Humourist as he was, and too often swayed by prejudice, no man had a sounder judgment than Walpole when he gave his reason fair play. In his estimate of public events, he sometimes displayed unusual sagacity. Though his dislike of Lord Chatham led him to disparage the efforts of the old man eloquent to avert the American War--efforts which filled Franklin with admiration--he yet foresaw quite as clearly as Chatham the disastrous results of that contest. The celebrated speeches which fell dead on the ear of Parliament had no more effect upon Walpole; but Walpole did not need to be moved by them, for he was convinced already. “This interlude,” he writes to Conway, who was then in Paris, “would be entertaining, if the scene was not so totally gloomy. The Cabinet have determined on civil war.… There is food for meditation! Will the French you converse with be civil and keep their countenances? Pray remember it is not decent to be dancing at Paris, when there is a civil war in your own country. You would be like the country squire, who passed by with his hounds as the battle of Edgehill began.” The letter in which these words occur is dated January 22, 1775. Three weeks later, the writer adds: “The war with our Colonies, which is now declared, is a proof how much influence jargon has on human actions. A war on our own trade is _popular_![73] Both Houses are as eager for it as they were for conquering the Indies--which acquits them a little of rapine, when they are as glad of what will impoverish them as of what they fancied was to enrich them.” His sympathy, as well as his judgment, was on the side of the Colonies. On September 7th, 1775, he writes to Mann: “You will not be surprised that I am what I always was, a zealot for liberty in every part of the globe, and consequently that I most heartily wish success to the Americans. They have hitherto not made _one_ blunder; and the Administration have made a thousand, besides the two capital ones, of first provoking, and then of uniting the Colonies. The latter seem to have as good heads as hearts, as we want both.” And on the 11th: “The Parliament is to meet on the 20th of next month, and vote twenty-six thousand seamen! What a paragraph of blood is there! With what torrents must liberty be preserved in America! In England what can save it?… What prospect of comfort has a true Englishman? Why, that Philip II. miscarried against the boors of Holland, and that Louis XIV. could not replace James II. on the throne!” And when Fortune declared herself on the side of the Colonists, Horace, unmoved by the reverses of his country, steadily preserved the same tone. “We have been horribly the aggressors,” he wrote at the end of 1777, “and I must rejoice that the Americans are to be free, as they had a right to be, and as I am sure they have shown they deserve to be.” But the calamities and disgraces of the time weighed heavily on his spirits. His correspondence throughout 1777 and