help and mutual forbearance could prevent the dissolution of society. A
hard creditor, who sternly demanded payment to the day in milled money,
was pointed at in the streets, and was beset by his own creditors with
demands which soon brought him to reason. Much uneasiness had been felt
about the troops. It was scarcely possible to pay them regularly; if
they were not paid regularly, it might well be apprehended that they
would supply their wants by rapine; and such rapine it was certain that
the nation, altogether unaccustomed to military exaction and oppression,
would not tamely endure. But, strange to say, there was, through this
trying year, a better understanding than had ever been known between
the soldiers and the rest of the community. The gentry, the farmers,
the shopkeepers supplied the redcoats with necessaries in a manner
so friendly and liberal that there was no brawling and no marauding.
"Severely as these difficulties have been felt," L'Hermitage writes,
"they have produced one happy effect; they have shown how good the
spirit of the country is. No person, however favourable his opinion
of the English may have been, could have expected that a time of such
suffering would have been a time of such tranquillity." [724]

Men who loved to trace, in the strangely complicated maze of human
affairs, the marks of more than human wisdom, were of opinion that, but
for the interference of a gracious Providence, the plan so elaborately
devised by great statesmen and great philosophers would have failed
completely and ignominiously. Often, since the Revolution, the English
had been sullen and querulous, unreasonably jealous of the Dutch, and
disposed to put the worst construction on every act of the King. Had
the fourth of May found our ancestors in such a mood, it can scarcely be
doubted that sharp distress, irritating minds already irritable, would
have caused an outbreak which must have shaken and might have subverted
the throne of William. Happily, at the moment at which the loyalty of
the nation was put to the most severe test, the King was more popular
than he had ever been since the day on which the Crown was tendered to
him in the Banqueting House. The plot which had been laid against his
life had excited general disgust and horror. His reserved manners, his
foreign attachments were forgotten. He had become an object of personal
interest and of personal affection to his people. They were every where
coming in c