menace an immediate invasion of the Netherlands, and to awe
and overbear the whole Helvetic body, which is in a most perilous
situation: the great aristocratic Cantons having, perhaps, as much or
more to dread from their own people, whom they arm, but do not choose
or dare to employ, as from the foreign enemy, which against all public
faith has butchered their troops serving by treaty in France. To this
picture it is hardly necessary to add the means by which Prance has been
enabled to effect all this,--namely, the apparently entire destruction
of one of the largest and certainly the highest disciplined and best
appointed army ever seen, headed by the first military sovereign in
Europe, with a captain under him of the greatest renown; and that
without a blow given or received on any side. This state of things seems
to me, even if it went no further, truly serious.

Circumstances have enabled France to do all this by _land_. On the other
element she has begun to exert herself; and she must succeed in her
designs, if enemies very different from those she has hitherto had to
encounter do not resist her.

She has fitted out a naval force, now actually at sea, by which she is
enabled to give law to the whole Mediterranean. It is known as a fact,
(and if not so known, it is in the nature of things highly probable,)
that she proposes the ravage of the Ecclesiastical State and the pillage
of Rome, as her first object; that nest she means to bombard Naples,--to
awe, to humble, and thus to command, all Italy,--to force it to a
nominal neutrality, but to a real dependence,--to compel the Italian
princes and republics to admit the free entrance of the French commerce,
an open intercourse, and, the sure concomitant of that intercourse, the
_affiliated societies_, in a manner similar to those she has established
at Avignon, the Comtat, Chambery, London, Manchester, &c, &c., which are
so many colonies planted in all these countries, for extending the
influence and securing the dominion of the French republic.

That there never has been hitherto a period in which this kingdom would
have suffered a French fleet to domineer in the Mediterranean, and to
force Italy to submit to such terms as France would think fit to
impose,--to say nothing of what has been done upon land in support of
the same system. The great object for which we preserved Minorca, whilst
we could keep it, and for which we still retain Gibraltar, both at a
great expe