Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/279

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Free Trade and the Channel Tunnel.
271

the superior of most men. But did that prevent him from being a public robber, whose acts of perfidy were commensurate with the number of treaties made by him? And, further, Sir William Molesworth says that the French "possess a constitutional government; that the love of peace, and the determination to preserve peace, have given to the King of the French, a constant majority in the Chambers." I was always under the impression that it was something of a different kind, rather concerned with patronage than peace, that gave Louis Philippe his majority in the Chambers; and as for the love of peace which Mr. Cobden and Sir William Molesworth set forth as so violent a passion among Frenchmen, I will quote presently from the French Enquête Parlementaire of November, 1849, the opinion of a French Vice-Admiral, who appears to an ordinary observer to have rather more of the love of war than of the love of peace, of which Sir William Molesworth attributes to him a love so ardent.

Mr. Cobden appears to consider the letter of the Duke of Wellington to Sir John Burgoyne on the National Defences of Great Britain, as the production of a man whose nervous system had been