t is possible that she might submit to lose
her commerce and her colonies: her security she never can abandon. If,
contrary to all expectations, under such a disgraced and impotent
government, any energy should remain in that country, she will make
every effort to recover her security, which will involve Europe for a
century in war and blood. What has it cost to France to make that
frontier? What will it cost to recover it? Austria thinks that without a
frontier she cannot secure the _Netherlands_. But without her frontier
France cannot secure _herself_. Austria has been, however, secure for an
hundred years in those very Netherlands, and has never been dispossessed
of them by the chance of war without a moral certainty of receiving them
again on the restoration of peace. Her late dangers have arisen not from
the power or ambition of the king of France. They arose from her own ill
policy, which dismantled all her towns, and discontented all her
subjects by Jacobinical innovations. She dismantles her own towns, and
then says, "Give me the frontier of France!" But let us depend upon it,
whatever tends, under the name of security, to aggrandize Austria, will
discontent and alarm Prussia. Such a length of frontier on the side of
France, separated from itself, and separated from the mass of the
Austrian country, will be weak, unless connected at the expense of the
Elector of Bavaria (the Elector Palatine) and other lesser princes, or
by such exchanges as will again convulse the Empire.

Take it the other way, and let us suppose that France so broken in
spirit as to be content to remain naked and defenceless by sea and by
land. Is such a country no prey? Have other nations no views? Is Poland
the only country of which it is worth while to make a partition? We
cannot be so childish as to imagine that ambition is local, and that no
others can be infected with it but those who rule within certain
parallels of latitude and longitude. In this way I hold war equally
certain. But I can conceive that both these principles may operate:
ambition on the part of Austria to cut more and more from France; and
French impatience under her degraded and unsafe condition. In such a
contest will the other powers stand by? Will not Prussia call for
indemnity, as well as Austria and England? Is she satisfied with her
gains in Poland? By no means. Germany must pay; or we shall infallibly
see Prussia leagued with France and Spain, and possibly with o