I am aware, indeed, that with respect to either of the treaties which I have quoted, it is possible to raise a question—whether variation of circumstances or change of times may not have somewhat relaxed its obligations. The treaty of 1661, it might be said, was so loose and prodigal in the wording—it is so unreasonable, so wholly out of nature, that any one country should be expected to defend another, “_even as itself_”; such stipulations are of so exaggerated a character, as to resemble effusions of feeling, rather than enunciations of deliberate compact. Again, with respect to the treaty of 1703, if the case rested on that treaty alone, a question might be raised, whether or not, when one of the contracting parties—Holland—had since so changed her relations with Portugal, as to consider her obligations under the treaty of 1703 as obsolete—whether or not, I say, under such circumstances, the obligation on the remaining party be not likewise void. I should not hesitate to answer both these objections in the negative. But without entering into such a controversy, it is sufficient for me to say that the time and place for taking such objections was at the Congress at Vienna. Then and there it was that if you, indeed, considered these treaties as obsolete, you ought frankly and fearlessly to have declared them to be so. But then and there, with your eyes open, and in the face of all modern Europe, you proclaimed anew the ancient treaties of alliance, friendship, and guarantee, “so long subsisting between the Crowns of Great Britain and Portugal,” as still “acknowledged by Great Britain,” and still “of full force and effect.” It is not, however, on specific articles alone—it is not so much, perhaps, on either of these ancient treaties, taken separately, as it is on the spirit and understanding of the whole body of treaties, of which the essence is concentrated and preserved in the treaty of Vienna, that we acknowledge in Portugal a right to look to Great Britain as her ally and defender. This, sir, being the state, morally and politically, of our obligations toward Portugal, it is obvious that when Portugal, in apprehension of the coming storm, called on Great Britain for assistance, the only hesitation on our part could be—not whether that assistance was due, supposing the occasion for demanding it to arise, but simply whether that occasion—in other words, whether the _casus fœderis_ had arisen.