Our record shows no calamity comparable to the greatest of
these, if we set aside the Indian horrors so terribly avenged at the
moment, but by their teaching resulting ultimately in good rather
than evil.
Besides the furious strife and convulsion that have rent other lands,
how inconsiderable seem the disturbances that disfigure our home
annals, how peaceful the changes in our constitutional system,
brought about orderly in due form of law, how purely domestic the
saddest events of our internal history! We wept with our Sovereign in
her early widowhood, a bereavement to the people as well as to the
Queen; we trembled with her when the shadow of death hung over her
eldest son, rejoicing with her when it passed away; we shared her
grief for two other of her children, inheritors of the noble
qualities of their father, and for the doom which took from us one
whom we had loved to call "our future king"; we deplored the other
bereavements which darkened her advancing years; we have lamented
great men taken from us, some, like the conqueror of Waterloo, "the
great world-victor's victor," in the fulness of age and honour,
others with their glorious work seemingly half done, their career of
usefulness mysteriously cut short; we have shuddered when the hateful
terrorism, traditional pest of Ireland through centuries of wrong and
outrage, has once and again lifted its head among ourselves; we have
suffered--though far less severely than other lands, even than some
under our own rule--from plague, pestilence, and famine, from dearth
of work and food.
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