French Commercial Treaty. 1860

Mr. Gladstone at Leeds, October 8, 1881:—

I, for my part, look with the deepest interest upon the share that I had in concluding—I will not say so much in concluding, but in conducting on this side of the water, and within the walls of parliament as well as in administration—the proceedings which led to the memorable French treaty of 1860. It is quite true that that treaty did not produce the whole of the benefits that some too sanguine anticipations may possibly have expected from it, that it did not produce a universal smash of protective duties, as I wish it had, throughout the civilised world. But it did something. It enormously increased the trade between this country and France. It effectually checked and traversed in the year 1860 tendencies of a very different kind towards needless alarms and panics, and tendencies towards convulsions and confusion in Europe. There was no more powerful instrument for confining and controlling those wayward and angry spirits at that particular crisis, than the commercial treaty with France. It produced no inconsiderable effect for a number of years upon the legislation of various European countries, which tended less decisively than we could have desired, but still intelligibly and beneficially, in the direction of freedom of trade.