person who has
a right to give any opinion at all about politics can think that the
question, whether two of the greatest empires in the world should be
virtually united so as to form one irresistible mass, was a question
with which other states had nothing to do, a question about which
other states could not take counsel together without being guilty of
impertinence as gross as that of a busybody in private life who should
insist on being allowed to dictate the wills of other people. If the
whole Spanish monarchy should pass to the House of Bourbon, it was
highly probable that in a few years England would cease to be great and
free, and that Holland would be a mere province of France. Such a danger
England and Holland might lawfully have averted by war; and it would be
absurd to say that a danger which may be lawfully averted by war
cannot lawfully be averted by peaceable means. If nations are so deeply
interested in a question that they would be justified in resorting to
arms for the purpose of settling it, they must surely be sufficiently
interested in it to be justified in resorting to amicable arrangements
for the purpose of settling it. Yet, strange to say, a multitude of
writers who have warmly praised the English and Dutch governments for
waging a long and bloody war in order to prevent the question of the
Spanish succession from being settled in a manner prejudicial to them,
have severely blamed those governments for trying to attain the same end
without the shedding of a drop of blood, without the addition of a crown
to the taxation of any country in Christendom, and without a moment's
interruption of the trade of the world by land or by sea.

It has been said to have been unjust that three states should have
combined to divide a fourth state without its own consent; and, in
recent times, the partition of the Spanish monarchy which was meditated
in 1698 has been compared to the greatest political crime which stains
the history of modern Europe, the partition of Poland. But those who
hold such language cannot have well considered the nature of the Spanish
monarchy in the seventeenth century. That monarchy was not a body
pervaded by one principle of vitality and sensation. It was an
assemblage of distinct bodies, none of which had any strong sympathy
with the rest, and some of which had a positive antipathy for each
other. The partition planned at Loo was therefore the very opposite of
the partition of Poland. T