cry raised from jealousy, or he would readily sacrifice the officer as the shortest way of getting it over. I am confident from what I have seen that there is no possible situation which can justify despair in war. The events are so uncertain, that a single moment changes the fate of kingdoms. A spirit of enterprise is always sure of succeeding, if directed with the smallest portion of sense. Combination is what is most of all requisite, and to keep the clue in your hands—and the great point in a Minister is to resist pannicks, which spread unaccountably and are contagious beyond what can be imagined. How unaccountable was the pannick which struck this country upon the taking Minorca—a place of no consequence—and the country capable of such great and noble efforts as it made afterwards, and so superior to France in every respect. It spread however to such a degree that no one was exempt. Mr. Fox, a man of as great natural sagacity as ever lived, told Mr. Hamilton, his private intimate friend, that Mr. Pitt, his rival whom he detested, would well deserve the victory he had obtained over him, if he could extricate the country so as to save it from ruin. Mr. Pitt whose recommendation was the courage and firmness of which he assumed the character appears—and that in his very despatches—to have possessed himself little better. Witness his offer of Gibraltar to the Spaniards, and many other traits.[1] I have never been able to find there was a single man in publick affairs, who did not believe that we were utterly ruined.[2] The same in regard to the Rebellion of 1745,[3] when mountains of wealth might have been made in the stocks, and yet no fortunes were made and no reasonable method of accounting for either than might be given for any epidemick
- ↑ A similar proposal had been made by Stanhope in 1718.
- ↑ "Whoever is in, or whoever is out, I am sure we are undone, both at home and abroad: at home by our increasing debt and expenses; abroad by our ill luck and incapacity. … We are no longer a nation. I never yet saw so dreadful a prospect."—Lord Chesterfield to Mr. Dayrolles, July 4th, 1757, Chesterfield Letters, iii. 1170. "It is time for England to slip her cables, and float away into some unknown ocean."—Horace Walpole to Mann, September 3rd, 1757, Correspondence, iii. 103.
- ↑ When I was in office in 1767 there were some pacquets sealed up in the Secretary's Office, entitled most secret, and supposed to be the correspondence of Scots Leaders in the Rebellion. I never opened them. When I came into Ministry in 1782 they were gone. (Note by Lord Shelburne.)
