Page:Life of William Shelburne (vol 1).djvu/397

Rh "The experience of all ages shows us that facts alone are to be rested upon between nations, the professions of Ministers being in all times found dangerous and not to be relied upon. Your Excellency is sufficiently apprized of His Majesty's desire to maintain the public tranquillity, of the several proofs he has given of it upon different occasions, never declining to give the utmost satisfaction, where it has been desired with cordiality and with openness. If there is any instance which will bear a contrary surmise, your Excellency is aware that it has been owing not to His Majesty, but to others declining to come to that open and friendly adjustment of everything depending, which was professed to be their wish. On the other hand your Excellency must be sensible how different the conduct of the Court of France has been in this very instance. It is in vain for the French Minister to pretend that he was not apprized of the manner in which their getting possession of Corsica would be received here, for your Excellency warned him of it, at the time that he solemnly declared to you that no resolution whatever had been taken as to the Treaty in question. He afterwards assured your Excellency that the Convention would soon be made public even in the Paris Gazette, and that there was nothing but what had been done before by Vienna and France in furnishing the Genoese with auxiliaries to recover their own possessions; notwithstanding which a cession plainly appears on the face of the Treaty, and is so clearly the intention, that the Minister himself, in a subsequent conversation, did not scruple to avow, 'that he believed the Genoese would never be able to reimburse them, and even never intended it.' Add to this the alliances which France has since the late peace cultivated with the greatest assiduity, the several preparations which have been continually making both by France and Spain with a view to war sooner or later, the dry and unfriendly conduct of the latter, which is too well known to act under the influence of France, not to mention the several secret intelligences, to which your Excellency is no stranger, of the endeavours of France to keep alive