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 original and solemn pledge which is now referred to as the proof of the just and moderate disposition of the French Republic.  Yet even this offer was not sufficient to procure peace, or to arrest the progress of France in her defensive operations against other offending countries.  From the pages, however, of the learned gentleman’s pamphlet (which, after all its editions, is now fresher in his memory than in that of any other person in this House, or in the country), he is furnished with an argument on the result of the negotiation, on which he appears confidently to rely.  He maintains, that the single point on which the negotiation was broken off, was the question of the possession of the Austrian Netherlands; and that it is, therefore, on that ground only, that the war has, since that time, been continued.  When this subject was before under discussion, I stated, and I shall state again (notwithstanding the learned gentleman’s accusation of my having endeavoured to shift the question from its true point), that the question then at issue was not whether the Netherlands should, in fact, be restored,