Now, if Mr. Cobden had continued his careful study of Hansard beyond 1796, he could not have failed to perceive that in and after 1796 the situation changed prodigiously. I think he could not have failed to be forcibly impressed by passages in the debates of both Houses of Parliament in 1800, particularly with the passage in Pitt's speech in the House of Commons, on the 3rd February, 1800.
"If we look," Pitt says, "at the catalogue of the breaches of treaty, of the acts of perfidy, which are precisely commensurate with the number of treaties made by the republic (for I have sought in vain for any one which it has made and which it has not broken); if we trace the history of them all, or if we select those which have been accompanied by the most atrocious cruelty, the name of Bonaparte will be found allied to more of them than that of any other in the history of the crimes and miseries of the last ten years."
Mr. Cobden's statement that England was the aggressor throughout the whole war, instead of only for the first three years, is contradicted point- blank by a French writer of authority. "The war," this writer says, "which England was waging against us, so iniquitous at the beginning, had become, thanks to our aggressive policy, a guarantee and a protection to small states."[1]
- ↑ Lamfrey, vol. ii., p. 81.
