If such came now,
would the body of the nation strive to stand against them, or fall in
the dust, and be kicked and trampled, sputtering namby-pamby? Britannia
now is always wrong, in the opinion of her wisest sons, if she dares to
defend herself even against weak enemies; what then would her crime
be if she buckled her corselet against the world! To prostitute their
mother is the philanthropy of Communists.
But while the anxious people who had no belief in foreigners were
watching by the dark waves, or at the twilight window trembling (if ever
a shooting-star drew train, like a distant rocket-signal), or in their
sleepy beds scared, and jumping up if a bladder burst upon a jam-pot,
no one attempted to ridicule them, and no public journal pronounced that
the true British flag was the white feather. It has been left for times
when the power of England is tenfold what it was then, and her duties
a hundredfold, to tell us that sooner than use the one for the proper
discharge of the other, we must break it up and let them go to pot upon
it, for fear of hurting somebody that stuck us in the back.
But who of a right mind knows not this, and who with a wrong one
will heed it? The only point is that the commonest truisms come upon
utterance sometimes, and take didactic form too late; even as we shout
to our comrade prone, and beginning to rub his poor nose, "Look out!"
And this is what everybody did with one accord, when he was down upon
his luck--which is far more momentous than his nose to any man--in the
case of Rector Twemlow.
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