urging them to make, I
should have been as little disposed as anybody could to withhold
any practicable facilities of that description; but to the extent
to which they steadily continue to point, I own I feel myself too
little satisfied as to the equity of their claim upon us, and as to
the probability of their acting fairly and manfully up to the great
exertions which they ask from us, to entertain much disposition
towards those demands.

They dwell certainly upon the difference which they state between
loan and subsidy, and wish to prove to us that their offer of
security upon the revenues of the Low Countries should, at least by
us (who always insist on those territories remaining in the House
of Austria), be accepted as a good and ample mortgage for the
repayment of the sums which they want for this year and the next;
but if it is true that they do not feel interested at heart in
these possessions, or if they think us so earnest in our wishes on
this subject, that they may safely throw the whole weight of it
upon us, their offer of a _hypotheque_ on those possessions takes a
much more suspicious character; nor is it, perhaps, an unreasonable
jealousy on my part to apprehend that they may wish you to have a
mortgage of two millions on the Netherlands, as an inducement to
you hereafter to give up some of your French acquisitions in the
West Indies, in order to recover for them a country, in which you
will have a larger pecuniary stake, added to the ordinary course of
political observations.

Much at least of Thugut's conversation would seem to tally with
this view of the matter. It is observable that he perpetually
recurs to its being a settled point, that _de facon ou d'autre_ the
Netherlands will be secured to Austria at the peace, and yet he
never seems (in his view of the military operations to be pursued)
to consider them as a main object of defence, and is so little
disposed to make them so, that he expresses much reluctance at the
idea proposed, of engaging Austria to furnish so large an army, _to
act in that country_, which he thinks might be better employed
elsewhere. Add to this, his remarking that England might be
satisfied by the irrecoverable detriment done to the navy and
commerce of France, and his contrasting the difference