Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/62

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withheld from us—only to render its attainment more certain and more precious!

To the other solid grounds of an indefinite prolongation of this war, religious, moral, political, commercial, constitutional, continental, Jacobinical, Revolutionary, Corsican, foreign or domestic—our apologist, in the true spirit of the French petit maitre in Roderic Random, has now added a ground of his own, of equal efficacy and validity with the former, viz. that we are to carry it on in the character of gentlemen and men of honour. We are to fight for the restoration of the Bourbons, say The Times, "that we may have gentlemen and men of honour to fight with." There is some prudence in this resolution; it goes on the old principle, that we are not to fight except with our match. Don Quixote, after he had been soundly drubbed by the Yanguesian carriers, recollected that he ought not to have engaged with plebeians. The writer whom we have here quoted, told us, some time ago, from a greater authority certainly than that of The Times, the true grounds of war, or "that we might spill our blood for our country, for our liberty, for our friends, for our kind;" but we do not remember, among these legitimate sources of the waste of human blood, that we were to shed it for a punctilio. If war were to be decided by the breaking of white and black sticks among gentlemen-ushers, or even by the effusion of courtly phrases in The Courier and The Times, we should have no objection to this fastidious refinement; but we cannot consent to shed the best blood of Europe, nor that of "the meanest peasant in this our native land," in order that the delicate honour of the Carlton House Minority may not be stained, nor the purity of their moral taste perverted, by an intercourse with any but gentlemen and men of honour. And thou, Carl John, what hast thou to say to this new plea of the old school?—Or why, not being clad with the inherent right to "monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks,"—dost thou insult over the King of Denmark, menace Holstein, and seize upon Norway, and yet tellest thy little son, that the time is coming, when conquerors shall be no