world; and such ought to have been the conduct of the powers when the reduction of Savoy made them coalesce. The right honorable gentleman may know more of the secret particulars of their overrunning Savoy than I do; but certainly, as they have come to my knowledge, it was a most Bourbon-like act. A great and justly celebrated historian, I mean Mr. Hume, a writer certainly estimable in many particulars, but who is a childish lover of princes, talks of Louis XIV. in very magnificent terms. But he says of him, that, though he managed his enterprises with great skill and bravery, he was unfortunate in this, _that he never got a good and fair pretence for war_. This he reckons among his misfortunes. Can we say more of the republican French? In seizing on Savoy I think they made use of the words “_convénances morales et physiques_.” These were her reasons. A most Bourbon-like phrase. And I therefore contend that as we never scrupled to treat with the princes of the House of Bourbon on account of their rapacity, their thirst of conquest, their violation of treaties, their perfidy, and their restless spirit, so, I contend, we ought not to refuse to treat with their republican imitators. Ministers could not pretend ignorance of the unprincipled manner in which the French had seized on Savoy. The Sardinian minister complained of the aggression, and yet no stir was made about it. The courts of Europe stood by and saw the outrage; and our ministers saw it. The right honorable gentleman will in vain, therefore, exert his power to persuade me of the interest he takes in the preservation of the rights of nations, since, at the moment when an interference might have been made with effect, no step was taken, no remonstrance made, no mediation negotiated, to stop the career of conquest. All the pretended and hypocritical sensibility “for the rights of nations, and for social order,” with which we have since been stunned, can not impose upon those who will take the trouble to look back to the period when this sensibility ought to have roused us into seasonable exertion. At that time, however, the right honorable gentleman makes it his boast that he was prevented, by a sense of neutrality, from taking any measures of precaution on the subject. I do not give the right honorable gentleman much credit for his spirit of neutrality on the occasion. It flowed from the sense of the country at the time, the great majority of which was clearly and decidedly against all interruptions being given to the French in their desire of regulating their own internal government.