'As to Hanover,' he continues, 'we know by experience that none of the merits of that Electorate are passed over in silence.' 'It is not to be imagined that His Majesty would not have sent his proportion of troops to the Austrian army had not the temptation of greater profit been laid industriously before him.' 'It is now too apparent that this powerful, this great, this mighty nation is considered only as a province to a despicable electorate, and that, in consequence of a plan formed long ago and invariably pursued, these [Hanoverian] troops are hired only to drain us of our money.... How much reason the transactions of almost every year have given for suspecting this absurd, ungrateful, and perfidious partiality it is not necessary to declare.... To dwell upon all the instances of partiality which have been shown, and the yearly visits which have been paid to that delightful country [Hanover], to reckon up all the sums that have been spent to aggrandise and enrich it, would be an irksome and invidious task, invidious to those who are afraid to be told the truth, and irksome to those who are unwilling to hear of the dishonour and injuries of their country. I shall, however, dwell no longer on this unpleasing subject than to express my hope that we shall no longer suffer ourselves to be deceived and oppressed.' Conceive the position. On the one side a King, born and bred in Hanover, to whom the honour and welfare of Hanover and the Hanoverians were everything, whose paradise was Hanover, who counted the days to his annual visit to Hanover as a schoolboy counts the days to his holidays, who held Hanover as his own absolute monarchy and property as compared with the limited interest and power of the British throne; a King, moreover, courted by all, whose favour was necessary for the obtaining of office; accustomed to unstinted adulation and homage. On the other, this young jackanapes, an official in the court of his detested son, declaiming against him with every art of the actor and the rhetorician, with every power of voice and eye, holding him and his Hanover up to every kind of ridicule and contempt, before an audience mainly of place-hunters and place-holders, half trembling, half chuckling, as the philippic proceeded.