indirectness in any statesman as in the First Consul.”  Had Fox been supported by sufficient strong men to counteract the baneful influence of the weeds who were a constant peril to the country over whose destinies George III and they ruled, we should have been saved the ghastly errors that were committed in the name of the British people.  The King’s dislike to Fox was openly avowed.  He used to talk incessantly of going back to Hanover whenever he was thwarted in his disastrous policy of giving the country a stab, or when the inevitable brought Fox into office.  Everything that emanated from the great statesman was viewed with aversion and as being unjust and indecent by the royal Lilliputian, while Fox’s estimate of the King could not be uttered on a lower plane.  He says, in speaking of His Majesty, “It is intolerable to think that it should be in the power of one blockhead to do so much mischief”—­meaning, I presume, amongst many other blunders, the mess he was persisting in making over American affairs.

Had there been capable statesmen during that crisis, the Continent of Europe and the vast dominions of Great Britain would not have been at war this day with the pernicious Power that we, more than any other nation, as has been previously stated, helped to create and foster.

V

Fox was the only genius in our political life at that time, while Pitt was a mere shadow in comparison, though it is fair to state that the former always believed that he and Pitt would have made a workable combination.  As to the rest, they were pretty much on the level of the Lilliputians with whom the late traveller, Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, had such intimate and troublesome relations.  The book by the Dean of St. Patrick’s, “Gulliver’s Travels,” is a perfect caricature of the political dwarfs of his time, and vividly represents the men who misruled this country in George III’s reign.  But the Dean’s laughable history of the pompous antics of the Lilliputians is a picture which describes the constitution of our present administration who are managing the critical affairs of the nation so ill that disaster is inevitable in many forms, seen and unseen.  The administrative machine is clogged with experimental human odds and ends who have neither wit, knowledge, nor wisdom to fill the post allotted to them, and the appalling thought is that the nation as a whole is being blustered by the intriguers who are forcing every national interest into certain destruction.  Truly the Lilliputians are a plague on all human interests, real patriotism, and capacity:  always mischievous, always incapable, just the same now as when, in the eighteenth century, their type forced a peaceful and neutral Power into war because they refused to yield their fleet to them; always seeing things that do not exist, and foreboding perils that would never have come but for their dwarfish interference.  They