Whatsoever alarms it they join to crush.  There you get at their point of unity.  They will pay for the security of Comfort, calling it national worship, or national defence, if too much money is not subtracted from the means of individual comfort:  if too much foresight is not demanded for the comfort of their brains.  Have at them there.  Speak.  Moveless as you find them, they are not yet all gross clay, and I say again, the true word spoken has its chance of somewhere alighting and striking root.  Look not to that.  Seeds perish in nature; good men fail.  Look to the truth in you, and deliver it, with no afterthought of hope, for hope is dogged by dread; we give our courage as hostage for the fulfilment of what we hope.  Meditate on that transaction.  Hope is for boys and girls, to whom nature is kind.  For men to hope is to tremble.  Let prayer—­the soul’s overflow, the heart’s resignation—­supplant it . . .”

’Pardon, colonel; I forgot to roar, but old Nevil marks all down that page for encomium,’ said Captain Baskelett.  ’Oh! here we are.  English loyalty is the subject.  Now, pray attend to this, colonel.  Shrapnel communicates to Beauchamp that if ten Beauchamps were spouting over the country without intermission he might condescend to hope.  So on—­to British loyalty.  We are, so long as our sovereigns are well-conducted persons, and we cannot unseat them—­observe; he is eminently explicit, the old traitor!—­we are to submit to the outward forms of respect, but we are frankly to say we are Republicans; he has the impudence to swear that England is a Republican country, and calls our thoroughgoing loyalty—­yours and mine, colonel—­disloyalty.  Hark:  “Where kings lead, it is to be supposed they are wanted.  Service is the noble office on earth, and where kings do service let them take the first honours of the State:  but”—­hark at this—­“the English middle-class, which has absorbed the upper, and despises, when it is not quaking before it, the lower, will have nothing above it but a ricketty ornament like that you see on a confectioner’s twelfth-cake."’

‘The man deserves hanging!’ said Colonel Halkett.

’Further, my dear colonel, and Nevil marks it pretty much throughout:  “This loyalty smacks of a terrible perfidy.  Pass the lords and squires; they are old trees, old foundations, or joined to them, whether old or new; they naturally apprehend dislocation when a wind blows, a river rises, or a man speaks;—­that comes of age or aping age:  their hearts are in their holdings!  For the loyalty of the rest of the land, it is the shopkeeper’s loyalty, which is to be computed by the exact annual sum of his net profits.  It is now at high tide.  It will last with the prosperity of our commerce.”—­The insolent old vagabond!—­“Let commercial disasters come on us, and what of the loyalty now paying its hundreds of thousands, and howling down questioners!  In a day of bankruptcies, how much would you bid for the loyalty of a class shivering