“However it may have happened, it is an excellent thing, and I do not like it the worse for its being so very triumphant a peace for France…The sense of humiliation in the Government here will be certainly lost in the extreme popularity of the measure…this rascally people are quite overjoyed at receiving from Ministers what, if they had dared to ask it, could not have been refused them at almost any period of the war. Will the Ministers have the impudence to say that there was any time (much less that when Bonaparte's offer was refused) when we might not have had terms as good? Bonaparte's triumph is now complete indeed, and, since there is to be no political liberty in the world, I really believe he is the fittest person to be the master.”

Letter to T. Maitland (1801), quoted in L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 169-170.
1800s

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Charles James Fox 42
British Whig statesman 1749–1806

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