There can be no doubt that the day will one day come when all these illusions will be dispelled. If a Russian fleet of twenty-five ships of the line anchors off the Nore, and demands the surrender of the arsenal of Woolwich, and of our ships of war at Portsmouth and Plymouth, as the condition of their raising the blockade of the capital or saving it from pillage--or if a French squadron of fifteen ships of the line takes a _second_ look into Torbay, and we have only three or four half-manned seventy-fours to oppose to them--or if an invading army of 80,000 men lands on the coast of Sussex, and we can only muster 30,000 regular troops to stop their progress--if Woolwich is taken, and Hyde Park is the scene of an enemy's camp, and London, like Paris, capitulates to the conqueror--or if Russia and America unite together and demand the surrender of the half of our fleet and the whole of our arsenals as the price at which they will allow their grain-laden vessels to come to Great Britain and restore bread to the 7,000,000 of our population whom we have in four years rendered dependent on supplies from those countries for their daily food, or if wheat rises to 150s the quarter, and the quartern loaf to 2s. in consequence of our refusal--if the Thames, the Mersey, and the Clyde are blockaded by hostile fleets, and 700,000 or 800,000 manufacturers with their families, for the sake of the riches produced by whom we have sacrificed everything, are suddenly thrown out of employment--or if the seamen of the Baltic and other maritime powers of Europe have come to outnumber our own in the carrying on of our trade, and threaten to disable our commerce, and bring us to death's door, by simply recalling their crews--or if the Bank stops payment in the midst of these calamities, and public and private credit are at once destroyed at the very time when their assistance is most needed--_then, and not till then_, will England speak out in a voice of thunder.