It was not of that sort of war that I was amongst the least considerable, but amongst the most zealous advisers; and it is not by the sort of peace now talked of that I wish it concluded. It would answer no great purpose to enter into the particular errors of the war. The whole has been but one error. It was but nominally a war of alliance. As the combined powers pursued it, there was nothing to hold an alliance together. There could be no tie of honor in a society for pillage. There could be no tie of a common interest, where the object did not offer such a division amongst the parties as could well give them a warm concern in the gains of each other, or could, indeed, form such a body of equivalents as might make one of them willing to abandon a separate object of his ambition for the gratification of any other member of the alliance. The partition of Poland offered an object of spoil in which the parties might agree. They were circumjacent, and each might take a portion convenient to his own territory. They might dispute about the value of their several shares, but the contiguity to each of the demandants always furnished the means of an adjustment. Though hereafter the world will have cause to rue this iniquitous measure, and they most who were most concerned in it, for the moment there was wherewithal in the object to preserve peace amongst confederates in wrong. But the spoil of France did not afford the same facilities for accommodation. What might satisfy the House of Austria in a Flemish frontier afforded no equivalent to tempt the cupidity of the King of Prussia. What might be desired by Great Britain in the West Indies must be coldly and remotely, if at all, felt as an interest at Vienna, and it would be felt as something worse than a negative interest at Madrid. Austria, long possessed with unwise and dangerous designs on Italy, could not be very much in earnest about the conservation of the old patrimony of the House of Savoy; and Sardinia, who owed to an Italian force all her means of shutting out France from Italy, of which she has been supposed to hold the key, would not purchase the means of strength upon one side by yielding it on the other: she would not readily give the possession of Novara for the hope of Savoy. No Continental power was willing to lose any of its Continental objects for the increase of the naval power of Great Britain; and Great Britain would not give up any of the objects she sought for, as the means of an increase to her naval power, to further their aggrandizement.
The moment this war came to be considered as a war merely of profit, the actual circumstances are such that it never could become really a war of alliance. Nor can the peace be a peace of alliance, until things are put upon their right bottom.
I don't find it denied, that, when a treaty is entered into for peace, a demand will be made on the Regicides to surrender a great part of their conquests on the Continent. 'Will they, in the present state of the war, make that surrender without an equivalent? This Continental cession must of course be made in favor of that party in the alliance that has suffered losses. That party has nothing to furnish towards an equivalent. What equivalent, for instance, has Holland to offer, who has lost her all? What equivalent can come from the Emperor, every part of whose territories contiguous to France is already within the pale of the Regicide dominion? What equivalent has Sardinia to offer for Savoy, and for Nice,—I may say, for her whole being? What has she taken from the faction of France? She has lost very near her all, and she has gained nothing. What equivalent has Spain to give? Alas! she has already paid for her own ransom the fund of equivalent,—and a dreadful equivalent it is, to England and to herself. But I put Spain out of the question: she is a province of the Jacobin empire, and she must make peace or war according to the orders she receives from the Directory of Assassins. In effect and substance, her crown is a fief of Regicide.
Whence, then, can the compensation be demanded? Undoubtedly from that power which alone has made some conquests. That power is England. Will the Allies, then, give away their ancient patrimony, that England may keep islands in the West Indies? They never can protract the war in good earnest for that object; nor can they act in concert with us, in our refusal to grant anything towards their redemption. In that case we are thus situated: either we must give Europe, bound hand and foot, to France, or we must quit the West Indies without any one object, great or small, towards indemnity and security. I repeat it, without any advantage whatever: because, supposing that our conquest could comprise all that France ever possessed in the tropical America, it never can amount in any fair estimation to a fair equivalent for Holland, for the Austrian Netherlands, for the Lower Germany,—that is, for the whole ancient kingdom or circle of Burgundy, now under the yoke of Regicide, to say nothing of almost all Italy, under the same barbarous domination. If we treat in the present situation of things, we have nothing in our hands that can redeem Europe. Nor is the Emperor, as I have observed, more rich in the fund of equivalents.
If we look to our stock in the Eastern world, our most valuable and systematic acquisitions are made in that quarter. Is it from France they are made? France has but one or two contemptible factories, subsisting by the offal of the private fortunes of English individuals to support them, in any part of India. I look on the taking of the Cape of Good Hope as the securing of a post of great moment; it does honor to those who planned and to those who executed that enterprise; but I speak of it always as comparatively good,—as good as anything can be in a scheme of war that repels us from a centre, and employs all our forces where nothing can be finally decisive. But giving, as I freely give, every possible credit to these Eastern conquests, I ask one question:—On whom are they made? It is evident, that, if we can keep our Eastern conquests, we keep them not at the expense of France, but at the expense of Holland, our ally,—of Holland, the immediate cause of the war, the nation whom we had undertaken to protect, and not of the Republic which it was our business to destroy. If we return the African and the Asiatic conquests, we put them into the hands of a nominal state (to that Holland is reduced) unable to retain them, and which will virtually leave them under the direction of France. If we withhold them, Holland declines still more as a state. She loses so much carrying trade, and that means of keeping up the small degree of naval power she holds: for which policy alone, and not for any commercial gain, she maintains the Cape, or any settlement beyond it. In that case, resentment, faction, and even necessity, will throw her more and more into the power of the new, mischievous Republic. But on the probable state of Holland I shall say more, when in this correspondence I come to talk over with you the state in which any sort of Jacobin peace will leave all Europe.
