"Alas! so reasoned, in their time, the Austrian, Russian, and Prussian Plymleys. But the English are brave? So were all these nations. You might get together an hundred thousand men individually brave; but, without generals capable of commanding such a machine, it would be as useless as a first-rate man-of-war manned by Oxford clergymen or Parisian shopkeepers. I do not say this to the disparagement of English officers: they have had no means of acquiring experience. But I do say it to create alarm. We do not appear to me to be half alarmed enough, or to entertain that sense of our danger which leads to the most obvious means of self-defence. As for the spirit of the peasantry, in making a gallant defence behind hedgerows and through plate-racks and hencoops, highly as I think of their bravery, I do not know any nation in Europe so likely to be struck with panic as the English; and this from their total unacquaintance with the science of war. Old wheat and beans blazing for twenty miles round--cart-mares shot--sows of Lord Somerville's[49] breed running wild over the country--the minister of the parish wounded sorely in his hinder parts--Mrs. Plymley in fits--all these scenes of war an Austrian or a Russian has seen three or four times over. But it is now three centuries since an English pig has fallen in fair battle upon English ground, or a farm-house been rifled.... But whatever was our conduct--if every ploughman was as great a hero as he who was called from his oxen to save Rome from her enemies--I should still say that, at such a crisis, you want the affections of all your subjects in both islands. There is no spirit which you must alienate, no heart you must avert. Every man must feel he has a country, and that there is an urgent and pressing cause why he should expose himself to death." Although Peter is so seriously concerned about the military disasters which will fall on England unless she behaves more wisely to her Roman Catholic population, he is not the least afraid of any dangers arising from the Roman Catholic religion. England has done with it, once for all--