Fox was the only genius in our political life at that time, while Pitt
was a mere shadow in comparison, though it is fair to state that the
former always believed that he and Pitt would have made a workable
combination. As to the rest, they were pretty much on the level of the
Lilliputians with whom the late traveller, Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, had
such intimate and troublesome relations. The book by the Dean of St.
Patrick's, "Gulliver's Travels," is a perfect caricature of the
political dwarfs of his time, and vividly represents the men who
misruled this country in George III's reign. But the Dean's laughable
history of the pompous antics of the Lilliputians is a picture which
describes the constitution of our present administration who are
managing the critical affairs of the nation so ill that disaster is
inevitable in many forms, seen and unseen. The administrative machine
is clogged with experimental human odds and ends who have neither wit,
knowledge, nor wisdom to fill the post allotted to them, and the
appalling thought is that the nation as a whole is being blustered by
the intriguers who are forcing every national interest into certain
destruction. Truly the Lilliputians are a plague on all human
interests, _real_ patriotism, and capacity: always mischievous, always
incapable, just the same now as when, in the eighteenth century, their
type forced a peaceful and neutral Power into war because they refused
to yield their fleet to them; always seeing things that do not exist,
and foreboding perils that would never have come but for their
dwarfish interference. They discovered in their flights of frenzy and
fancy that Napoleon intended to take possession by force of the Danish
fleet, when, as a matter of fact, he had never shown any indication,
by word or thought, of committing an act so unjust and hostile to his
own interests. A strong point in his policy was to keep Denmark on
terms of friendly neutrality. Moreover, he was not, as many writers
have said (in loyalty to fashion), an unscrupulous breaker of
treaties. It was an unworthy act of the British Government to send Mr.
Jackson as their representative to bully the Danes into giving up
their fleet to the British, on the plea that they had learned by
reports through various channels what Napoleon's intentions were.
Count Bernsdorf, to whom Jackson insolently conveyed the nightmare of
his Government, very properly raged back at him that "the Danish
Government had