,--and
by this means giving a superiority to the French, in the only way in
which the present France is able to oppose a German force.

In consequence of the adoption of those false politics, which turned
everything on the king's sole and single person, the whole plan of the
war was reduced to nothing but a _coup de main_, in order to set that
prince at liberty. If that failed, everything was to be given up.

The scheme of a _coup de main_ might (under favorable circumstances) be
very fit for a partisan at the head of a light corps, by whose failure
nothing material would be deranged. But for a royal army of eighty
thousand men, headed by a king in person, who was to march an hundred
and fifty miles through an enemy's country,--surely, this was a plan
unheard of.

Although this plan was not well chosen, and proceeded upon principles
altogether ill-judged and impolitic, the superiority of the military
force might in a great degree have supplied the defects, and furnished a
corrective to the mistakes. The greater probability was, that the Duke
of Brunswick would make his way to Paris over the bellies of the rabble
of drunkards, robbers, assassins, rioters, mutineers, and half-grown
boys, under the ill-obeyed command of a theatrical, vaporing, reduced
captain of cavalry, who opposed that great commander and great army.
But--_Diis aliter visum_. He began to treat,--the winds blew and the
rains beat,--the house fell, because it was built upon sand,--and great
was the fall thereof. This march was not an exact copy of either of the
two marches made by the Duke of Parma into France.

There is some secret. Sickness and weather may defeat an army pursuing a
wrong plan: not that I believe the sickness to have been so great as it
has been reported; but there is a great deal of superfluous humiliation
in this business, a perfect prodigality of disgrace. Some advantage,
real or imaginary, must compensate to a great sovereign and to a great
general for so immense a loss of reputation. Longwy, situated as it is,
might (one should think) be evacuated without a capitulation with a
republic just proclaimed by the king of Prussia as an usurping and
rebellious body. He was not far from Luxembourg. He might have taken
away the obnoxious French in his flight. It does not appear to have been
necessary that those magistrates who declared for their own king, on the
faith and under the immediate protection of the king of Prussia, should
be de