In the changes of things and in the usual reaction by which Englishmen habitually atone for the fury of their rage, he came indeed to be thought of as a victim, yet the sentence was just. Coward, in the sense that he suffered from the pitiable cowardice which makes a man sick and giddy at the approach of personal danger, he was not. Neither was he disaffected, in the sense that he was scheming to upset the Government he served. As these were the forms of cowardice and disaffection contemplated by the Act, the court very properly acquitted him under these heads. But he was a coward in the intellectual sense. Having a dangerous piece of work to do, and one in which the very errors of the Government rendered it only the more incumbent on him to make all wants good by his own exertions, he thought chiefly of doing it at the least risk, and was resigned to failure. The excuses he made were pitiable. All through he insisted on the inferiority of his fleet. Yet he had thirteen ships to twelve. It is true that the French were better vessels, the _Foudroyant_ with her 80 guns, for instance, being superior in real strength to the =Ramillies= with her 90. Yet the _Foudroyant_ afterwards surrendered to a much smaller ship than the =Ramillies=. He harped on the lesser weight of his guns, and it is true that the 42-pounders carried on the lower deck of some French ships were heavier than any of ours. Yet he had 834 guns to the Frenchman’s 806, and the 42-pounder was afterwards rejected from our navy as too lumbering for ship-work. All through he kept insisting on the risk of doing this or that, till he brought upon himself the scathing answer of Blakeney: “I have served these sixty-three years, and I never knew any enterprise undertaken without some danger; and this might have been effected with as little danger as any I ever knew.” It was monstrous that men should think they could make war without hazard. Therefore the court justly found Byng guilty of “negligence,”—that is to say, all that deficiency to do enough, all that hanging back from strenuous effort, which are due to want of spirit, to a selfish regard of what the soft-minded man thinks are the interests of his safety, to the moral cowardice which falls short of mere physical poltroonery, and the disaffection which stops on this side of deliberate treason. The law had been made stern after the experience of the last war. Byng knew the conditions of his servitude. They were in the Act by which he exercised his own authority, and he sinned against the light.