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As well, they might say, let yonder scuffling vagabonds up any of the Veronese side-streets fall upon the patrol marching like one man, and hope to overcome them! In Vienna there was often despair: but it never existed in the Austrian camp. Vienna was frequently double-dealing and time-serving her force in arms was like a trained man feeling his muscle.
Outrages like these were rare: but they served to discredit the constitutional Church and to throw up in sharper relief the courage with which the orthodox clergy met exile and death for conscience' sake. Moreover, the time-serving of the constitutionals was to avail them little: during the Terror their stipends were unpaid, and the churches were for the most part closed.
The time-serving and unpatriotic burghers, who, at the beginning of the spring, set up his bust in their houses, and would give large sums for his picture in little, now broke his images and tore his portraits from their walls, for it was evident that the power of his name was gone, both with prince and people.
His support was the more necessary since Simon of Sudbury, who in 1375 succeeded Whittlesea on the throne of St. Augustine, was a weak and time-serving politician. The storm, which had long been brewing, burst at last in the parliament of April, 1376.
The people, the populace, are brave, generous, and humane; but the merchants and gentry, as they are called, are the most selfish, the most corrupt, the most vulgar, the most ignorant, the most illiberal, and the most time-serving race that are to be found in Europe.
Some slave-owners encourage it because they think it cannot decrease slavery, and will keep back the inconvenient crisis when free labor will be cheaper than slave labor; others of the same class join it because they really want to do some act of kindness to the unfortunate African race, and all the country insist upon it that this is the only way; some politicians in the free States countenance it from similar motives, and because less cautious measures might occasion a loss of Southern votes and influence; the time-serving class so numerous in every community, who are always ready to flatter existing prejudices, and sail smoothly along the current of popular favor, join it, of course; but I am willing to believe that the largest proportion belong to it, because they have compassionate hearts, are fearful of injuring their Southern brethren, and really think there is no other way of doing so much good to the negroes.
There were realistic and graphic pictures of the negro at his best, in Old Tiff and Milly. The sophistries and time-serving of ecclesiastics were fairly pictured. The fundamental attitude of the law in regarding the slave as the creature of his master's convenience was shown with historic fidelity.
This was the language of that man to whom I owe my existence, and from whom I imbibed, at a very early age, those principles of veracity, justice, humanity, and public spirit, the free exercise of which, although it consigned his forefather as well as his descendant to the same prison; yet, such is the consoling and heart-cheering effect of following the dictates of an honest mind, that it not only tranquillizes the passions, and checks their overflowing the due bounds of discretion, while under the influence of prosperity, but also conveys to the persecuted captive that inward satisfaction, which makes reflection, even in a prison, a source of delight, and teaches him to despise that outward shew of mirth and affected gaiety which accompany the selfish votaries of pleasure, who sacrifice every honest independent principle at the shrine of fashion, till the man is degraded to a mere time-serving pander in the Temple of Folly.
In the month of August all negotiation was broken off with Austria, though that power, still adhering to her time-serving policy, continued to protest fidelity to the cause of the Emperor Napoleon until the moment when her preparations were completed and her resolution formed. But if there was duplicity at Vienna was there not folly, nay, blindness, in the Cabinet of the Tuileries?
I remember that we were quite triumphant, in our little owlish way, that year; for the weight of socialistic and anti-national, anti-responsible feeling had forced a time-serving Cabinet into cutting down our Navy by a quarter at one stroke. The hurried scramblers after money and pleasure were much gratified. "We can make defensive alliances with other Powers," they said.
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