27.  In support of his motion, he declaimed in the most virulent strain, even beyond any of his former invectives, against every power with whom we were then, and are now, acting against France.  In the moral forum some of these powers certainly deserve all the ill he said of them; but the political effect aimed at, evidently, was to turn our indignation from France, with whom we were at war, upon Russia, or Prussia, or Austria, or Sardinia, or all of them together.  In consequence of his knowledge that we could not effectually do without them, and his resolution that we should not act with them, he proposed, that, having, as he asserted, “obtained the only avowed object of the war (the evacuation of Holland) we ought to conclude an instant peace.”

28.  Mr. Fox could not be ignorant of the mistaken basis upon which his motion was grounded.  He was not ignorant, that, though the attempt of Dumouriez on Holland, (so very near succeeding,) and the navigation of the Scheldt, (a part of the same piece,) were among the immediate causes, they were by no means the only causes, alleged for Parliament’s taking that offence at the proceedings of France, for which the Jacobins were so prompt in declaring war upon this kingdom.  Other full as weighty causes had been alleged:  they were,—­1.  The general overbearing and desperate ambition of that faction; 2.  Their actual attacks on every nation in Europe; 3.  Their usurpation of territories in the Empire with the governments of which they had no pretence of quarrel; 4.  Their perpetual and irrevocable consolidation with their own dominions of every territory of the Netherlands, of Germany, and of Italy, of which they got a temporary possession; 5.  The mischiefs attending the prevalence of their system, which would make the success of their ambitious designs a new and peculiar species of calamity in the world; 6.  Their formal, public decrees, particularly those of the 19th of November and 15th and 25th of December; 7.  Their notorious attempts to undermine the Constitution of this country; 8.  Their public reception of deputations of traitors for that direct purpose; 9.  Their murder of their sovereign, declared by most of the members of the Convention, who spoke with their vote, (without a disavowal from any,) to be perpetrated as an example to all kings and a precedent for all subjects to follow.  All these, and not the Scheldt alone, or the invasion of Holland, were urged by the minister, and by Mr. Windham, by myself, and by others who spoke in those debates, as causes for bringing France to a sense of her wrong in the war which she declared against us.  Mr. Fox well knew that not one man argued for the necessity of a vigorous resistance to France, who did not state the war as being for the very existence of the social order here, and in every part of Europe,—­who did not state his opinion that this war was not at all a foreign war of empire, but as much for our liberties, properties, laws, and religion, and even more so, than any we had ever been engaged in.  This was the war which, according to Mr. Fox and Mr. Gurney, we were to abandon before the enemy had felt in the slightest degree the impression of our arms.