that there never had been any express regulation in England to provide that the Prince of Wales should be made independent of his father, and there was clear good-sense in the contempt with which Walpole treated the argument that the State dependency upon his father in {85} which the son of a great family usually lives, must necessarily tend to the debasing of the son's mind and the diminishing of his intelligence, or that the dignity and grandeur even of a Prince of Wales could not be as well supported by a yearly allowance as by a perpetual and independent settlement. Some of the speakers on Walpole's side--indeed, Walpole himself occasionally--strove to show their willingness to serve the prince by utterances which must have caused the prince to smile a grim, sardonic smile if he had any existing sense of humor. Please do not imagine--this was the line of observation--that we think one hundred thousand a year too much for his Royal Highness. Oh dear, no; nothing of the kind; we do not think it would be half enough if only the nation had the money to give away. "Why," exclaimed one gushing orator, "if we had the money the only course we could take would be to offer his Royal Highness whatever he pleased to accept, and even in that case we should have reason to fear lest his modesty might do an injury to his generosity by making him confine his demand within the strictest bounds of bare necessity." "Were we," another member of the Court party declared, "to measure the prince's allowance by the prince's merit, as we know no bounds to the latter, we could prescribe no bounds to the former." Therefore, as it was totally impossible that the treasury of any State could reward this extraordinary prince according to his merit, the speakers on Walpole's side mildly pleaded that they had only to fall back on the cold and commonplace rules of ordinary economy, and try to find out what sum the nation could really afford to hand over.