of as Beggared Britain, the astute Jap, self-seeking, with limited ideas of gratitude, was England's enemy.

In South Africa, alas! England had lost not only a slice, but all. The men of words had overruled the men of deeds. What had been won in many a hard-fought battle, was surrendered in the House of Commons. Patriotism had been superseded by a policy of expediency. The great Boer War had furnished a hecatomb of twenty thousand British lives. A hundred thousand mourners bowed their heads in resignation for those who died or fought and bled for England. Millions had groaned under the burden of the war tax, and then, after years, we had enabled Brother Boer to secure, by means of a ballot box, what he had lost for the world's good in the stricken field. They had talked of a union of races--a fond thing vainly invented. Oil and water never mix.

Socialists, in alliance with sentimentalists in the swarming ranks of enfranchised women, had reduced the British Lion to the condition of a zoological specimen--a tame and clawless creature. The millennium was to be expedited so that the poor old Lion might learn to eat straw like the ox. If he could not get straw, let him eat dirt--dirt, in any form of humble pie, that other nations thought fit to set before the one-time King of Beasts.

In another part of the world, the link between England and Canada, another great dominion, as Linton Herrick well knew, had worn to the tenuity of thinnest thread. Canada, as yet, had not formally thrown off allegiance to the old country, but the thread might be snapped at any moment.

Linton, who had lived all his life in the Dominion, knew very well how things were tending. The English were no longer the dominant race in those vast tracts. They might have been, if a wise system of colonisation had been organised by British Governments. But the rough material of the race had been allowed to stagnate and rot here in the crowded cities of England. Loafers, hooligans, and alien riff-raff had reached incredible numbers in the course of the last five-and-twenty years. Workhouses, hospitals, lunatic asylums, and prisons could not be built fast enough to accommodate the unfit and the criminal. Meanwhile, the vast tracts of grain-growing Canada, where a reinvigorated race of Englishmen might have found unlimited elbow-room, had been largely annexed by astute speculators from the United States. The Canadians, unsupported, had found it impossible to hold their own. The State was too big for them. As far back as 1906, the remnant of the British Government garrison had said good-bye to Halifax; and the power and the glory had gone, too, with the once familiar uniform of Tommy Atkins.

At Quebec and Montreal, all the talk was of deals and dollars. The whole country had been steadily Americanised, and Sir Wilfred Laurier, when he went the ultimate way of all Premiers, was succeeded by office-holders who cared nothing for Imperial ties. For a time they were not keen about being absorbed by the United States, for that would mean loss of highly paid posts and political prestige. The march of events was too strong for them, and between the American and the British stools they were falling to the ground. It was bound to come, that final tumble. The force of things and the whirligig of time would bring in the assured revenges. The big fish swallows the little fish all the world over.

In olden time, when the earth was corrupt and filled with violence, the word came from on high: "Make thee an ark of gopher wood." And Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark, to the saving of his house. But while the ark was a-preparing, the people went about their business, marrying and giving in marriage, making small account of the shipbuilder and his craze. It had been pretty much the same in the twentieth century, when the British people were warned that another sort of flood was coming, and that they, too, would need an ark, of material considerably stronger than gopher wood. They refused to believe in the flood. But it came. It was bound to come.

During these dire events the women had votes, and many of them had seats in Parliament. Their sex was dominant. They heard the cry of the children. The men heard the lamentations of the women, and were unmanned.

Thus was Great Britain reduced to the level of a third-rate Power--a downfall not without precedent in the history of the world's great empires. But sadder even than the accomplished downfall was the fact that vast numbers of Britons had grown used to the situation, had so lost the patriotic spirit and fibre of their forefathers that the loss of race-dominance and of the mighty influence of good which Empire had sustained, seemed to them of little moment compared with their immediate individual advantage and petty personal interests.

ABOARD THE AIR-SHIP.

"So you've made the young lady's acquaintance on the river?" remarked the Judge, looking amusedly at his nephew.

"Yes," said Linton, "and the President's, ... in the garden."

"'Youth, youth, how buoyant are thy hopes,'" quoted Sir Robert, chuckling.

"And," added the young man, with a slightly heightened colour, which the gathering dusk failed to conceal, "they've promised me a trip in their air-boat!"

Sir Robert groaned. "Air-boats! Wish they'd never been invented." He flicked away the ash of his cigar and gazed at the first stars faintly twinkling in the evening sky. They were sitting on the terrace, and the September air was as balmy as the breath of June.

"Look!" exclaimed Herrick, springing to his feet, "don't you see one over yonder?"

His uncle gazed and nodded. "And just imagine," he said, "what it will mean when the present law expires and all restrictions are removed. Everyone will want to be at liberty to 'aviate'; and as a consequence, we shall want an enormous staff of air-police to control the upper traffic and check outrage and robbery. I tell you, sir, the world's going too fast. The thing won't work!"

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet