One night Fox himself put the same question to Sir Fletcher Norton (the Speaker,) who nonchalantly answered, "Happen! hang me, if I know or care!" A substantial proof of the general approval was given to the new official, in the addition of L1000 a-year to his salary; thus giving him L6000 a-year--which, besides a house, with some other emoluments on public and private bills, and the sale of certain clerkships connected with the business of the Commons, is generally calculated as equivalent to about L10,000 yearly. For this, however, the Speaker is expected to keep up considerable state, to give occasional banquets during the session to successive parties of the members; to have evening receptions and levees; and, in general, to lead a rather laborious life; the least part of whose labour is in the Speaker's chair. He has also the appointment of a chaplain to the House, which is equivalent to the disposal of valuable church patronage, the chaplain being always provided for, after a few years' attendance, by a request of the House to the crown. To complete this accumulation of good things, the Speaker who exhibits intelligence, is frequently promoted to the higher offices of the cabinet, and generally receives a peerage. But those were the "piping times of peace;" times of trouble and terror were at hand. The French democracy had already burst on Europe; and every throne was heaving on the surge which it had raised. Pitt alone, of all the great ministers of Europe, seemed to disregard its hazards. Customary as it is for the pamphleteers of later times to assail his memory, as the promoter of hostilities, the chief outcry against Pitt in the year 1790, was his tardiness in thinking that those hostilities could ever force England to take a share in the struggles of the Continent. The whole aristocracy, the whole property, the whole mercantile interest, and even the whole moral feeling of the empire, had become from hour to hour more convinced that a war was inevitable. Even the Opposition, whose office it was to screen the atrocities of every national enemy, and who, for a time, had looked to Jacobinism as an auxiliary in the march to power, had at last shrunk from this horrible alliance--had felt the natural disgust of Englishmen for an association with the undisguised vice and vileness of the Republic, and had at last sunk into silence, if not into shame. Burke had published his immortal "Reflections," and their sound had gone forth like the tolling of a vast funeral bell for the obsequies of European monarchy. Still, nothing could move Pitt. By nature, a financier, and by genius the most magnificent of all financiers, he calculated the force of nations by the depths of their treasuries; and seeing France bankrupt, conceived that she was on the verge of conviction, and waited only to see her sending her humbled Assembly to beg for a general loan, and for a general peace at the same moment.