question which we shall probably
make no haste to discuss, and a right, of which no formal resignation
was ever required. This reserve has supplied matter for much clamour,
and, perhaps the English ministry would have been better pleased had the
declaration been without it. But when we have obtained all that was
asked, why should we complain that we have not more? When the possession
is conceded, where is the evil that the right, which that concession
supposes to be merely hypothetical, is referred to the Greek calends for
a future disquisition? Were the Switzers less free, or less secure,
because, after their defection from the house of Austria, they had never
been declared independent before the treaty of Westphalia? Is the king
of France less a sovereign, because the king of England partakes his
title?

If sovereignty implies undisputed right, scarce any prince is a
sovereign through his whole dominions; if sovereignty consists in this,
that no superiour is acknowledged, our king reigns at port Egmont with
sovereign authority. Almost every new-acquired territory is, in some
degree, controvertible, and till the controversy is decided, a term very
difficult to be fixed, all that can be had is real possession and actual
dominion.

This, surely, is a sufficient answer to the feudal gabble of a man, who
is every day lessening that splendour of character which once
illuminated the kingdom, then dazzled, and afterwards inflamed it; and
for whom it will be happy if the nation shall, at last, dismiss him to
nameless obscurity, with that equipoise of blame and praise which
Corneille allows to Richelieu, a man who, I think, had much of his
merit, and many of his faults:

"Chacun parle a son gre de ce grand cardinal;
Mais, pour moi, je n'en dirai rien:
Il m'a fait trop de bien pour en dire du mal;
Il m'a fait trop de mal pour en dire du bien."

To push advantages too far is neither generous nor just. Had we insisted
on a concession of antecedent right, it may not misbecome us, either as
moralists or politicians, to consider what Grimaldi could have answered.
We have already, he might say, granted you the whole effect of right,
and have not denied you the name. We have not said, that the right was
ours before this concession, but only that what right we had, is not, by
this concession, vacated. We have now, for more than two centuries,
ruled large tracts of the American continent, by a claim which, perhaps,
is v