Fox opposed the Bill, which he said would be considered as a veiled declaration of war. France was patient because she wished to persuade her allies that we were the aggressors, and so induce them to join her. The passing of the Bill would furnish the very proof she required. The whole gist of the matter lay in the word 'now,' 'the hinge,' he said with a painful confusion of metaphor, 'upon which the very marrow of this debate must turn.' Were peace hopeless such a Bill might be necessary; now it could only do harm. Pitt followed Fox and made play with the word 'now,' for as Murray said in reply: 'He has the happy faculty of being able to turn the most important word, the most serious argument, into ridicule.' He pointed out from examples in the reign of Elizabeth and Charles II. that we might be at war for many years without declaring war, and supported the Bill; as did Richard Lyttelton (though the House, says Rigby, can no longer be brought to hear a word from him), and George Grenville. The most piquant part of the speeches of both Pitt and Fox related to Walpole, who had now from a bugbear become a fetish. Fox pronounced a high eulogy upon him, but denied that his parliaments had been venal. Pitt said that he himself had always opposed Walpole when in power, but after resignation had always 'spoken well of him as a man.' Here there was a laugh, which Pitt angrily rebuked. Was it not more honourable to respect a man when his power had come to an end than before? Walpole had no doubt 'for many years an amazing influence in this House, and the enquiry, stifled as it was, made it pretty evident from whence that influence proceeded!' Legge swelled the chorus of devotion to a Minister who had scarce a friend at his fall, by declaring that 'he was an honour to human nature and the peculiar friend to Great Britain!' Death, in British politics, magnanimously closes most accounts with a credit balance.[310] [Sidenote: Dec. 5, 1755.] Three days afterwards, Barrington, the new Secretary at War, moved the Army Estimates. Here we are again thrown upon Walpole, whose records, precious as they are, are the notes of an amateur, jotted down at the time with the idea of subsequent expansion, but not subsequently expanded. Indeed, when he came to use them, his memory, it is probable, no longer availed for the purpose. But from the account of the last debate on December 2, 1755, the Parliamentary history, incredible as it may seem, records no speech of Pitt's till the last month of 1761, and then only a formal reply.