Granting the necessity, of course.  By dint of incessantly speaking of the necessity we granted it unknowingly.  The lighter hearts regarded our period of monotonously lyrical prosperity as a man sensible of fresh morning air looks back on the snoring bolster.  Many of the graver were glad of a change.  After all that maundering over the blessed peace which brings the raisin and the currant for the pudding, and shuts up the cannon with a sheep’s head, it became a principle of popular taste to descant on the vivifying virtues of war; even as, after ten months of money-mongering in smoky London, the citizen hails the sea-breeze and an immersion in unruly brine, despite the cost, that breeze and brine may make a man of him, according to the doctor’s prescription:  sweet is home, but health is sweeter!  Then was there another curious exhibition of us.  Gentlemen, to the exact number of the Graces, dressed in drab of an ancient cut, made a pilgrimage to the icy despot, and besought him to give way for Piety’s sake.  He, courteous, colossal, and immoveable, waved them homeward.  They returned and were hooted for belying the bellicose by their mission, and interpreting too well the peaceful.  They were the unparalyzed Ministers of the occasion, but helpless.

And now came war, the purifier and the pestilence.

The cry of the English people for war was pretty general, as far as the criers went.  They put on their Sabbath face concerning the declaration of war, and told with approval how the Royal hand had trembled in committing itself to the form of signature to which its action is limited.  If there was money to be paid, there was a bugbear to be slain for it; and a bugbear is as obnoxious to the repose of commercial communities as rivals are to kings.

The cry for war was absolutely unanimous, and a supremely national cry, Everard Romfrey said, for it excluded the cotton-spinners.

He smacked his hands, crowing at the vociferations of disgust of those negrophiles and sweaters of Christians, whose isolated clamour amid the popular uproar sounded of gagged mouths.

One of the half-stifled cotton-spinners, a notorious one, a spouter of rank sedition and hater of aristocracy, a political poacher, managed to make himself heard.  He was tossed to the Press for morsel, and tossed back to the people in strips.  Everard had a sharp return of appetite in reading the daily and weekly journals.  They printed logic, they printed sense; they abused the treasonable barking cur unmercifully.  They printed almost as much as he would have uttered, excepting the strong salt of his similes, likening that rascal and his crew to the American weed in our waters, to the rotting wild bees’ nest in our trees, to the worm in our ships’ timbers, and to lamentable afflictions of the human frame, and of sheep, oxen, honest hounds.  Manchester was in eclipse.  The world of England discovered that the peace-party which opposed was the actual cause of the war:  never was indication clearer.  But my business is with Mr. Beauchamp, to know whom, and partly understand his conduct in after-days, it will be as well to take a bird’seye glance at him through the war.