up in every trading town in the island.[1] In the same spirit Anderson, the industrious and generally sensible historian of our commerce, earnestly expresses his hope that "this most just and beneficial convention," as it had remained unviolated to his day, may continue so for ever. But the Methuen Treaty is now looked back upon by most thinking persons as having been, if not at the moment when it was contracted, at least during the greater part of the time it was allowed to remain in force, an entanglement on the whole very prejudicial in its effects both commercially and politically. If it gained us the market of Portugal for our woollens, it excluded us from the vastly more wealthy and extensive market of France. In forcing upon us the wines of Portugal, it deprived us of those of France, although such used to be the preference given by our national taste to the latter, that it has been doubted if a single pipe of port was ever brought into this country previous to the Restoration, So great, however, was the change of sentiment and fashion gradually wrought by the wars and other events that had occurred since then, and finally fixed and made permanent by this treaty, that we soon nearly ceased to import or drink French wines altogether, and the belief in the superiority of port came to be held as much part and parcel of the creed of eery true-born and true-hearted Englishman as his belief in the eternal fitness of the corn-laws and the game-laws. An instance, as it has been remarked, perhaps the most remarkable in the history of commerce, of the course of trade and the taste and habits of a people being altered by a mere custom-house regulation! Worst of all, this treaty, by rivetting in the manner it did our connexion with Portugal, and binding us both politically and commercially to that country, without question materially contributed to keep us from ever forming any really cordial or intimate alliance with France, even when there was no war between us. Sufficient evidence of this was given in what happened at the peace of Utrecht, in 1713, when the proposed commercial treaty with France, almost the only part of the arrangements
- ↑ British Merchant, iii. 51.
