struggle against
what their fears or their interests taught them to regard as an
invincible power, most insufferable. They demanded peace on any terms.
Men like Yorke and Moore--and there were thousands whom the war placed
where it placed them, shuddering on the verge of bankruptcy--insisted on
peace with the energy of desperation.

They held meetings, they made speeches, they got up petitions to extort
this boon; on what terms it was made they cared not.

All men, taken singly, are more or less selfish; and taken in bodies,
they are intensely so. The British merchant is no exception to this
rule: the mercantile classes illustrate it strikingly. These classes
certainly think too exclusively of making money; they are too oblivious
of every national consideration but that of extending England's--that
is, their own--commerce. Chivalrous feeling, disinterestedness, pride in
honour, is too dead in their hearts. A land ruled by them alone would
too often make ignominious submission--not at all from the motives
Christ teaches, but rather from those Mammon instils. During the late
war, the tradesmen of England would have endured buffets from the
French on the right cheek and on the left; their cloak they would have
given to Napoleon, and then have politely offered him their coat also,
nor would they have withheld their waistcoat if urged; they would have
prayed permission only to retain their one other garment, for the sake
of the purse in its pocket. Not one spark of spirit, not one symptom of
resistance, would they have shown till the hand of the Corsican bandit
had grasped that beloved purse; _then_, perhaps, transfigured at once
into British bulldogs, they would have sprung at the robber's throat,
and there they would have fastened, and there hung, inveterate,
insatiable, till the treasure had been restored. Tradesmen, when they
speak against war, always profess to hate it because it is a bloody and
barbarous proceeding. You would think, to hear them talk, that they are
peculiarly civilized--especially gentle and kindly of disposition to
their fellow-men. This is not the case. Many of them are extremely
narrow and cold-hearted; have no good feeling for any class but their
own; are distant, even hostile, to all others; call them useless; seem
to question their right to exist; seem to grudge them the very air they
breathe, and to think the circumstance of their eating, drinking, and
living in decent houses quite unjustifiabl