For what have I entered into all this detail?  To what purpose have I recalled your view to the end of the last century?  It has been done to show that the British nation was then a great people,—­to point out how and by what means they came to be exalted above the vulgar level, and to take that lead which they assumed among mankind.  To qualify us for that preeminence, we had then an high mind and a constancy unconquerable; we were then inspired with no flashy passions, but such as were durable as well as warm, such as corresponded to the great interests we had at stake.  This force of character was inspired, as all such spirit must ever be, from above.  Government gave the impulse.  As well may we fancy that of itself the sea will swell, and that without winds the billows will insult the adverse shore, as that the gross mass of the people will be moved, and elevated, and continue by a steady and permanent direction to bear upon one point, without the influence of superior authority or superior mind.

This impulse ought, in my opinion, to have been given in this war; and it ought to have been continued to it at every instant.  It is made, if ever war was made, to touch all the great springs of action in the human breast.  It ought not to have been a war of apology.  The minister had, in this conflict, wherewithal to glory in success, to be consoled in adversity, to hold high his principle in all fortunes.  If it were not given him to support the falling edifice, he ought to bury himself under the ruins of the civilized world.  All the art of Greece and all the pride and power of Eastern monarchs never heaped upon their ashes so grand a monument.

There were days when his great mind was up to the crisis of the world he is called to act in.[29] His manly eloquence was equal to the elevated wisdom of such sentiments.  But the little have triumphed over the great:  an unnatural, (as it should seem,) not an unusual victory.  I am sure you cannot forget with how much uneasiness we heard, in conversation, the language of more than one gentleman at the opening of this contest,—­“that he was willing to try the war for a year or two, and, if it did not succeed, then to vote for peace.”  As if war was a matter of experiment!  As if you could take it up or lay it down as an idle frolic!  As if the dire goddess that presides over it, with her murderous spear in her hand and her Gorgon at her breast, was a coquette to be flirted with!  We ought with reverence to approach that tremendous divinity, that loves courage, but commands counsel.  War never leaves where it found a nation.  It is never to be entered into without a mature deliberation,—­not a deliberation lengthened out into a perplexing indecision, but a deliberation leading to a sure and fixed judgment.  When so taken up, it is not to be abandoned without reason as valid, as fully and as extensively considered.  Peace may be made as unadvisedly as war.  Nothing is so rash as fear; and the counsels of pusillanimity very rarely put off, whilst they are always sure to aggravate, the evils from which they would fly.