Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/331

312 government, as a result of confidence in its own strength, of its ambition, and its ascendancy in America, raises pretensions to a part of Florida in order to show itself afterward more exacting toward Spain. The Emperor will feel that justice requires him not to recognize such pretensions. If he should assist by his good offices an arrangement between the United States and Spain, he would wish good faith and impartiality for its base.


 * "Only in case the United States should desist from their unjust pretensions to West Florida, and return to the forms of civility and decorum,—from which in their relations with each other governments should never depart,—could the Emperor allow himself to second at the Court of Madrid the project of acquisition of the two Floridas. Then perhaps the Emperor might think that this country is less suited to Spain now that it is separated from her other colonies, and that it is better suited to the United States because a part of their Western rivers cross the Floridas before flowing into the Gulf of Mexico; and finally, that Spain may see in her actual situation, and in the expenses entailed on her by the war, some motives for listening to the offers of the Federal government."

Talleyrand had great need to insist on "the forms of civility and decorum from which governments should never depart"! Perhaps Talleyrand already foresaw the scene, said to have occurred some two years later, when Napoleon violently denounced him to his face as "a silk stocking stuffed with filth," and the minister coldly retaliated by the famous phrase, "Pity that so great a man should be so ill brought up!" The task of teaching manners to