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I may now be permitted to take a cursory retrospect of Gustavus Adolphus in his victorious career; glance at the scene in which he alone was the great actor; and then, when Austria becomes reduced to extremity by the successes of the Swedes, and by a series of disasters is driven to the most humiliating and desperate expedients, to return to the history of the Emperor.
The Plantagenets and the Tudors had, it is true, occasionally supplied a deficiency in their revenue by a benevolence or a forced loan: but these expedients were always of a temporary nature. To meet the regular charge of a long war by regular taxation, imposed without the consent of the Estates of the realm, was a course which Henry the Eighth himself would not have dared to take.
The same equity and prudence has always influenced your lordships to distinguish between the several parts of the same bill; to reject those expedients, of which, however plausible, either experience or reason may discover the impropriety, and to retain those from which any real benefit can reasonably be expected.
I think, however, in spite of all, that you must not be discouraged, but continue in the course you have inaugurated. It is right to keep faith touching concessions that have been granted. I hope that your speech to the Chamber will be in this spirit. The more strength may be wanted in the future, the more important it is to prove to the country that we act upon ideas, and not only on expedients.
Hardinge was my guardian, that Rupert and I had passed our boyhoods in each other's company, and that Lucy was even an inmate of my own house the day we sailed. This little knowledge only excited a desire for more, and, by the end of a week, I was obliged to submit to devices and expedients to pump me, than which even the thumbscrew was scarcely more efficient.
This was done easily, and indeed was one of those things which would be almost foolishly simple did we not all have experience of overlooking expedients that lie immediately under our noses. Balch's other story which I recall was at the moment simply humorous, but has since seemed to me charged with homely wisdom of wide application.
In the meantime, Cutler might recross the mountains, and Stone had seen quite enough of Margaret's capriciousness to tremble for the safety of his conquest, should that event occur before it was thoroughly secured. This was embarrassing: but when a man is in earnest, expedients are never wanting.
* Digges, p. 73. But this princess, though magnanimous, had never entertained the ambition of making conquests, or gaining new acquisitions; and the whole purpose of her vigilant and active politics was to maintain, by the most frugal and cautious expedients, the tranquillity of her own dominions.
Amuse them, my dear! Amuse whom? My father! my uncles! But it must be so! All his expedients ready, you see! I had no objection to this: and I have written accordingly. But what answer I shall have, or whether any, that is what gives me no small anxiety.
On the contrary, we may ask whether the vile spirit of demagogism had not even thus early laid hold of this matter, and whether expedients were really needed so violent and dangerous as, for example, the deduction of the interest paid from the capital. Our documents do not enable us to decide the question of right or wrong in the case.
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