Locke and Sydenham; With Other Occasional Papers (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1858 edition. Excerpt: ...natural enemies of the French, ' there are necessarily selected, during the French war, say thirty ablebodied men. Drumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, and another build, another hammer or stitch, and the weakest can stand under thirty pounds avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are felected, all dressed in red, and shipped away at the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain, and fed and scourged there till wanted. And now to that same spot in the south of Spain are thirty French handicraf-tsmen from a French Drumdrudge, in like manner wending; till at length, after infinite effort and expense, the two parties actually meet, and thirty stand confronting thirty, each with a gun in his hand. straightway the word ' sire' is given, and they blow the souIs out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk, useful workmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the devil is, not the smallest; they lived far enough apart, nay, in so wide a world, there was even unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton Their governors had fallen out, and instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make their poor blockheads shoot. In that fiction of the English Smollet, it is true, the final cessation of war is perhaps prophetically shadowed forth when the two ' natural enemies' (France and Britain) in person take each a tobacco-pipe filled with brimstone, light the same, and smoke in each other's faces till one or both give..