Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 5.djvu/152

 138 for very worthless wares. We paid for about seventeen thousand mercenaries a million and a half yearly!

There is no point of view in which it is possible to regard these transactions in too severe a spirit. What a spectacle was it to the world to see England, in open defiance of her own constitutional principles, hiring the vilest of men to massacre our own fellow-subjects! It was a circumstance which greatly exasperated the Americans, and greatly encouraged them, by making it appear that we were too weak to contend against them ourselves. In the same degree, and for the same reasons, it encouraged France to make common cause with the colonists, and nothing is clearer than that, had we given an extra bounty and pay, we could, at an infinitely less annual cost, have raised infinitely better men at home. But the whole of the policy of the reign of George III. had from the first been so impolitic, and so grossly hostile to liberty, the monarch himself growing every day more and more obstinate, and more and more insisting on his own narrow and incapable ideas, that nothing but a frightful catastrophe could result from it.



The independent members of both houses nobly discharged their duty in condemnation of this engagement of German mercenaries. Even Lord Irnham, a Luttrel, stimulated into a violent oppositionist by the treatment of his daughter, the duchess of Cumberland, by the court, could grow virtuous on the occasion. He compared the German princes, the relatives of the king and queen, to Sancho Panza, when he wished that all his subjects of Barataria were black-a-moors, that he might turn them into ready money by selling them for slaves. He declared that they were guilty of the additional crime of selling their people to destroy much better and nobler beings than themselves. Other members anticipated that we were only paying for the emigration of these Germans to America, where 150,000 of their countrymen had already crossed from their despotic masters at home; but the ministry were of opinion that these gallant Hessians and Brunswickers had only to show themselves in the colonies to frighten the insurgents into submission.

In the house of lords, the duke of Richmond denounced the whole scheme of setting rule mercenaries to butcher our own kinsmen. He represented the rapacity of the petty princes of Germany as unparalleled, and he complained of the secret influence which rendered all appeals to the throws for wise and humane measures abortive. That influence, however, was now well known to be the king's own stubborn will and incapability for perceiving the calamitous course that he was pursuing. He thought it perfectly monstrous that for seventeen thousand three hundred mercenaries we should be paying a million and a half annually. On every possible occasion, the opposition in both houses renewed the appeal to better principles. The duke of Grafton, on the 14th of March, moved an address to his majesty, that opportunity should be given to the colonists still to offer their list of grievances and that a suspension of arms should be granted to afford time to consider them. He assured government that negotiations between America and France were already on foot for sending assistance by the French to the colonies; that two French gentlemen had been to America, had conferred