After a contest of twenty years' duration, Britain, thanks to her
insular position, her native energies, and the wisdom of her counsels,
knows scarcely any thing of the calamities of war but from report, and
from the comparatively easy pecuniary sacrifices required for its
prosecution. No invader's foot has polluted her shores, no hostile hand
has desolated her towns and villages, neither have fire and sword
transformed her smiling plains into dreary deserts. Enjoying a happy
exemption from these misfortunes, she hears the storm, which is destined
to fall with destructive violence upon others, pass harmlessly over her
head. Meanwhile the progress of her commerce and manufactures, and her
improvement in the arts, sciences, and letters, though liable, from
extraordinary circumstances, to temporary obstructions, are sure and
steady; the channels of her wealth are beyond the reach of foreign
malignity; and, after an unparalleled struggle, her vigour and her
resources seem but to increase with the urgency of the occasions that
call them forth.

Far different is the lot of other nations and of other countries. There
is scarcely a region of Continental Europe but has in its turn drunk
deep within these few years of the cup of horrors. Germany, the theatre
of unnumbered contests--the mountains of Switzerland, which for ages had
reverberated only the notes of rustic harmony--the fertile vales of the
Peninsula--the fields of Austria--the sands of Prussia--the vast forests
of Poland, and the boundless plains of the Russian empire--have
successively rung with the din of battle, and been drenched with native
blood. To the inhabitants of several of these countries, impoverished by
the events of war, the boon of British benevolence has been nobly
extended; but the facts related in the following sheets will bear me out
in the assertion, that none of these cases appealed so forcibly to the
attention of the humane as that of Leipzig, and its immediate vicinity.