If Ireland is gone, where are jobs? where are reversions? where is my brother, Lord Arden?[57] where are ‘my dear and near relations’?  The game is up, and the Speaker of the House of Commons will be sent as a present to the menagerie at Paris.  We talk of waiting, as if centuries of joy and prosperity were before us.  In the next ten years our fate must be decided; we shall know, long before that period, whether we can bear up against the miseries by which we are threatened, or not:  and yet, in the very midst of our crisis, we are enjoined to abstain from the most certain means of increasing our strength, and advised to wait for the remedy till the disease is removed by death or health.  And now, instead of the plain and manly policy of increasing unanimity at home, by equalizing rights and privileges, what is the ignorant, arrogant, and wicked system which has been pursued?  Such a career of madness and of folly was, I believe, never run in so short a period.  The vigour of the ministry is like the vigour of a grave-digger—­the tomb becomes more ready and more wide for every effort which they make....  Every Englishman felt proud of the integrity of his country; the character of the country is lost for ever.  It is of the utmost consequence to a commercial people at war with the greatest part of Europe, that there should be a free entry of neutrals into the enemy’s ports; the neutrals who carried our manufactures we have not only excluded, but we have compelled them to declare war against us.  It was our interest to make a good peace, or convince our own people that it could not be obtained; we have not made a peace, and we have convinced the people of nothing but of the arrogance of the Foreign Secretary:  and all this has taken place in the short space of a year, because a King’s Bench barrister and a writer of epigrams, turned into Ministers of State, were determined to show country gentlemen that the late administration had no vigour.  In the mean time commerce stands still, manufactures perish, Ireland is more and more irritated, India is threatened, fresh taxes are accumulated upon the wretched people, the war is carried on without it being possible to conceive any one single object which a rational being can propose to himself by its continuation; and in the midst of this unparalleled insanity we are told that the Continent is to be reconquered by the want of rhubarb and plums.  A better spirit than exists in the English people never existed in any people in the world; it has been misdirected, and squandered upon party purposes in the most degrading and scandalous manner; they have been led to believe that they were benefiting the commerce of England by destroying the commerce of America, that they were defending their Sovereign by perpetuating the bigoted oppression of their fellow-subjects; their rulers and their guides have told them that they would equal the vigour of France by equalling her atrocity; and they have gone on wasting that opulence, patience,