Rather, in the spirit of Mr. Fortescue’s admirable volume on _British Statesmen of the Great War_, shall we be prone to stand amazed at the courage and resolution of the group of British ministers who stood out, for long years and against tremendous odds, to defeat the tyrant of Europe and to preserve the British Empire. ‘On the one side was Napoleon, an autocrat vested with such powers as great genius and good fortune have rarely placed in the hands of one man, with the resources of half Europe at his disposition, and an armed force unsurpassed in strength and devotion ready to march to the ends of the world to uphold his will. On the other were these plain English gentlemen, with not so much as a force of police at their back, with a population by nature five times as turbulent as it is now, and in the manufacturing districts inflamed alike by revolutionary teaching and by real distress, with an Ireland always perilously near revolt, with a House of Commons unreformed indeed, but not on that account containing a less factious, mischievous, and obstructive opposition than any other House of Commons during a great war. In face of all these difficulties they had to raise armies, maintain fleets, construct and pursue a military policy, and be unsuccessful at their peril. Napoleon might lose whole armies with impunity: five thousand British soldiers beaten and captured would have brought any British minister’s head perilously near the block. Such were the difficulties that confronted Perceval, Liverpool, and Castlereagh: yet for their country’s sake they encountered them without flinching[156].’ [156] Fortescue’s _British Statesmen_, pp. 277-8. The winter of 1811-12 was not quite the darkest hour: the Russian war was looming in the near future, and Napoleon was already beginning to withdraw troops from Spain in preparation for it. No longer therefore, as in 1810 and the earlier half of 1811, was there a high probability that the main bulk of the French armies, under the Emperor himself, might be turned once more against the Peninsula. It was all but certain that England would soon have allies, and not stand practically alone in the struggle, as she had done ever since Wagram. Nevertheless, even with the political horizon somewhat brightened in the East, the time was a sufficiently anxious one. In Great Britain, as in the rest of Europe, the harvest of 1811 had been exceptionally bad, and the high price of bread, coinciding with much unemployment, was causing not only distress but wide-spread turbulence in the manufacturing districts. This was the year of the first outbreak of the ‘Luddites,’ and of their senseless exploits in the way of machine-smashing. The worst stringency of domestic troubles coincided with the gradual disappearance of the external danger from the ambition of Napoleon.