In 1803 the tardiness of our military preparations had been accentuated in a debate on the second reading of the Army Reserve Bill. Windham, of whom Wilberforce says that "he had many of the true characteristics of a hero, but he had one great fault as a statesman, he hated the popular side of any question," gives as his opinion in the next letter, that he saw no impossibility in two armies of from twenty to thirty thousand men being landed in different places, and being opposed only by yeomanry and volunteers they might advance to London or wherever else they pleased. "Government acknowledge that there is an utter want of firearms."[35] Windham's hope was that Buonaparte might, for some reason or other, not come; though he confesses that he did not know of any foundation for such hope. _Right Hon. William Windham to Mr. Wilberforce._ "BEACONSFIELD, "_August 18, 1803_. "DEAR WILBERFORCE,--The breaking up of Parliament, advanced as the season is, I can hardly help regretting on another account. One wants a means of publishing the abominable backwardness in which things are with respect to defence: so as literally to put us in the situation, described by some writer in the _Moniteur_, namely that if fifty thousand men can anyhow get on shore, they must conquer the island. What shall we say to the fact, that at the end of now more than five months since the King's message not a single ball cartridge (I suppose) has been fired from one end of the country to the other, unless perhaps a few that I have desired to be fired just by me in Norfolk, and some that I hear Grey has been using upon the same principle in Northumberland?--that the corps, which have been raising, such as they are, remain to this moment for the greater part without arms?--that excepting, I am afraid, a very few thousand men to the army of reserve, not the smallest addition has been or can be made to a force truly regular, such as can alone be opposed upon equal terms to the troops by which we shall be invaded?--and that the whole assistance, that would be to be received from works, of whatever sort, is all yet to be begun, and even settled? When men talk of the difficulties and impracticability of invasion, of the impossibility of conquering a country such as this, they say what may be true, but which is certainly not so for any reasons which they can, or at least which they do, give. It is all a kind of loose, general vague notion founded on what they have been accustomed to see and to conceive, to which the answer is that so was everything which we have seen successively happen for these last fourteen years. Considering things not in much detail, but upon principles somewhat less general than those which I have been alluding to, I can see no impossibility in the supposition of two armies landing in different places of from twenty to thirty thousand men each, of their beating, severally, the troops immediately opposed