But his submission, whether accompanied or not by a feigned resignation, availed him nothing; his unpopularity seemed rather to increase than diminish. The nation suspected his good faith. The legion of able and brilliant men whom he had alienated were in no ways appeased, but more ruthless in their determination to hunt him to the death; the multitude effervesced in mobs. Soon they were all in full cry. There was another general election in 1741, when the Prince of Wales with lavish subsidies entered actively into the strife. Parliament, dissolved in April, met in December, thirsty for Walpole's political blood. The inglorious course of the war in the meantime, its delays and disasters, forms no part of Pitt's life. One may wonder in passing at the callous wickedness that sent out raw boys and decrepit pensioners to die of fever and exhaustion, or at the strange fortune by which those who prepare such expeditions, ministers, commissaries, contractors, and the like, escape the gallows. Walpole at any rate did not escape the particular fate that he deserved. A year of glowing and successful war might yet have saved him; a year of failure and calamity fixed his doom. He had held on to the last possible moment, and so fell with little of grace or dignity. An inevitable political catastrophe only becomes more overwhelming by delay; each day that a minister remains in power against the will of the nation adds force to the torrent against him. Moreover, he affronted public opinion by receiving unusual favours from the King when he had become the object of popular execration. Here the coarse fibre which had stood him in such good stead during a hundred fights did him disservice, for it hindered his perception of the fact that it is unwise to be conspicuously decorated at a moment when the nation is calling for your head. He held on, with failing health but unfailing courage, though the war had furnished him with a reasonable door of departure at the critical moment when honour permitted and indeed required him to go, and though his friends had implored him to resign. The motives for his obstinacy were obvious enough. His was a doughty soul, and did not yield without agony. But there was a more practical reason. He believed that, as had long been threatened, his fall would be followed by his impeachment. As soon as he resigned, his brother Horace hurried off to burn his papers. Walpole himself took a similar precaution. This shows their sense of the imminence of the danger which had always impended over him, and which was first in their thoughts when the protection of office was about to be withdrawn.