y sir George Byng, though it appeared by the instructions on the
table, that Spain had been already amply satisfied on that head; these
deductions reduced the balance to ninety-five thousand pounds; but the
king of Spain insisted upon the South-Sea company's paying immediately
the sum of sixty-eight thousand pounds, as a debt due to him on one head
of accounts, though in other articles his catholic majesty was indebted
to the company a million over and above the demand; the remainder to
be paid by Spain did not exceed seven-and-twenty thousand pounds, from
which she insisted upon deducting whatever she might have already given
in satisfaction for any of the British ships that had been taken; and
on being allowed the value of the St. Theresa, a Spanish ship which
had been seized in the port of Dublin. Mr. W. Pitt, with an energy
of argument and diction peculiar to himself, declaimed against the
convention, as insecure, unsatisfactory, and dishonourable to Great
Britain. He said the great national objection, the searching of British
ships, was not admitted, indeed, in the preamble; but stood there as the
reproach of the whole, as the strongest evidence of the fatal submission
that followed; 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 treaties, and from God and nature, declared and
asserted in the resolutions of parliament, were now referred to the
discussion of plenipotentiaries, upon one and the same equal footing.
This undoubted right was to be discussed and regulated; and if to
regulate be to prescribe rules, as in all construction it is, that
right was, by the express words of the convention, to be given up and
sacrificed; for it must cease to be any thing from the moment it is
submitted to limitation. Mr. Lyttelton, with equal force and fluency,
answered the speech of Mr. H. Walpole. "After he had used many arguments
to persuade us to peace," said he, "to any peace, good or bad, by
pointing out the dangers of a war, dangers I by no means allow to be
such as he represents them, he crowned all those terrors with the name
of the pretender. It would be the cause of the pretender. The pretender
would come. Is the honourable gentleman sensible what this language
imports? The people of England complain of the greatest wrongs and
indignities; they complain of the interruption, the destruction of their
trade; they think the p