9, 1914)
[By kind permission of Mr. Lloyd George and Messrs.
Methuen & Co., Ltd.]

WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF CHATHAM

MARCH 8, 1738

THE CONVENTION WITH SPAIN

You have been moved to vote an humble address of thanks to His
Majesty, for a measure which (I will appeal to gentlemen's
conversation in the world) is odious throughout the kingdom. Such
thanks are only due to the fatal influence that framed it, as are due
for that low, unallied condition abroad, which is now made a plea
for this convention. To what are gentlemen reduced in support of it?
First, try a little to defend it upon its own merits; if that is
not tenable, throw out general terrors--the House of Bourbon is
united--who knows the consequence of a war? Sir, Spain knows the
consequence of a war in America; whoever gains, it must prove fatal to
her; she knows it, and must therefore avoid it; but she knows England
does not dare to make it; and what is a delay, which is all this
magnified convention is sometimes called, to produce? Can it produce
such conjunctures as those you lost, while you were giving kingdoms
to Spain, and all to bring her back again to that great branch of the
House of Bourbon which is now thrown out to you with so much terror?
If this union be formidable, are we to delay only till it becomes more
formidable, by being carried farther into execution, and more strongly
cemented? But be it what it will, is this any longer a nation, or what
is an English Parliament, if, with more ships in your harbours than in
all the navies of Europe, with above two millions of people in
your American colonies, you will bear to hear of the expediency of
receiving from Spain an insecure, unsatisfactory, dishonourable
convention? Sir, I call it no more than it has been proved in this
debate; it carries fallacy, or downright subjection, in almost every
line. It has been laid open and exposed in so many strong and glaring
lights, that I can pretend to add nothing to the conviction and
indignation it has raised.

Sir, as to the great national objection--the searching your
ships--that favourite word, as it was called, is not omitted, indeed,
in the preamble to the convention, but it stands there as the
reproach, of the whole--as the strongest evidence of the fatal
submission that follows. On the part of Spain, an usurpation, an
inhuman tyranny, claimed and exercised over the American seas; on the
part of England, an undoubted right, by