t," he asks, "to be eternal?"
"France and England," he concludes, "may, by the abuse of their
strength, still for a time retard the period of their exhaustion; but
I will venture to say the fate of all civilized nations is attached to
the termination of a war which involves the whole world."

And what did England's Tory king answer? He intrusted the reply to
Grenville, who was then the British minister for foreign affairs, and
wrote to the Consul Bonaparte that, while his Britannic Majesty did
not positively make the restoration of the Bourbons an indispensable
condition of peace, nor claim to prescribe to France her form of
government, he would intimate that only the one was likely to secure
the other, and that he had not sufficient respect for her new ruler to
entertain his proposals. Can we wonder that after so insolent a letter
the first consul became emperor?

France is quite as proud as England; and the insolence of the Guelph,
in presuming to insinuate that her first consul was not as good as he,
was quite enough to provoke her into making the consul her emperor,
and doing her best to chastise her insulters. Charles James Fox, in
Parliament, pronounced the royal answer "odiously and absurdly wrong";
but the squires and borough-mongers of the House of Commons supported
the action of the king by a majority of 265 to 64. It is for such
infamies as this that Newfoundland has even to-day to bear all the
inconveniences of the French claims on their shores. I do not blame
the French for insisting that England shall scuttle out of Egypt
before she yields her claims in Newfoundland; but it is the
responsible English, and not the innocent Newfoundlanders, who ought
to pay the cost, and the conduct of England in insisting that
Newfoundland shall bear the burden is cowardly and mean beyond all
expression.

While the Tories were thus hurling England into war, it is interesting
to observe how the Guelphs conducted it. The Duke of York, with a
generalship worthy of his family, led an army of British and Russian
soldiers into a captivity from which they could only be redeemed by
the surrender of prisoners taken on the sea by _real_ Englishmen.

Englishmen were taxed in order to give the German despots money
wherewith to fight the French. Austria received for one campaign more
money than England had to pay even for the "Alabama" claims, and the
czar of Russia received L900,000 for the eight months his troops were
in the fiel