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It will have shown these men, in the scrupulous good faith, not to say the generosity, of its dealing with them, that great national authorities can have no small retaliations and revenges. It will have made every provision for their health on the passage home, and will have landed them, restored from their campaigning fatigues by a sea-voyage, pure air, sound food, and good medicines.
In the process of imitation, each belligerent took care to pass at least a little beyond the precedent; and thus, beginning with a paper blockade of the northern coast of the continent by the British Government, the process advanced, by alternate "retaliations," to a British proclamation specifying the ports of the world to which American vessels were to be allowed to trade, stopping in England or its dependencies to pay taxes en route.
It must be allowed in favor of those tyrants of antiquity, that what was done by them could hardly be said to be done in cold blood. Their passions were inflamed, their tempers soured, their understandings confused with the spirit of revenge, with the innumerable reciprocated and recent inflictions and retaliations of blood and rapine.
Soon the English were provoked into retaliations; whereupon the regulars of Beausejour found an excuse for taking part, and the turbid Missaguash became the scene of such perpetual skirmishes that its waters ran redder than ever. Even then there might have been erelong an attempt at reconciliation, to which end the efforts of Captain Howe were ceaselessly directed.
Yet I might have returned to Nancy if something had not occurred which I would have thought unbelievable: she began to show a marked preference for Ralph Hambleton. At first I regarded this affair as the most obvious of retaliations. She, likewise, had pride.
"We can easily ascertain to what point their baggage was checked," I remarked, again essaying to maintain a rôle of good cheer. But the pessimistic Ptolemy was right there with another of his gloom-casting retaliations. "They only took suit-cases and they always keep them in the car. Here's a check father said to give you to pay for our board. He said you could write in any amount you wanted to."
It is for the most part a confused chronicle of small feuds, jealousies, raids, skirmishes, retaliations, hardly amounting to the dignity of war, but certainly as distinctly the antipodes of peace. The tribal system, which in its earlier stages has been already explained, had to some degree begun to change its character.
The whole matter ended in smoke. The traitors were not made examples of, and negotiations and retaliations ceased. During the winter, stores of every kind were forwarded to Kingston, from Quebec and Montreal. In February, the 8th regiment, and two hundred and twenty seamen, arrived overland from Fredericton, New Brunswick.
And we all know how rich the world is in prey of this kind! Littre. The allusion, of course, is to Don Quixote, Part II. chap. xx. His hand is infallible like his glance. The spirit of sarcasm lives and thrives in the midst of universal wreck; its balls are enchanted and itself invulnerable, and it braves retaliations and reprisals because itself is a mere flash, a bodiless and magical nothing.
Wars which had raged for more than twenty years throughout Europe; which had spread blood and desolation from Cadiz to Moscow, and from Naples to Copenhagen; which had wasted the means of human enjoyment, and destroyed the instruments of social improvement; which threatened to diffuse among the European nations, the dissolute and ferocious habits of a predatory soldiery, at length, by one of those vicissitudes which bid defiance to the foresight of man, had been brought to a close, upon the whole, happy beyond all reasonable expectation, with no violent shock to national independence, with some tolerable compromise between the opinions of the age and reverence due to ancient institutions; with no too signal or mortifying triumph over the legitimate interests or avowable feelings of any numerous body of men, and, above all, without those retaliations against nations or parties, which beget new convulsions, often as horrible as those which they close, and perpetuate revenge and hatred and bloodshed, from age to age.
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