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The court of Inquisition in Spain had pronounced the whole nation of the Netherlands guilty of treason in the highest degree, Catholics and heterodox, loyalists and rebels, without distinction; the latter as having offended by overt acts, the former as having incurred equal guilt by their supineness.
This led to supineness and apathy as to public exertion; which would in the end ruin us: the disposition therefore must be changed, by forcing them to exert themselves; which would not be if Government did everything in civil war, they nothing: hence his wish for a volunteer force.
It was against the beginnings of this that my father had raised his standard, to be crushed thorough the supineness of his peers, who would not support him to save themselves from being consumed in the capacious maw of Rome.
The anathemas of posterity will alight upon the heads, not of those who have made a brave effort to better the evils that surround them, but of those who by their supineness helped to ensure such failure, or by their active opposition paralysed the efforts and discouraged the hearts of those who, but for them, might either have wholely succeeded in accomplishing what all admit to be so desirable, or might at least have been far nearer reaching their goal than was possible owing to the dog-in-the-manger obstructions of those who had neither the heart to help, nor the brains to devise, nor the courage to execute, what others might have dared and done!
And when she realised that the sacrifice was inevitable for her, when she inwardly knew that Arthur and the splendid rushing life of New York must be renounced in obedience to the double instinct of maternity and of repentance, she could not write. She felt timorous; she was unable to frame the sentences. And she procrastinated, ruled by her characteristic quality of supineness.
The supineness of the Protestants deepened in direct proportion to the feverish increase of activity on the part of Austria and the League. The mockery of negotiation in which nothing could be negotiated, the parade of conciliation when war of extermination was intended, continued on the part of Spain and Austria.
The offence has been universal, why then should not the punishment be the same? What the rebels have incurred by their actions the rest have incurred equally by their supineness. Whose fault is it but theirs that the former have so far succeeded? Why did they not promptly oppose their first attempts?
This force far exceeded Howe's; and it was no thanks to the British Government, but only to the admiral's sleepless vigilance and activity, seconded, as such qualities are apt to be, by at least an average degree of supineness on the part of his antagonist, that his scanty squadron was not surprised and overpowered in Delaware Bay, when Sir Henry Clinton evacuated Philadelphia to retreat upon New York.
The only period in which a real freedom of the press has existed in France were those years of the late King's reign immediately preceding the revolution; and either through the contempt, supineness, or worse motives, of those who should have checked it, it existed in too great a degree: so that deists and republicans were permitted to corrupt the people, and undermine the government without restraint.*
"So much the worse for you, sir," said Wolfe, sourly: "the man who has health and education can find no excuse for supineness or indifference to that form of legislation by which his country decays or prospers."
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