expelled summarily
from Madrid, and we have had an Ambassador driven almost with ignominy
from Washington. We have blockaded Athens for a claim which was known
to be false. We have quarrelled with Naples, for we chose to give
advice to Naples, which was not received in the submissive spirit
expected from her, and our Minister was therefore withdrawn. Not three
years ago, too, we seized a considerable kingdom in India, with which
our Government had but recently entered into the most solemn treaty,
which every lawyer in England and in Europe, I believe, would consider
binding before God and the world. We deposed its monarch, we committed
a great immorality and a great crime, and we have reaped an almost
instantaneous retribution in the most gigantic and sanguinary revolt
which probably any nation ever made against its conquerors. Within the
last few years we have had two wars with a great Empire, which we are
told contains at least one-third of the whole human race. The first
war was called, and appropriately called, the Opium War. No man, I
believe, with a spark of morality in his composition, no man who
cares anything for the opinion of his fellow countrymen, has dared to
justify that war. The war which has just been concluded, if it has
been concluded, had its origin in the first war; for the enormities
committed in the first war are the foundation of the implacable
hostility which it is said the inhabitants of Canton bear to all
persons connected with the English name. Yet though we have these
troubles in India--a vast country which we do not know how to
govern--and a war with China--a country with which, though everybody
else can remain at peace, we cannot--such is the inveterate habit of
conquest, such is the insatiable lust of territory, such is, in my
view, the depraved, unhappy state of opinion of the country on this
subject, that there are not a few persons, Chambers of Commerce to
wit, in different parts of the kingdom (though I am glad to say it has
not been so with the Chamber of Commerce at Birmingham), who have been
urging our Government to take possession of a province of the
greatest island in the Eastern Seas, a possession which must at once
necessitate increased estimates and increased taxation, and which
would probably lead us into merciless and disgraceful wars with the
half-savage tribes who inhabit that island.

I will not dwell upon that question. The gentleman who is principally
concerned in it