d, he wrote to the Earl of Strafford:

In London there is a more cruel campaign than that waged by the
Russians: the streets are a very picture of the murder of the
innocents--one drives over nothing but poor dead dogs! The dear,
good-natured, honest, sensible creatures! Christ! how can anybody
hurt them? Nobody could but those Cherokees the English, who desire
no better than to be halloo'd to blood--one day Samuel Byng, the
next Lord George Sackville, and to-day the poor dogs!

As for Walpole's interest in politics, we are told by writer after writer
that he never took them seriously, but was interested in them mainly for
gossip's sake. It cannot be denied that he made no great fight for good
causes while he sat in the House of Commons. Nor had he the temper of a
ruler of men. But as a commentator on politics and a spreader of opinion
in private, he showed himself to be a politician at once sagacious,
humane, and sensitive to the meaning of events. His detestation of the
arbitrary use of power had almost the heat of a passion. He detested it
alike in a government and in a mob. He loathed the violence that compassed
the death of Admiral Byng and the violence that made war on America. He
raged against a public world that he believed was going to the devil. "I
am not surprised," he wrote in 1776, "at the idea of the devil being
always at our elbows. They who invented him no doubt could not conceive
how men could be so atrocious to one another, without the intervention of
a fiend. Don't you think, if he had never been heard of before, that he
would have been invented on the late partition of Poland?" "Philosophy has
a poor chance with me," he wrote a little later in regard to America,
"when my warmth is stirred--and yet I know that an angry old man out of
Parliament, and that can do nothing but be angry, is a ridiculous animal."
The war against America he described as "a wretched farce of fear daubed
over with airs of bullying." War at any time was, in his eyes, all but the
unforgivable sin. In 1781, however, his hatred had lightened into
contempt. "The Dutch fleet is hovering about," he wrote, "but it is a
pickpocket war, and not a martial one, and I never attend to petty
larceny." As for mobs, his attitude to them is to be seen in his comment
on the Wilkes riots, when he declares:

I cannot bear to have the name of Liberty profaned to the
destruction of the cause; for frantic tumults