e same thing to France,
and she sings as shrilly and as gaily after a beating as before. With
a subsidy to a less amount than she has lately been accustomed to
squander in six weeks, and with no more troops than would garrison a
single fortress, she will enable us to set you at defiance, and to do
you a heavier injury in two campaigns than she has been able to do in
two centuries, although your king was in her pay against you. She will
instantly be our ally, and soon our scholar. Afterward she will sell
her crown jewels and her church jewels, which cover the whole kingdom,
and will derive unnatural strength from her vices and her profligacy.
You ought to have conciliated us as your ally, and to have had no
other, excepting Holland and Denmark. England could never have, unless
by her own folly, more than one enemy. Only one is near enough to
strike her; and that one is down. All her wars for six hundred years
have not done this; and the first trumpet will untrance her. You leave
your house open to incendiaries while you are running after a
refractory child. Had you laid down the rod, the child would have come
back. And because he runs away from the rod, you take up the poker.
Seriously, what means do you possess of enforcing your unjust claims
and insolent authority? Never since the Norman Conquest had you an
army so utterly inefficient, or generals so notoriously unskilful: no,
not even in the reign of that venal traitor, that French stipendiary,
the second Charles. Those were yet living who had fought bravely for
his father, and those also who had vanquished him: and Victory still
hovered over the mast that had borne the banners of our Commonwealth:
_ours_, _ours_, my lord! the word is the right word here.

_Shipley._ I am depressed in spirit, and can sympathize but little in
your exultation. All the crimes of Nero and Caligula are less
afflicting to humanity, and consequently we may suppose will bring
down on the offenders a less severe retribution, than an unnecessary
and unjust war. And yet the authors and abettors of this most grievous
among our earthly calamities, the enactors and applauders (on how vast
a theatre!) of the first and greatest crime committed upon earth, are
quiet complacent creatures, jovial at dinner, hearty at breakfast, and
refreshed with sleep! Nay, the prime movers in it are called most
religious and most gracious; and the hand that signs in cold blood the
death-warrant of nations, is kissed b