I have said no record has been left to show that Napoleon ever had any intention of occupying the ports of Holstein or of using the Danish fleet for the invasion of Great Britain and Ireland.  Members of Parliament in the House of Commons and members of the House of Lords proved beyond question that ministers’ statements, taking the dates into account, were entirely erroneous.  Canning defended the sending of the expedition, which was natural, as he was one of the principal advocates of it.  But the House would stand none of his tricks of evasion or repudiation.  He, like some more modern ministers, ventured on the hazardous plan of deceiving Parliament, and, as was said at the time, setting fair dealing at defiance.  Canning, like all tricksters, read extracts from documents, authentic and otherwise, to prove that Denmark was hostile to Britain, but when a demand was made for their inspection, he impudently refused to allow the very documents he had based his case of justification on to be scrutinized, and in consequence no other conclusion could be arrived at than that he was unscrupulously misleading the country.  In fact, the Government’s case was so bad it would not bear the light of God’s day!

I venture to say that Mr. Fox knew more of the character, political intricacies, and ambitions of the French race than any public man or writer of history of his own or in subsequent years.  He always based his conclusions on a sound logical point.  He was an accurate thinker, who refused to form his judgments on light, faulty and inaccurate newspaper paragraphs about what was going on around him.  He was opposed to Pitt and his supporters’ policy of carrying on war with France.  He wanted peace, but they wanted the Bourbons, because the Bourbon section in France and the old autocracy in his own and other kingly countries were opposed to the new ruler the masses in France had chosen.  He ridiculed the folly of our mental nonentities for “making such a fuss about acknowledging the new Emperor.  May not the people give their own Magistrate the name they choose?” he asks.  “On what logical grounds did we claim the right to revoke by the force of arms the selection by the French people of a ruler on whom they wished to bestow the title of Emperor?” Fox poured lavishly his withering contempt on those miscreants who arrogantly claimed the right to be consulted (for that is practically what their war policy amounted to) as to who the French should put on the throne and what his title should be.  They had acknowledged Napoleon in the capacity of First Consul, but they shuddered at the consequences to the human race of having an Emperor sprung upon them whose glory was putting kingship into obscurity.  Besides, an Emperor who combined humble origin with democratic genius and ambition created by the Revolution was a challenge to the legitimacy of the Divine Right of Kings and a reversal of the order of ages.  George III raged at Pitt for including Fox in his Ministry