Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/726

720 tensity; whatever he has lauded and promised as a benefit to be conferred by himself, he has signally failed to effect. He is an impressive example of the unwisdom of pretension and censoriousness in general; but more especially is he a danger-signal warning all men of the fatal consequences of emitting cant.

HOT AND COLD FITS OF THE NATION.
It is an everyday remark how apathetic the nation has been lately while calamities have been closing in on it from every side. Though our money has been wasted and our troops destroyed to no purpose in Egypt; though the disasters have been clearly traceable to the incapacity of our rulers; though the complications which perplex us in Europe and Asia as well as in Africa are equally due to careless and bad government; yet the country does not stir itself to rescue the lives of its defenders, and its wealth, from stewards who have already so grossly misdealt with both, but callously commits more precious lives and more treasure to be misused by the same unworthy hands.

It seems, truly, a very perverse condition of things; but there is no use in fretting and lamenting over it. The country is in one of its cold fits – that is all. Something – perhaps some very small provocation – will rouse it to sensitiveness ere long; and then it is likely that there may be smarter public action than is good for us, or than we may altogether approve.

They who have watched the humours of our people must be aware that there are occasions when the least prick will startle them into sudden, and not always wise, action; while there are periods of apathy when the temperament seems to have become phlegmatic, when hurricanes or earthquakes will produce hardly the least animation, – when an alarm that we are drifting into a chaos amid "red ruin and the breaking up of laws" will not evoke an answer, but the event will be impassively awaited, and no hand and no voice raised to turn away the coming evil.

As an example of the over-lively mood of John Bull, we may refer to the sharp practice which was vented on Lord Palmerston's Administration when it attempted to make a law to restrain French assassins from using the United Kingdom as a resort where they might hatch plots against their own country, and load shells and torpedoes to be discharged against the French Emperor. There had been scarcely a growl to show that the Bill would be even objected to; hardly any precaution had been taken against the action of opposition, so reasonable and so certain of acceptance seemed the measure which was proposed. And yet the British lion, being at the moment peculiarly irascible, arose suddenly in his might, rejected the Bill without ceremony, and manifested an utter indifference about the consequences of his act. Lord Palmerston pulled his hat over his eyes, and ceased for a season from his usual jauntiness, when he felt the sudden spring by which his labour had been brought to nought. The next day he and his colleagues resigned office. The Bill which roused this fierce indignation was just such a one as we are at present desirous that the Americans should pass to discourage and restrain