t was made, I maintain, that the
whole ground on which that argument is founded cannot be tolerated. In
the name of the laws of nature and nations, in the name of everything
that is sacred and honourable, I demur to that plea, and I tell that
honourable and learned gentleman that he would do well to look again
into the law of nations, before he ventures to come to this House,
to give the sanction of his authority to so dreadful and execrable a
system.

[Mr. Erskine here said across the House, that he had never maintained
such a proposition.]

I certainly understood this to be distinctly the tenor of the learned
gentleman's argument; but as he tells me he did not use it, I take it
for granted he did not intend to use it: I rejoice that he did
not: but, at least, then I have a right to expect that the learned
gentleman should now transfer to the French note some of the
indignation which he has hitherto lavished upon the declarations of
this country. This principle, which the learned gentleman disclaims,
the French note avows: and I contend, without the fear of
contradiction, it is the principle upon which France has uniformly
acted. But while the learned gentleman disclaims this proposition, he
certainly will admit, that he himself asserted, and maintained in the
whole course of his argument, that the pressure of the war upon France
imposed upon her the necessity of those exertions which produced
most of the enormities of the revolution, and most of the enormities
practised against the other countries of Europe. The House will
recollect, that, in the year 1796, when all these horrors in Italy
were beginning, which are the strongest illustrations of the general
character of the French revolution, we had begun that negotiation
to which the learned gentleman has referred. England then possessed
numerous conquests; England, though not having at that time had the
advantage of three of her most splendid victories, England, even
then, appeared undisputed mistress of the sea; England, having then
engrossed the whole wealth of the colonial world; England, having
lost nothing of its original possessions; England then comes forward,
proposing general peace, and offering--what? offering the surrender
of all that it had acquired, in order to obtain--what? not the
dismemberment, not the partition of ancient France, but the return of
a part of those conquests, no one of which could be retained but in
direct contradiction to that orig