nent
with blood and shaken the system of Europe to pieces, we have never had
any considerable army, of a magnitude to be compared to the least of
those by which in former times we so gloriously asserted our place as
protectors, not oppressors, at the head of the great commonwealth of
Europe. We have never manfully met the danger in front; and when the
enemy, resigning to us our natural dominion of the ocean, and abandoning
the defence of his distant possessions to the infernal energy of the
destroying principles which he had planted there for the subversion of
the neighboring colonies, drove forth, by one sweeping law of
unprecedented despotism, his armed multitudes on every side, to
overwhelm the countries and states which had for centuries stood the
firm barriers against the ambition of France, we drew back the arm of
our military force, which had never been more than half raised to oppose
him. From that time we have been combating only with the other arm of
our naval power,--the right arm of England, I admit,--but which struck
almost unresisted, with blows that could never reach the heart of the
hostile mischief. From that time, without a single effort to regain
those outworks which ever till now we so strenuously maintained, as the
strong frontier of our own dignity and safety no less than the liberties
of Europe,--with but one feeble attempt to succor those brave, faithful,
and numerous allies, whom, for the first time since the days of our
Edwards and Henrys, we now have in the bosom of France itself,--we have
been intrenching and fortifying and garrisoning ourselves at home, we
have been redoubling security on security to protect ourselves from
invasion, which has now first become to us a serious object of alarm and
terror. Alas! the few of us who have protracted life in any measure near
to the extreme limits of our short period have been condemned to see
strange things,--new systems of policy, new principles, and not only new
men, but what might appear a new species of men. I believe that any
person who was of age to take a part in public affairs forty years ago
(if the intermediate space of time were expunged from his memory) would
hardly credit his senses, when he should hear from the highest authority
that an army of two hundred thousand men was kept up in this island, and
that in the neighboring island there were at least fourscore thousand
more. But when he had recovered from his surprise on being told of thi