L're THE EDITOR Or THE " SPECTATOR. " ] Sin,—The quotation from
Sydney Smith in the Spectator of December 10th reminds me of another passage by that writer equally applicable to present-day England in the "Letters to Peter Plymley " (Letter V.) :— " You cannot imagine, you say, that England will ever be conquered and ruined ; for no other reason that I can find, but because it seems so very odd that it should be ruined and conquered. Alas ! so reasoned in their time the Austrian, Russian and Prussian Plymleys. But the English are brave ; so were all these nations. You might get together 100,000 men individually brave ; but without generals capable of commanding such a machine, it would be as useless as a first-rate man-of-war manned by Oxford clergymen or Parisian shopkeepers. I do not say this in disparagement of English officers : they have had no means of acquiring experience ; but I do say it to create alarm ; for we do not appear to me to be half alarmed enough, do not entertain that sense of our danger which leads to the most obvious means of defence. As to the spirit of the peasantry in making a gallant defence behind hedgerows and through plate-racks and hencoops, highly as I think of their bravery, I do not think there is any nation in Europe so likely to be struck with panic as the English, and this from their total unacquaintance with the Science of War. Old wheat and beans blazing for 20 miles round: cart mares shot: sows of Lord Somerville's breed running wild over the country : the minister of the parish so sorely wounded in the hinder parts ; all those scenes of war an Austrian or a Russian has seen three or four times over; but it is now three centuries since an English pig has fallen in fair battle on English ground, or a farm house been rifled, or a clergy- man's wife been subjected to any other proposals of love than the
connubial endearments of her sleek and orthodox spouse Every man must feel he has a country, and that there is an urgent and pressing cause why he should expose himself to death."
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