was: "They are born wicked and they grow up worse."

There is, of course, in much of this something of the malignance
of party. In an age when one reverend theologian, Toplady, called
another theologian, John Wesley, "a low and puny tadpole in
Divinity" we must expect harsh epithets. But behind this
bitterness lay a deep conviction of the righteousness of the
American cause. At a great banquet at Holkham, Coke omitted the
toast of the King; but every night during the American war he
drank the health of Washington as the greatest man on earth. The
war, he said, was the King's war, ministers were his tools, the
press was bought. He denounced later the King's reception of the
traitor Arnold. When the King's degenerate son, who became George
IV, after some special misconduct, wrote to propose his annual
visit to Holkham, Coke replied, "Holkham is open to strangers on
Tuesdays." It was an independent and irate England which spoke in
Coke. Those who paid taxes, he said, should control those who
governed. America was not getting fair play. Both Coke and Fox,
and no doubt many others, wore waistcoats of blue and buff
because these were the colors of the uniforms of Washington's
army.

Washington and Coke exchanged messages and they would have been
congenial companions; for Coke, like Washington, was above all a
farmer and tried to improve agriculture. Never for a moment, he
said, had time hung heavy on his hands in the country. He began
on his estate the culture of the potato, and for some time the
best he could hear of it from his stolid tenantry was that it
would not poison the pigs. Coke would have fought the levy of a
penny of unjust taxation and he understood Washington. The