d. During the same war the king's second son, the same Duke
of York who had given so characteristic a sample of Guelph generalship
in leading his forces to defeat, gave an equally characteristic
specimen of Guelph morality. He had for mistress one Mary Ann Clarke,
a woman of low origin, who transferred her intimacy to a Colonel
Wardle, and confided to him many of the secrets of her relations to
the royal duke. Wardle, on Jan. 27, 1809, affirmed in the House of
Commons that the Duke of York had permitted Mrs. Clarke to carry on a
traffic in commissions and promotions, and demanded a public inquiry.
Mrs. Clarke was examined at the bar of the House of Commons for
several weeks, displaying a shameless, witty impudence that drew
continual applause and laughter from a mob of English _gentlemen_,
many of whom knew her too well. The charges were proved, and the Duke
of York resigned his position as commander-in-chief; and the
disclosures made--doctors of divinity suing for bishoprics, and
priests for preferment, at the feet of a harlot, kissing her palm with
coin--may teach Englishmen what they have to guard against even to-day
on the part of that Tory party that has religion, conscience, and
morality much more on its lips than in its heart.

It is not altogether irrelevant in this connection to mention that in
1825, when the Catholic relief bill had passed the House of Commons by
268 votes against 241, the Duke of York opposed the repeal of the
Catholic disabilities by the common Tory appeal to what they call
conscience, saying "these were the principles to which he would
adhere, and which he would maintain and act up to, to the latest
moment of his life existence, whatever might be his situation in life,
_so help him God_."

England has indeed had to pay dearly for her hereditary monarchy, and
for the awful hypocrisy which permits the appeal to God by such State
Churchmen as the Duke of York to have any effect on politics. I need
hardly say that the House of Lords did with the Catholic Emancipation
Bill what it has lately done with the House of Commons Bill for Home
Rule in Ireland, and threw it out.

While England was fighting France, she had also to fight the United
States. It is an episode of which neither country has any reason to be
proud. The New Englanders were mostly opposed to the declaration of
war. The average Englishman knows little about it. He is taught by his
history books that the victory of the "Shannon" o