Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/126

 which in a tragedy of that time a veteran general applies to his sister whom a royal libertine had dishonoured:—

"'Tis, to be thy brother,

An infamy below the sin of coward,"

James I. had as great a horror of war as the gentlemen of the Peace Society. Being nearly despotic he had been able to put in practice his peace-at-any-price doctrines so successfully, both in avoiding war and in breaking the once high spirit of the English people, that the ambassadors of foreign powers resident in England repeatedly expressed their astonishment that the English nation submitted to such disgrace and oppression—calling it cowardice in the English people, some of them even going so far as to say that there were no men in England. England had, in fact, in this disgraceful reign sunk so low that her ambassadors were repeatedly insulted at foreign courts, her merchant ships could not sail the sea in safety, and her coasts were ravaged by the Barbary pirates, who plundered the villages and carried off many hundreds of the inhabitants into slavery.

No man ever engaged in the court intrigues of that king's reign and escaped with life and honour; and no man of average knowledge and capacity