Page:Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy, 1738-1914 - ed. Jones - 1914.djvu/113

 a temporary sacrifice as reasonable men would willingly make to obtain so essential an object.

The honourable and learned gentleman, however, has supported his reasoning on this part of the subject by an argument which he undoubtedly considers as unanswerable—a reference to what would be his own conduct in similar circumstances; and he tells us that every landed proprietor in France must support the present order of things in that country from the same motive that he and every proprietor of three per cent stock would join in the defence of the constitution of Great Britain. I must do the learned gentleman the justice to believe that the habits of his profession must supply him with better and nobler motives for defending a constitution which he has had so much occasion to study and examine, than any which he can derive from the value of his proportion (however large) of three per cents, even supposing them to continue to increase in price as rapidly as they have done during the last three years, in which the security and prosperity of the country has been established by following a system directly opposed to the counsels of the learned gentleman and his friends.

The learned gentleman's illustration, however, though it fails with respect to himself, is happily and aptly applied to the state of France; and let us see what inference it furnishes with respect to the probable attachment of moneyed men to the continuance of the revolutionary system, as well as with respect to the general state of public credit in that country. I do not, indeed, know that there exists precisely any fund of three per cents in France, to furnish a test for the patriotism and