O sorrow! O misery for England, the Land of liberty and courage and
peace; the Land trustworthy and long approved; the home of lofty example
and benign precept; the central orb to which, as to a fountain, the
nations of the earth 'ought to repair, and in their golden urns draw
light;'--O sorrow and shame for our country; for the grass which is upon
her fields, and the dust which is in her graves;--for her good men who
now look upon the day;--and her long train of deliverers and defenders,
her Alfred, her Sidneys, and her Milton; whose voice yet speaketh for
our reproach; and whose actions survive in memory to confound us, or to
redeem!

For what hath been done? look at it: we have looked at it: we have
handled it: we have pondered it steadily: we have tried it by the
principles of absolute and eternal justice; by the sentiments of
high-minded honour, both with reference to their general nature, and to
their especial exaltation under present circumstances; by the rules of
expedience; by the maxims of prudence, civil and military: we have
weighed it in the balance of all these, and found it wanting; in that,
which is most excellent, most wanting.

Our country placed herself by the side of Spain, and her fellow Nation;
she sent an honourable portion of her sons to aid a suffering people to
subjugate or destroy an army--but I degrade the word--a banded multitude
of perfidious oppressors, of robbers and assassins, who had outlawed
themselves from society in the wantonness of power; who were abominable
for their own crimes, and on account of the crimes of him whom they
served--to subjugate or destroy these; not exacting that it should be
done within a limited time; admitting even that they might effect their
purpose or not; she could have borne either issue, she was prepared for
either; but she was not prepared for such a deliverance as hath been
accomplished; not a deliverance of Portugal from French oppression, but
of the oppressor from the anger and power (at least from the animating
efforts) of the Peninsula: she was not prepared to stand between her
Allies, and their worthiest hopes: that, when chastisement could not be
inflicted, honour--as much as bad men could receive--should be
conferred: that them, whom her own hands had humbled, the same hands and
no other should exalt: that finally the sovereign of this horde of
devastators, himself the destroyer of the hopes of good men, should have
to say, through the mouth