of the war with Spain in 1739--often snubbed as the "war about
Jenkins's ear"--but which was, as I hold, one of the most just, as it was
one of the most popular, of all our wars; after, too, the once famous
"forty fine harvests" of the eighteenth century, the British people, from
the gentleman who led to the soldier or sailor who followed, were one of
the mightiest and most capable races which the world has ever seen,
comparable best to the old Roman, at his mightiest and most capable
period. That, at least, their works testify. They created--as far as
man can be said to create anything--the British Empire. They won for us
our colonies, our commerce, the mastery of the seas of all the world. But
at what a cost--

"Their bones are scattered far and wide,
By mount, and stream, and sea."

Year after year, till the final triumph of Waterloo, not battle only, but
worse destroyers than shot and shell--fatigue and disease--had been
carrying off our stoutest, ablest, healthiest young men, each of whom
represented, alas! a maiden left unmarried at home, or married, in
default, to a less able man. The strongest went to the war; each who
fell left a weaklier man to continue the race; while of those who did not
fall, too many returned with tainted and weakened constitutions, to
injure, it may be, generations yet unborn. The middle classes, being
mostly engaged in peaceful pursuits, suffered less of this decimation of
their finest young men; and to that fact I attribute much of their
increasing preponderance, social, political, and intellectual, to this
very day. One cannot walk the streets of any of our great commercial
cities without seeing plenty of men, young and middle-aged, whose whole
bearing and stature shows that the manly vigour of our middle class is
anything but exhausted. In Liverpool, especially, I have been much
struck not only with the vigorous countenance, but with the bodily size
of the mercantile men on 'Change. But it must be remembered always,
first, that these men are the very elite of their class; the cleverest
men; the men capable of doing most work; and next, that they are, almost
all of them, from the great merchant who has his villa out of town, and
perhaps his moor in the Highlands, down to the sturdy young volunteer who
serves in the haberdasher's shop, country-bred men; and that the question
is, not what they are like now, but what their children and
grand-children, especially the fine