And one always pities a poor Nation, in such case;--as the very Destinies rather do, and judge it more mercifully.

Nay, the poor bewildered Nation may, among its brain-phantasms, have something of reality and sanity inarticulately stirring it withal.

It may have a real ordinance of Heaven to accomplish on those terms:--and IF so, it will sometimes, in the most chaotic circuitous ways, through endless hazards, at a hundred or a hundred thousand times the natural expense, ultimately get it done! This was the case of the poor English in those Wars.
"They were Wars extraneous to England little less than to France; neither Nation had real business in them; and they seem to us now a very mad object on the part of both.

But they were not gratuitously gone into, on the part of England; far from that.

England undertook them, with its big heart very sorrowful, strange spectralities bewildering it; and managed them (as men do sleep-walking) with a gloomy solidity of purpose, with a heavy-laden energy, and, on the whole, with a depth of stupidity, which were very great.