Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall, Vol. 3 of 5: 1772-1784 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall, Vol. 3 of 5: 1772-1784 To Pitt we are indebted for the second leading cause or principle of our resuscitation and recovery after losing America. His institution of the sinking fund of a million sterling in the spring of 1786, by its beneficial operation at that time on the public mind, on our national credit, commerce, and finances, might be said to revivify the state. The third source of our prosperity came from the East, where, without a metaphor, the sun of Britain rose as it set in the west. Since 1783, our acquisitions and possessions in that portion of the globe have been perpetually in a state of progression. All our losses sustained on the Delaware and on the Chesapeake have been more than compensated by our conquests on the Ganges or on the coasts of Coromandel and Malabar. The augmentations of territory in Oude, as well as in Corah and Dooab, including Delhi itself, the metropolis of the Mogul princes, the seizure of the Carnatic, the dissolution of the Mysore monarchy in the person of Tippoo Sultan, the re duction of Ceylon, of the Cape of Good Hope, and of the island of Mauritius, not to mention many inferior objects of attention; these prodigious accu mulations of commerce, power, and wealth have obliterated almost the recollections of the American struggle, and have closed all the wounds caused by that unfortunate war. An annual revenue of more than fifteen millions sterling raised in India, pay able not in paper but in specie, together with the trade of the East continually poured into our har bours. Have enabled us, after contending for nearly twenty years with the power of France, successively wielded by Robespierre and by Buonaparte, to ter minate the conflict in the most triumphant manner. I return to the progress of public affairs. However readily I admit that the treaty of 178 3 may be entitled to national approval, yet the mem bers of that Administration at the head of which Lord North had so long presided might never theless be fully justified in severely arraigning a peace which relinquished to America almost every point or object for the maintenance of which they had contended from 1775 down to 1782. They might justly feel indignant at the dereliction of the Loyalists,1 at the evacuation of New York and of Charlestown, together with the sacrifice of immense tracts of territory, extending through nearly twenty degrees of latitude and as many of longitude, in cluding Indian nations our allies, and containing incalculable commercial advantages. When Lord Sackville and Lord Stormont in the House of Peers compared such a treaty with past periods of our history, when they accused the Ministry of doing acts more culpable than even Lord Oxford and Lord Bolingbroke had committed at Utrecht, they might at least be considered as speaking with consistency and ln conformity to their avowed prin ciples. But I own that it seems more difficult to conceive and to explain upon what ground Fox could justly reprobate such preliminaries. He had loudly and repeatedly declaimed, through successive years, on the indispensable necessity of obtaining almost any peace, however comparatively bad it might be, as imperiously demanded by the fallen condition of Great Britain. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com