We are so accustomed to the loyalty and steadiness of the English army, that the possibility of their wavering never enters into our imagination. But still all must admit that we too, with all our boasted safeguards of popular representation, general information, a free press, and centuries of freedom, stood on the edge of an abyss; and that, not less than Austria or Prussia, our salvation had come to depend chiefly, if not entirely, on the fidelity of the soldiers. If the six thousand men who garrisoned London on the 10th April 1848 had wavered, and one-half of them had joined the insurgents, where would now have been the British constitution? Had a hundred thousand men from Kennington Common crossed Waterloo Bridge, headed by a regiment of the Guards, and three regiments of the line, where would now have been the British liberties? Where would have been all the safeguards formed, all the hopes expressed, all the prophecies hazarded, as to its being perpetual? But in that dread hour, perhaps the most eventful that England ever knew, we were saved by the courage of the Queen, the firmness of the government, the admirable arrangements of the Duke of Wellington, and the universal steadiness and loyalty of our soldiers. We are quite aware of the special constables, and the immense _moral_ influence of the noble display which the aristocracy and middle classes of England made on that occasion. But moral influence, often all-powerful in the end, is not alone sufficient at the beginning; physical force is then required to withstand the _first assault_ of the enemy: and, highly as we respect the civic force with batons in their hands; and fully as we admit the immense importance of that citizen-demonstration in its ultimate effects, we ascribe our deliverance from the instant peril which threatened, entirely to the steadiness of the British army, and the incomparable arrangements of their chief.