Daily Inspiration Quote by George Canning

Trade policy rarely sounds this nakedly petty. Canning’s couplet isn’t just a jab at Dutch merchants for being stingy; it’s a miniature manifesto for British mercantilism dressed up as common sense. The “fault of the Dutch” is framed as a moral failing - they “offer too little and ask too much” - which quietly converts a commercial rivalry into a character indictment. Once your competitor is greedy by nature, punishing them stops looking like strategy and starts looking like hygiene.

Then comes the sly turn: the French, “with equal advantage content,” are described as satisfyingly pliable. “Content” does double duty, meaning both economically acceptable and politically convenient. In the post-Napoleonic world Canning helped manage, Britain’s goal wasn’t free trade as an ideal; it was leverage. Tariffs were less about abstract economics than about disciplining markets and rewarding alignment.

The punchline - “we clap on Dutch bottoms just twenty per cent” - is where the statesman’s intent becomes unmistakable. “Bottoms” is literal shipping (the hulls of Dutch vessels) and a wink of bodily humor, making the tariff sound like a deserved spanking rather than a coercive tax. Twenty percent reads like moderation, almost a gentlemanly correction, but the subtext is muscle: Britain can skim value off Dutch trade routes because it commands the seas and sets the rules.

Canning’s rhetoric works because it makes power feel like propriety. It’s a tariff marketed as fairness, rivalry sold as moral accounting, and empire smuggled in as punchline.