Great Britain -- Description and travel; Great Britain -- Rural conditions
One newspaper says that Mr. Huskisson is gone to Paris, and thinks it
_likely_ that he will endeavour to "inculcate in the mind of the
Bourbons wise principles of _free trade_!" What the devil next! Persuade
them, I suppose, that it is for _their good_ that English goods should
be admitted into France and into St. Domingo with little or no duty?
Persuade them to make a treaty of commerce with him; and, in short,
persuade them to make _France help to pay the interest of our debt and
dead-weight_, lest our system of paper should go to pieces, and lest
that should be followed by _a radical reform_, which reform would be
injurious to "the monarchical principle!" This newspaper politician
does, however, _think_ that the Bourbons will be "too dull" to
comprehend these "_enlightened_ and _liberal_" notions; and I think so
too. I think the Bourbons, or, rather, those who will speak for them,
will say: "No thank you. You contracted your debt without our
participation; you made your _dead-weight_ for your own purposes; the
seizure of our museums and the loss of our frontier towns followed your
victory of Waterloo, though we were 'your Allies' at the time; you made
us pay an enormous Tribute after that battle, and kept possession of
part of France till we had paid it; you _wished_, the other day, to keep
us out of Spain, and you, Mr. Huskisson, in a speech at Liverpool,
called our deliverance of the King of Spain an _unjust and unprincipled
act of aggression_, while Mr. Canning _prayed to God_ that we might not
succeed. No thank you, Mr. Huskisson, no. No coaxing, Sir: we saw, then,
too clearly the _advantage we derived from your having a debt and a dead
weight_ to wish to assist in relieving you from either. 'Monarchical
principle' here, or 'monarchical principle' there, we know that your
mill-stone debt is our best security. We like to have your wishes, your
prayers, and your abuse against us, rather than your _subsidies_ and
your _fleets_: and so farewell, Mr. Huskisson: if you like, the English
may drink French wine; but whether they do or not, the French shall not
wear your rotten cottons. And as a last word, how did you maintain the
'monarchical principle,' the 'paternal principle,' or as Castlereagh
called it, the 'social system,' when you called that an unjust and
unprincipled aggression which put an end to the bargain by which the
convents and other church-property of Spain were to be transferred to
the Jews and Jobbers of London? Bon jour, Monsieur Huskisson, ci-devant
membre et orateur du club de quatre vingt neuf!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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