text:  Pitt was imperturbable; but there was not one among his colleagues who did not feel the hopelessness of calling for public reliance when in every successive debate we heard the leader of Opposition contemptuously asking what answer we had to the Gazette crowded with bankruptcy? to the resolutions of great bodies of the people denouncing the war? or to the deadly evidence of its effects in the bulletin which he held in his hand announcing some new defeat of our allies; some new treaty of submission; some new barter of provinces for the precarious existence of foreign thrones? In all my recollections of public life this was the period of the deepest perplexity