abundantly supplied with stores and provisions of all
kinds towards their warfare. No sort of argumentative materials, suited
to their purposes, have been withheld. False they are, unsound,
sophistical; but they are regular in their direction. They all bear one
way, and they all go to the support of the substantial merits of their
cause. The others have not had the question so much as fairly stated to
them.

There has not been in this century any foreign peace or war, in its
origin the fruit of popular desire, except the war that was made with
Spain in 1739. Sir Robert Walpole was forced into the war by the people,
who were inflamed to this measure by the most leading politicians, by
the first orators, and the greatest poets of the time. For that war Pope
sang his dying notes. For that war Johnson, in more energetic strains,
employed the voice of his early genius. For that war Glover
distinguished himself in the way in which his muse was the most natural
and happy. The crowd readily followed the politicians in the cry for a
war which threatened little bloodshed, and which promised victories that
were attended with something more solid than glory. A war with Spain was
a war of plunder. In the present conflict with Regicide, Mr. Pitt has
not hitherto had, nor will perhaps for a few days have, many prizes to
hold out in the lottery of war, to tempt the lower part of our
character. He can only maintain it by an appeal to the higher; and to
those in whom that higher part is the most predominant he must look the
most for his support. Whilst he holds out no inducements to the wise nor
bribes to the avaricious, he may be forced by a vulgar cry into a peace
ten times more ruinous than the most disastrous war. The weaker he is in
the fund of motives which apply to our avarice, to our laziness, and to
our lassitude, if he means to carry the war to any end at all, the
stronger he ought to be in his addresses to our magnanimity and to our
reason.

In stating that Walpole was driven by a popular clamor into a measure
not to be justified, I do not mean wholly to excuse his conduct. My time
of observation did not exactly coincide with that event, but I read much
of the controversies then carried on. Several years after the contests
of parties had ceased, the people were amused, and in a degree warmed
with them. The events of that era seemed then of magnitude, which the
revolutions of our time have reduced to parochial importance; and