es
were of this way of thinking, and that, when they evacuated all these
countries, it was a stratagem of war to decoy France into ruin,--or
that, if in a treaty we should surrender them forever into the hands of
the usurpation, (the lease the author supposes,) it is a master-stroke
of policy to effect the destruction of a formidable rival, and to render
her no longer an object of jealousy and alarm. This, I assure the
author, will infinitely facilitate the treaty. The usurpers will catch
at this bait, without minding the hook which this crafty angler for the
Jacobin gudgeons of the new Directory has so dexterously placed under
it.

Every symptom of the exacerbation of the public malady is, with him, (as
with the Doctor in Moliere,) a happy prognostic of recovery.--Flanders
gone. _Tant mieux_.--Holland subdued. Charming!--Spain beaten, and all
the hither Germany conquered. Bravo! Better and better still!--But they
will retain all their conquests on a treaty. Best of all!--What a
delightful thing it is to have a gay physician, who sees all things, as
the French express it, _couleur de rose!_ What an escape we have had,
that we and our allies were not the conquerors! By these conquests,
previous to her utter destruction, she is "wholly to lose that
preponderance which she held in the scale of the European powers." Bless
me! this new system of France, after changing all other laws, reverses
the law of gravitation. By throwing in weight after weight, her scale
rises, and will by-and-by kick the beam. Certainly there is one sense in
which she loses her preponderance: that is, she is no longer
preponderant against the countries she has conquered. They are part of
herself. But I beg the author to keep his eyes fixed on the scales for a
moment longer, and then to tell me, in downright earnest, whether he
sees hitherto any signs of her losing preponderance by an augmentation
of weight and power. Has she lost her preponderance over Spain by her
influence in Spain? Are there any signs that the conquest of Savoy and
Nice begins to lessen her preponderance over Switzerland and the Italian
States,--or that the Canton of Berne, Genoa, and Tuscany, for example,
have taken arms against her,--or that Sardinia is more adverse than
ever to a treacherous pacification? Was it in the last week of October
that the German States showed that Jacobin. France was losing her
preponderance? Did the King of Prussia, when he delivered into her safe
c