in America. That stroke finishes
all. I should be glad to see our suppliant negotiator in the act of
putting his feather to the ear of the directory, to make it unclinch
the fist; and, by his tickling, to charm that rich prize out of the
iron gripe of robbery and ambition! It does not require much sagacity
to discern that no power wholly baffled and defeated in Europe can
flatter itself with conquests in the West Indies. In that state of
things it can neither keep nor hold. No! It cannot even long make war
if the grand bank and deposit of its force is at all in the West
Indies. But here a scene opens to my view too important to pass by,
perhaps too critical to touch. Is it possible that it should not
present itself in all its relations to a mind habituated to consider
either war or peace on a large scale, or as one whole?

Unfortunately other ideas have prevailed. A remote, an expensive, a
murderous, and, in the end, an unproductive adventure, carried on upon
ideas of mercantile knight-errantry, without any of the generous
wildness of Quixotism, is considered as sound, solid sense; and a war
in a wholesome climate, a war at our door, a war directly on the
enemy, a war in the heart of his country, a war in concert with an
internal ally, and in combination with the external, is regarded as
folly and romance.

My dear friend, I hold it impossible that these considerations should
have escaped the statesmen on both sides of the water, and on both
sides of the House of Commons. How a question of peace can be
discussed without having them in view, I cannot imagine. If you or
others see a way out of these difficulties I am happy. I see, indeed,
a fund from whence equivalents will be proposed. I see it. But I
cannot just now touch it. It is a question of high moment. It opens
another Iliad of woes to Europe.

Such is the time proposed for making a _common political peace_, to
which no one circumstance is propitious. As to the grand principle of
the peace, it is left, as if by common consent, wholly out of the
question.

Viewing things in this light, I have frequently sunk into a degree of
despondency and dejection hardly to be described; yet out of the
profoundest depths of this despair, an impulse, which I have in vain
endeavoured to resist, has urged me to raise one feeble cry against
this unfortunate coalition which is formed at home, in order to make a
coalition with France, subversive of the whole ancient order of the