I know it is supposed, that, if good terms of capitulation are not granted, after we have thus so repeatedly hung out the white flag, the national spirit will revive with tenfold ardor.  This is an experiment cautiously to be made. Reculer pour mieux sauter, according to the French byword, cannot be trusted to as a general rule of conduct.  To diet a man into weakness and languor, afterwards to give him the greater strength, has more of the empiric than the rational physician.  It is true that some persons have been kicked into courage,—­and this is no bad hint to give to those who are too forward and liberal in bestowing insults and outrages on their passive companions; but such a course does not at first view appear a well-chosen discipline to form men to a nice sense of honor or a quick resentment of injuries.  A long habit of humiliation does not seem a very good preparative to manly and vigorous sentiment.  It may not leave, perhaps, enough of energy in the mind fairly to discern what are good terms or what are not.  Men low and dispirited may regard those terms as not at all amiss which in another state of mind they would think intolerable:  if they grow peevish in this state of mind, they may be roused, not against the enemy whom they have been taught to fear, but against the ministry,[28] who are more within their reach, and who have refused conditions that are not unreasonable, from power that they have been taught to consider as irresistible.

If all that for some months I have heard have the least foundation, (I hope it has not,) the ministers are, perhaps, not quite so much to be blamed as their condition is to be lamented.  I have been given to understand that these proceedings are not in their origin properly theirs.  It is said that there is a secret in the House of Commons.  It is said that ministers act, not according to the votes, but according to the dispositions, of the majority.  I hear that the minority has long since spoken the general sense of the nation; and that to prevent those who compose it from having the open and avowed lead in that House, or perhaps in both Houses, it was necessary to preoccupy their ground, and to take their propositions out of their mouths, even with the hazard of being afterwards reproached with a compliance which it was foreseen would be fruitless.

If the general disposition of the people be, as I hear it is, for an immediate peace with Regicide, without so much as considering our public and solemn engagements to the party in France whose cause we had espoused, or the engagements expressed in our general alliances, not only without an inquiry into the terms, but with a certain knowledge that none but the worst terms will be offered, it is all over with us.  It is strange, but it may be true, that, as the danger from Jacobinism is increased in my eyes and in yours, the fear of it is lessened in the eyes of many people who formerly regarded it with horror.  It seems,