England was irritated and uneasy. Lord Chatham, quite recently sick and almost dying, more implacable than ever in pursuing everywhere the influence and intervention of France, exclaimed, with the customary exaggeration of his powerful and passionate talent, "Yesterday England could yet resist the world; to-day no one is insignificant enough to show his respect for her. I borrow the words of the poet, my lords, but what his lines express is no fiction. France has insulted you: she has encouraged and sustained America; and whether America be in the right or not, the dignity of this nation demands that we repulse with disdain the officious intervention of France. The ministers and ambassadors of those whom we call rebels and enemies are received at Paris; they treat there of the reciprocal interests of France and America. Their natives are sustained there, and supplied with military resources, and our ministers allow it and do not protest. Is this sustaining the honor of a great kingdom, which formerly imposed law on the House of Bourbon?" [Image] Franklin. {287} The manifest favor of France had forever enrolled Lord Chatham among the opponents of the recognition of American independence. He carried to the House a proposal to cease hostilities and enter upon a negotiation with the revolted colonies, under one sole condition, that of submission to the mother-country. In the violent discussion raised on this subject, Lord Suffolk desired to defend the cruel practices of the Indian savages who were tolerated in the service of Great Britain. Lord Chatham rose in his place, forgetting that he had lately accepted the same auxiliaries during the war against the French in Canada. "My lords," he exclaimed, "have we heard aright? Men, Christians, profane the royal majesty at the very side of the throne. God and nature have placed these arms in our hands, you are told. I do not know what ideas may be conceived of God and of nature, but I know that these abominable principles are equally contrary to religion and to humanity. What! shall the sanction of God and of nature be attributed to the cruelties of the Indian scalping-knife, to cannibal savages who torture, massacre, devour--yes, my lords, who devour the mutilated victims of their barbarous combats? And on whom have you let loose these infidel savages? On your brothers in faith, in order to devastate their country, in order to desolate their dwellings, in order to extirpate their race and their name!" {288}