Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/289

 most expressive epithets, arranged in similarly constructed periods, that Demosthenes hurled at Æschines, they would fall flat. A written letter, or a spoken speech, could not have the force, and effect of the words of Burke in the House of Commons, when called up by Fox's strong expression of admiration of the French Revolution, he said:—

"'He hated the old despotism of France and still more he hated the new: it was a plundering, ferocious, bloody, tyrannical democracy, without a single virtue to redeem its crimes; and so far from being, as his honourable friend had inadvertently said, worthy of imitation, he would spend his last breath and the last drop of his blood—he would quit his best friends and join his worst enemies—to oppose the least tittle of such a spirit or such an example in England.'"

As soon as the monarchy of Louis Philippe was succeeded by the short-lived republic, we have seen that, instead of an effusion of brotherly love together with liberty, equality, and universal philanthropy, one of the first schemes of the philanthropic republic was an invasion of England. Of course a railway projector who sees, or fancies he sees, enormous profits in a Channel Tunnel, shuts his eyes to all other consequences of his Tunnel. He can invest his profits in foreign securities, and leaving England to her fate, retire to Switzerland or America, rich