complacent burgess article, meant to be a summary of the controversy and
a recommendation to the country to bask in the sun of its wealth again.

'Ay, be the porker sow it's getting liker and liker to every year!' Lord
Ormont exclaimed, and sprang on his feet. 'Take a pen. Shut up that
box. We'll give 'em digestive biscuits for their weak stomachs.
Invasion can't be done, they say! I tell the doddered asses Napoleon
would have been over if Villeneuve had obeyed him to the letter.
Villeneuve had a fit of paralysis, owing to the prestige of Nelson--
that 's as it happened. And they swear at prestige, won't believe in it,
because it's not fat bacon. I tell them, after Napoleon's first battles,
prestige did half his work for him. It saved him at Essling from a
plunge into the Danube; it saved him at Moskowa; it would have marched
him half over England at his first jump on our shingle beach. But that
squelch of fat citizens should be told--to the devil with them! will they
ever learn? short of a second William!--there were eight-and-forty hours
when the liberty of this country hung wavering in the balance with those
Boulogne boats. Now look at Ulm and Austerlitz. Essling, Wagram; put
the victors in those little affairs to front our awkward squads. The
French could boast a regimental system, and chiefs who held them as the
whist-player his hand of cards. Had we a better general than the
Archduke Charles? or cavalry and artillery equal to the Hungarian?
or drilled infantry numbering within eighty thousand of the Boulogne-
Wimereux camps? We had nothing but the raw material of courage--pluck,
and no science. Ask any boxing man what he thinks of the chances.
The French might have sacrificed a fleet to land fifty thousand.
Our fleet was our one chance. Any foreign General at the head of fifty
thousand trained, picked troops would risk it, and cut an 'entrechat' for
joy of the chance. We should have fought and bled and been marched over
--a field of Anglo-Saxon stubble! and Nelson riding the Channel,