tary apparatus has been
employed; but it has been worse than uselessly employed, through the
false policy of the war. The operations of the field suffered by the
errors of the cabinet. If the same spirit continues when peace is
made, the peace will fix and perpetuate all the errors of the war;
because it will be made upon the same false principle. What has been
lost in the field, in the field may be regained. An arrangement of
peace in its nature is a permanent settlement; it is the effect of
counsel and deliberation, and not of fortuitous events. If built upon
a basis fundamentally erroneous, it can only be retrieved by some of
those unforeseen dispensations, which the all-wise but mysterious
Governor of the world sometimes interposes, to snatch nations from
ruin. It would not be pious error, but mad and impious presumption,
for any one to trust in an unknown order of dispensations, in defiance
of the rules of prudence, which are formed upon the known march of the
ordinary providence of God.

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 _honour_, 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 the 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 faci