he forswore the principles which
animated Burke, which animated Fox, which guided the course of
Rockingham and inspired the utterances of Richmond. All he could see
was an England humiliated by many defeats, an England threatened by
many terrible alliances, and in the face of humiliation and of menace
he forgot that both alike were the inevitable, the well-deserved fruit
of injustice. Remembering that he had helped to make England great, he
refused to remember that England would have been still greater if she
had {186} followed the honorable course his wisdom had made plain to
her. His proud, unhappy spirit could not consent to her dismemberment,
a dismemberment which seemed to his fading intellect to be the
equivalent to her ruin. He came from his sick bed, a ghastly image of
decay, to offer the desperate protest of a dying man against surrender
to the mutiny his own eloquence had fanned. "Come the four quarters of
the world in arms and we will shock them." The spirit of Faulconbridge
was strong in the ruined body of the statesman who was carried to his
seat in the House of Lords by the son who bore his name and by the Lord
Mahon who had married his daughter. His eagle face was turned against
the men who had been his colleagues. His trembling hand pointed at
them in condemnation. He gasped out a few sentences, almost
inarticulate, almost inaudible, before he reeled in a fit upon the arms
of those about him. He was carried from the House; he was carried to
Hayes, and at Hayes a few weeks later the great career came to an end.
His last battle was at least heroic. If his stroke was struck on the
wrong side and for a cause his prime had done so much to baffle, it is
not necessary to attribute his perversion entirely to the insidious
ravages of the malady that had clouded his whole life. He could not
bear to see the country that was in so eminent and so intimate a sense
his country yield even to claims that were conspicuously right and just
at the command of a league between England's rebellious children and
England's enemy, France. There broke his mighty heart. In Chatham
England lost one of the greatest of her statesmen, one of the most
splendid of her sons. His life was passionately devoted to his
country, his career one long struggle against a peculiarly bigoted,
stubborn, and unwise King. Always hated by his enemies, often
misunderstood by his friends, he showed while he lived a steadfast
front alike aga