ur may call her; but I
must at the same time be allowed to say, that her strength has very
recently been strained to the utmost; that her means are at that
precise stage of recovery which makes it most desirable that the
progress of that recovery should not be interrupted; that her
resources, now in a course of rapid reproduction, would, by any sudden
check, be thrown into a disorder more deep and difficult of cure. It
is in reference to this particular condition of the country, that I
said on a former evening, what the honourable member for Surrey (Mr.
Holme Sumner) has since done me the honour to repeat, 'If we are to be
driven into war, sooner or later, let it be later': let it be after we
have had time to turn, as it were, the corner of our difficulties--
after we shall have retrieved a little more, effectively our exhausted
resources, and have assured ourselves of means and strength, not only
to begin, but to keep up the conflict, if necessary, for an indefinite
period of time.

For let no man flatter himself that a war now entered upon would be a
short one. Have we so soon forgotten the course and progress of the
last war? For my part, I remember well the anticipations with which
it began. I remember hearing a man, who will be allowed to have been
distinguished by as great sagacity as ever belonged to the most
consummate statesman--I remember hearing Mr. Pitt, not, in his place
in Parliament (where it might have been his object and his duty
to animate zeal and to encourage hope), but in the privacy of his
domestic circle, among the friends in whom he confided--I remember
well hearing him say, in 1793, that he expected that war to be of very
short duration. That duration ran out to a period beyond the life
of him who made the prediction. It outlived his successor, and
the successors of that successor, and at length came suddenly and
unexpectedly to an end, through a combination of miraculous events,
such as the most sanguine imagination could not have anticipated.
With that example full in my recollection, I could not act upon the
presumption that a new war, once begun, would be speedily ended. Let
no such expectation induce us to enter a path, which, however plain
and clear it may appear at the outset of the journey, we should
presently see branching into intricacies, and becoming encumbered with
obstructions, until we were involved in a labyrinth from which not we
ourselves only, but the generation to come, migh