So far as to the East Indies.
As to the West Indies,—indeed, as to either, if we look for matter of exchange in order to ransom Europe,—it is easy to show that we have taken a terribly roundabout road. I cannot conceive, even if, for the sake of holding conquests there, we should refuse to redeem Holland, and the Austrian Netherlands, and the hither Germany, that Spain, merely as she is Spain, (and forgetting that the Regicide ambassador governs at Madrid,) will see with perfect satisfaction Great Britain sole mistress of the isles. In truth, it appears to me, that, when we come to balance our account, we shall find in the proposed peace only the pure, simple, and unendowed charms of Jacobin amity. We shall have the satisfaction of knowing that no blood or treasure has been spared by the Allies for support of the Regicide system. We shall reflect at leisure on one great truth: that it was ten times more easy totally to destroy the system itself than, when established, it would be to reduce its power,—and that this republic, most formidable abroad, was of all things the weakest at home; that her frontier was terrible, her interior feeble; that it was matter of choice to attack her where she is invincible, and to spare her where she was ready to dissolve by her own internal disorders. We shall reflect that our plan was good neither for offence nor defence.
It would not be at all difficult to prove that an army of an hundred thousand men, horse, foot, and artillery, might have been employed against the enemy, on the very soil which he has usurped, at a far less expense than has been squandered away upon tropical adventures. In these adventures it was not an enemy we had to vanquish, but a cemetery to conquer. In carrying on the war in the West Indies, the hostile sword is merciful, the country in which we engage is the dreadful enemy. There the European conqueror finds a cruel defeat in the very fruits of his success. Every advantage is but a new demand on England for recruits to the West Indian grave. In a West India war, the Regicides have for their troops a race of fierce barbarians, to whom the poisoned air, in which our youth inhale certain death, is salubrity and life. To them the climate is the surest and most faithful of allies.
Had we carried on the war on the side of France which looks towards the Channel or the Atlantic, we should have attacked our enemy on his weak and unarmed side. We should not have to reckon on the loss of a man who did not fall in battle. We should have an ally in the heart of the country, who to our hundred thousand would at one time have added eighty thousand men at the least, and all animated by principle, by enthusiasm, and by vengeance: motives which secured them to the cause in a very different manner from some of those allies whom we subsidized with millions. This ally, (or rather, this principal in the war,) by the confession of the Regicide himself, was more formidable to him than all his other foes united. Warring there, we should have led our arms to the capital of Wrong. Defeated, we could not fail (proper precautions taken) of a sure retreat. Stationary, and only supporting the royalists, an impenetrable barrier, an impregnable rampart, would have been formed between the enemy and his naval power. We are probably the only nation who have declined to act against an enemy when it might have been done in his own country, and who, having an armed, a powerful, and a long victorious ally in that country, declined all effectual coöperation, and suffered him to perish for want of support. On the plan of a war in France, every advantage that our allies might obtain would be doubled in its effect. Disasters on the one side might have a fair chance of being compensated by victories on the other. Had we brought the main of our force to bear upon that quarter, all the operations of the British and Imperial crowns would have been combined. The war would have had system, correspondence, and a certain direction. But as the war has been pursued, the operations of the two crowns have not the smallest degree of mutual bearing or relation.
Had acquisitions in the West Indies been our object, on success in France, everything reasonable in those remote parts might be demanded with decorum and justice and a sure effect. Well might we call for a recompense in America for those services to which Europe owed its safety. Having abandoned this obvious policy connected with principle, we have seen the Regicide power taking the reverse course, and making real conquests in the West Indies, to which all our dear-bought advantages (if we could hold them) are mean and contemptible. The noblest island within the tropics, worth all that we possess put together, is by the vassal Spaniard delivered into her hands. The island of Hispaniola (of which we have but one poor corner, by a slippery hold) is perhaps equal to England in extent, and in fertility is far superior. The part possessed by Spain of that great island, made for the seat and centre of a tropical empire, was not improved, to be sure, as the French division had been, before it was systematically destroyed by the Cannibal Republic; but it is not only the far larger, but the far more salubrious and more fertile part.