vernments must, in a great measure, be
restrained by the will of the people, and by established laws; with them,
physical and political force are necessarily separate considerations:
they have not only to calculate what can be borne, but what will be
submitted to; and perhaps France is the first country that has been
compelled to an exertion of its whole strength, without regard to any
obstacle, natural, moral, or divine. It is for want of sufficiently
investigating and allowing for this moral and political latitudinarianism
of our enemies, that we are apt to be too precipitate in censuring the
conduct of the war; and, in our estimation of what has been done, we pay
too little regard to the principles by which we have been directed. An
honest man could scarcely imagine the means we have had to oppose, and an
Englishman still less conceive that they would have been submitted to:
for the same reason that the Romans had no law against parricide, till
experience had evinced the possibility of the crime.

In a war like the present, advantage is not altogether to be appreciated
by military superiority. If, as there is just ground for believing, our
external hostilities have averted an internal revolution, what we have
escaped is of infinitely more importance to us than what we could
acquire. Commerce and conquest, compared to this, are secondary objects;
and the preservation of our liberties and our constitution
is a more solid blessing than the commerce of both the Indies, or the
conquest of nations.

Should the following pages contribute to impress this salutary truth on
my countrymen, my utmost ambition will be gratified; persuaded, that a
sense of the miseries they have avoided, and of the happiness they enjoy,
will be their best incentive, whether they may have to oppose the arms of
the enemy in a continuance of the war, or their more dangerous
machinations on the restoration of peace.

I cannot conclude without noticing my obligations to the Gentleman whose
name is prefixed to these volumes; and I think it at the same time
incumbent on me to avow, that, in having assisted the author, he must not
be considered as sanctioning the literary imperfections of the work.
When the subject was first mentioned to him, he did me the justice of
supposing, that I was not likely to have written any thing, the general
tendency of which he might disapprove; and when, on perusing the
manuscript, he found it contain sentiments diss