The Sparrowhawk Companion by Edward Cline

what passes for oratory today. Most modern politicians cannot speak two complete sentences together from memory without the aid of a written text, extensive notes, or a teleprompter. Most of them do not—in fact, cannot—write their own speeches, but rely on hired speechwriters, whose efforts doubtless are endlessly rewritten to conform to what a speaker wishes his auditors to believe he is saying or what he thinks they wish to hear. Further, their speeches are largely ragouts of “messages”; that is, of unappetizing stews of refried bromides, lubricious principles, and populist claptrap, all calculated to appeal to men’s emotions, not to their minds. Modern speechmaking is a monument to vapidity. I cannot recall the last time I heard a living American politician declaim on individual rights, freedom of speech, or the sanctity of private property.
    So, it was with great relief and pleasure that I could retreat to a time when these matters were a common subject of speechmaking.
    * * *
    Sir Henoch Pannell, member for Canovan, and dedicated enemy of the
American colonies, gives his maiden speech in Parliament, 1755.
    “It has been heard in this assembly on a number of occasions that the colonials are unhappy with the means with which this coming war is to be paid for and prosecuted. Oh, how they grumble, those rustical Harries! The means, as we all know, and as they rightly fear, must in the end come out of their own rough, bucolic purses. To my mind, that is but a logical expectation. Yet, you would think, to judge by some of the protestationsthat have reached our ears, that the Crown was proposing to engage the French over Madagascar for possession of that pirates’ nest, and obliging them to pay the costs of an adventure far removed from their concerns. But—the threat is to their own lives, their own homes and families, their fields, their shops, their seaports, their own livelihoods, and they higgle and haggle over the burden of expense! A very
strange
state of mind, indeed! I am merely a messenger, sirs. Do not entertain thoughts of murdering me for what I have said, or am about to say.
    “And, no doubt, many of these same said colonials will pay with their own skins, too. However, if the reports of officers in His Majesty’s service in the colonies in the past are to be warranted—and I don’t for a minute doubt the substance of their complaints or the truth of their anecdotes—not many colonial skins will be cut by French bayonet or bruised by Indian war club. The colonials, it is commonly said, are uniformly lazy, undisciplined, contentious, quarrelsome, niggardly, presumptuous, and cowardly, amongst themselves as well as amongst our brave officers and troops! It is thought by many in high and middling places that if the colonial auxiliaries under General Braddock’s command had been more forthright and daring with their musketry in that fatal wood near the Ohio, that brave and enterprising officer would be sitting in this very chamber today to receive our thanks, and not buried in some ignominious patch of mud in the wilderness. But—the colonial temperament is a matter of record.
Our
colonials! Scullions all, the sons of convicts, whores, and malcontents! From the greedy gentry of the northern parts, to the posturing macaronis of the southern, every man Jack of them unmindful of the fact that he is a
colonial
, a mere plant nurtured in exotic soil for the benefit of this nation! Oh! How
ungrateful
, our Britannic flora!
    “Yes!
Ungrateful
, their noggins emboldened by a few leagues of water! Now, it is thought here in this hall, and in London, and in all of England, and even in Wales and Scotland, that His Majesty’s government—we here, within these ancient walls,and
they
across the way, in
Lords
are the corporate lawgiver
and
defender of our excellent constitution. Why, the most ignoble knife-grinder and blasphemous fishwife would be able to tell you that! Yet, proposals for new laws, or for the