Minister of Landgrave Frederick II.; but I do not
know on what authority. The writer pointed out such
novel facts as that men had in all ages slaughtered each
other, that the Swiss had long been in the habit of
fighting as mercenaries, that the ten thousand Greeks
under Xenophon did the same, and he considered it
unjust to blame his contemporaries for what seemed to
be a natural instinct of mankind. He noticed that the
present letting-out of troops by Hesse was perhaps
the tenth occasion of the sort since the beginning of
the century. He showed the benefits which the
Landgrave had bestowed on his country, and the affection
in which he was held by his people. He drew attention—and
this was, perhaps, his best argument—to the
fact that the Landgrave of Hesse and the Duke of
Brunswick were so nearly connected with the English
royal family that their descendants might be one day
called to the throne of Great Britain.[1] As for the
boasted Liberty of the Americans, she was but a
deceitful siren, for all history proved that republican
governments were as tyrannical and cruel as monarchies.
Meanwhile the Freiherr von Gemmingen, minister to the Margrave of Anspach, was a little ashamed of the business in which he found himself. “It always seems very hard to me to deal in troops,” writes he to his agent in London, “but the Margrave is determined to set his affairs in order at any price, and to pay all his own debts and those of his predecessors. So the good that may come out of such a treaty of subsidy will far outweigh the hatefulness of the business.”
- ↑ This argument was not mentioned in the British Parliament, where it might, perhaps, have been received with derision.
