lities 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 aggrandisement.

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 do not 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 favour 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 dominions? 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