Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/299

This page has been validated.
Free Trade and the Channel Tunnel.
291

—"When shall we be proof against the transparent appeal to our vanity involved in the 'liberties of Europe' argument?" He then proceeds to say that, "we never had forty thousand British troops engaged in one field of battle on the Continent during the whole war;" and infers thence that we could have had nothing to do with putting down Bonaparte; in fact, that the Russian winter did the business, just as the Irish famine did the


    slaughter them like sheep. When a Goverment publishes what the French Government put forth in its Enquête Parlementaire of 1849-50, I do not think we are guilty of infringing the comity of nations in calling this insolence. There is a monarchical insolence and a republican insolence. This is republican insolence, and I think it exceeds monarchical insolence in offensiveness. If Russia were to come under republican government, a Russian republic would probably be a worse neighbour than a Russian Czar. If a French republic of 1870 fancies it is to run the course of the French republic of seventy years before, with a military genius of the highest order to fight its battles, the French Republic of 1883 may find itself very much mistaken. A Channel Tunnel to bring us nearer to such a neighbour may be agreeable to the high philanthropic aspirations of the advanced thinker of the Peace Party, who proposed to receive the invaders with such an effusion of hospitality and brotherly love, as could not fail to convert the Zouave into the friend of the family. Brotherly love! and universal philanthropy! From the oldest record to that of yesterday,