Page:Karl Marx - The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston - ed. Eleanor Marx Aveling (1899).pdf/39

 Rh greater than that of France in effecting a marriage between the Duke of Montpensier and the Spanish Infanta—the one being a violation of the Treaty of Vienna, and the other of the Treaty of Utrecht. Now, the Treaty of Utrecht, renewed in 1782, was definitely abrogated by the Anti-Jacobin war; and had, therefore, ever since 1792, ceased to be operative. There was no man in the House better informed of this circumstance than the noble lord, as he had himself stated to the House on the occasion of the debates on the blockades of Mexico and Buenos Ayres, that

We have not yet done with the exertions of the noble lord in resisting the encroachments of Russia upon Poland.

There once existed a curious convention between England, Holland, and Russia—the so-called Russian Dutch loan. During the Anti-Jacobin war the Czar, Alexander, contracted a loan with Messrs. Hope & Co., at Amsterdam; and after the fall of Bonaparte, the King of the Netherlands, "desirous to make a suitable return to the Allied Powers for having delivered his territory," and for having annexed to it Belgium, to which he had no claim whatever, engaged himself—the other Powers waiving their common claims in favour of Russia, then in great need of money—to execute a convention with Russia agreeing to pay her by successive instalments the twenty-five million florins she owed to Messrs. Hope & Co. England, in order to cover the robbery she had committed on Holland, of her colonies at the Cape of Good Hope, Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice, became a party to this convention, and bound herself to pay a certain proportion of the subsidies granted to Russia. This stipulation became part of the Treaty of Vienna, but upon the express condition "that the payment should cease if the union between Holland and Belgium were broken prior to the liquidation of the debt." When Belgium separated herself from Holland by a revolution, the latter, of course,