shall never be reconciled to mending shoes in America; but I see it
must be my lot, and I will then take a dreadful revenge upon Mr.
Perceval, if I catch him preaching within ten miles of me. I cannot
for the soul of me conceive whence this man has gained his notions
of Christianity: he has the most evangelical charity for errors in
arithmetic, and the most inveterate malice against errors in
conscience. While he rages against those whom in the true spirit of
the Gospel he ought to indulge, he forgets the only instance of
severity which that Gospel contains, and leaves the jobbers,
contractors, and money-changers at their seats, without a single
stripe.

You cannot imagine, you say, that England will ever be ruined and
conquered; and for no other reason that I can find, but because it
seems so very odd it should be ruined and conquered. Alas! so
reasoned, in their time, the Austrian, Russian, and Prussian
Plymleys. But the English are brave: so were all these nations.
You might get together a hundred thousand men individually brave;
but without generals capable of commanding such a machine, it would
be as useless as a first-rate man-of-war manned by Oxford clergymen
or Parisian shopkeepers. I do not say this to the disparagement of
English officers: they have had no means of acquiring experience;
but I do say it to create alarm; for we do not appear to me to be
half alarmed enough, or to entertain that sense of our danger which
leads to the most obvious means of self-defence. As for the spirit
of the peasantry in making a gallant defence behind hedge-rows, and
through plate-racks and hen-coops, highly as I think of their
bravery, I do not know any nation in Europe so likely to be struck
with the panic as the English; and this from their total
unacquaintance with the science of war. Old wheat and beans blazing