h prompt, ought not to be rash and indigested. They ought
to be well chosen, well combined, and well pursued. The system must be
general; but it must be executed, not successively, or with
interruption, but all together, _uno flatu_, in one melting, and one
mould.

For this purpose we must put Europe before us, which plainly is, just
now, in all its parts, in a state of dismay, derangement, and confusion,
and, very possibly amongst all its sovereigns, full of secret
heartburning, distrust, and mutual accusation. Perhaps it may labor
under worse evils. There is no vigor anywhere, except the distempered
vigor and energy of France. That country has but too much life in it,
when everything around is so disposed to tameness and languor. The very
vices of the French system at home tend to give force to foreign
exertions. The generals _must_ join the armies. They must lead them to
enterprise, or they are likely to perish by their hands. Thus, without
law or government of her own, France gives law to all the governments in
Europe.

This great mass of political matter must have been always under the view
of thinkers for the public, whether they act in office or not. Amongst
events, even the late calamitous events were in the book of contingency.
Of course they must have been in design, at least, provided for. A plan
which takes in as many as possible of the states concerned will rather
tend to facilitate and simplify a rational scheme for preserving Spain
(if that were our sole, as I think it ought to be our principal object)
than to delay and perplex it.

If we should think that a provident policy (perhaps now more than
provident, urgent and necessary) should lead us to act, we cannot take
measures as if nothing had been done. We must see the faults, if any,
which have conducted to the present misfortunes: not for the sake of
criticism, military or political, or from the common motives of blaming
persons and counsels which have not been successful, but in order, if we
can, to administer some remedy to these disasters, by the adoption of
plans more bottomed in principle, and built on with more discretion.
Mistakes may be lessons.

There seem, indeed, to have been several mistakes in the political
principles on which the war was entered into, as well as in the plans
upon which it was conducted,--some of them very fundamental, and not
only visibly, but I may say palpably erroneous; and I think him to have
less than the discer