The merchants of Antwerp and the manufacturers of Ghent, had the good sense, probably purchased by experience, to recognize this incontrovertible principle, and foreseeing, clearly, the ruin of their pursuits in the results of the Repeal of the Union with Holland, they loudly protested against the proceedings of the revolutionists of 1830.[26] But, as “madness ruled the hour,” their protestations were all unheeded--they were overborne by numbers; and, as the patriots of Ireland, in rejecting the advantages held out to them by Great Britain in the celebrated “commercial propositions” of 1785, adopted as their watchword “_perish commerce_, but live the constitution;” so the patriots of Belgium, in their paroxysm of repeal, reproached their less frenzied fellow-countrymen with “allowing the profits on their cottons, or the prices of their iron, to outweigh the independence of their country!” The revolution was accomplished in their defiance, and the ruin of their trade was consummated by the same blow. With respect to the very branch of manufacture which has led to these observations, the printing of calicoes and woollens, M. Briavionne, an impartial historian, and so far as political inclination is concerned, strongly biassed in favour of the revolution, thus details its immediate effects upon it. After describing the rapid decline of the cotton trade in general, since 1830, he goes on to say, “In the department of printing, the results have not been more satisfactory; many of the leading establishments of Ghent, and of Brussels have been altogether abandoned, or their buildings dismantled and converted to other purposes, and their utensils and machinery sold off by public auction. Ghent, in 1829, possessed _fifteen_ print-works--in 1839 she had but _nine_; in Brussels, at the same time, and in Ardennes and Lierre, there were _eleven_ houses of the first rank, of these _six_ have since closed their accounts. Other establishments there are, it is true, that have sprung up in the interim, but, in the aggregate, the number is diminished. In prosperous years, the production of Belgium might have amounted, before the revolution, to about 400,000 pieces. Ghent, alone, produced 300,000 in 1829, but its entire production, at present, does not amount to 20,000, nor does that of the largest house in Belgium exceed 45,000 pieces.