ust the men
needed to call aloud to the people and make sure that their voices must
be heard. They had to talk in a shout if they were to talk to any
purpose. There was much in their style of eloquence against which a
pure and cultured criticism would naturally protest. But they did not
speak for the pure and cultured criticism. They came to call ignorant
sinners to repentance. They have the one great abiding {146} merit,
they have the one enduring fame--that they saw their real business in
life; that they kept to it through whatever disadvantage, pain, and
danger; and that they accomplished what they had gone out to do. Their
monument lives to-day in the living history of England and of America.

{147}

CHAPTER XXXI.

ENGLAND'S HONOR AND JENKINS'S EAR.

[Sidenote: 1738--The passion of war]

"Madam, there are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe, and not
one Englishman among them." This was the proud boast which, as has
been already mentioned, Walpole was able to make to Queen Caroline not
very long before her death, when she was trying to stir him up to a
more agressive policy in the affairs of the Continent. Walpole's words
sound almost like an anticipation of Prince Bismarck's famous
declaration that the Eastern Question was not worth to Germany the life
of a single Pomeranian grenadier. But Prince Bismarck was more
fortunate than Walpole in his policy of peace. He had secured a
position of advantage for himself in maintaining that policy which
Walpole never had. Prince Bismarck had twice over made it clear to all
the world that he could conduct to the most complete success a policy
of uncompromising war. Walpole had all the difficulty in keeping to
his policy of peace which a statesman always has who is suspected,
rightly or wrongly, of a willingness to purchase peace at almost any
price. It is melancholy to have to make the statement, but the
statement is nevertheless true, that in the England of Walpole's day,
and in the England of our own day as well, the statesman who is known
to love peace is sure to have it shrieked at him in some crisis that he
does not love the honor of his country. A periodical outbreak of the
craving or lust for war seems to be one of the passions and one of the
afflictions of almost every great commonwealth in Europe. A wise and
just policy may have secured a peace that has lasted for years; but the
mere fact that peace has lasted for years {148} seems t