THAT France, by its mere geographical position, independently of every other circumstance, must affect every state of Europe; some of them immediately, all of them through mediums not very remote.

That the standing policy of this kingdom ever has been to watch over the external proceedings of France, (whatever form the interiour government of that kingdom might take,) and to prevent the extension of its dominion or its ruling influence, over other states.

That, there is nothing in the present internal state of things in France, which alters the national policy with regard to the exteriour relations of that country.

That there are, on the contrary, many things in the internal circumstances of France (and perhaps of this country too) which tend to fortify the principles of that fundamental policy; and which render the active assertion of those principles more pressing at this, than at any former time.

That, by a change effected in about three weeks, France has been able to penetrate into the heart of Germany; to make an absolute conquest of Savoy; to menace an immediate invasion of the Netherlands; and to awe and overbear the whole Helvetic body, which is in a most perilous situation. The great aristocratic cantons having, perhaps, as much or more to dread from their own people whom they arm, but do not choose or dare to employ, as from the foreign enemy, which against all public faith has butchered their troops, serving by treaty in France. To this picture, it is hardly necessary to add, the means by which France has been enabled to effect all this, namely the apparently entire destruction of one of the largest, and certainly the highest disciplined, and best appointed army ever seen, headed by the first military sovereign in Europe, with a captain under him of the greatest renown; and that without a blow given or received on any side. This state of things seems to me, even if it went no further, truly serious.

Circumstances have enabled France to do all this by land. On the other element she has begun to exert herself; and she must succeed in her designs, if enemies very different from those she has hitherto had to encounter, do not resist her.

She has fitted out a naval force, now actually at sea, by which she is enabled to give law to the whole Mediterranean. It is known as a fact (and if not so known, it is in the nature of things highly probable) that she proposes the ravage of the Ecclesiastical state, and the pillage of Rome, as her first object; that next she means to bombard Naples; to awe, to humble, and thus to command all Italy--to force it to a nominal neutrality, but a real dependence-to compel the Italian princes and republics to admit the free entrance of the French commerce, an open intercourse, and the sure concomitant, of that intercourse, the affiliated societies, in a manner similar to those she has established at Avignon, the Comtat, Chamberry, London, Manchester, &c., &c., which are so many colonies planted in all these countries, for extending the influence, and securing the dominion of the French republic.

That there never has been hitherto a period in which this kingdom would have suffered a French fleet to domineer in the Mediterranean, and to force ITALY to submit to such terms as France would think fit to impose-to say nothing of what has been done upon land in support of the same system. The great object for which we preserved Minorca, whilst we could keep it, and for which we still retain Gibraltar, both at a great expense, was, and is, to prevent the predominance of France over the Medi

terranean.

Thus far as to the certain and immediate effect of that armament upon the Italian states. The probable effect which that armament, and the other armaments preparing at Toulon, and other ports, may have upon SPAIN, on the side of the Mediterranean, is worthy of the serious attention of the British councils.

That it is most probable, we may say, in a manner certain, that if there should be a rupture between France and Spain, France will not confine her offensive piratical operations against Spain, to her efforts in the Mediterranean; on which side, however, she may grievously affect Spain, especially if she excites Morocco and Algiers, which undoubtedly she will, to fall upon that power.

That she will fit out armaments upon the ocean, by which the flota itself may be intercepted, and thus the treasures of all Europe, as well as the largest and surest resources of the Spanish monarchy, may be conveyed into France, and become powerful instruments for the annoyance of all her neighbours.

That she makes no secret of her designs. That, if the inward and outward bound flota should escape, still France has more and better means of dissevering many of the provinces in the West and East Indies, from the state of Spain, than Holland had when she succeeded in the same attempt. The French marine resembles not a little the old armaments of the Flibustiers, which about a century back, in conjunction with pirates of our nation, bright such calamities upon the Spanish colonies. They differ only in this, that the present piratical force is, out of all measure and comparison, greater; one hundred and fifty ships of the line, and frigates, being ready built, most of them in a manner new, and all applicable in different ways to that service. Privateers and Moorish corsairs possess not the best seamanship, and very little discipline, and indeed can make no figure in regular service; but in desperate adventures, and animated with a lust of plunder, they are truly formidable.

That the land forces of France are well adapted to concur with their marine in conjunct expeditions of this nature. In such expeditions, enterprise supplies the want of discipline, and perhaps more than supplies it. Both for this, and for other service, (however contemptible their military is, in other respects) one arm is extremely good, the engineering and artillery branch. The old officer corps in both being composed for the greater part of those who were not gentlemen, or gentlemen newly such, few have abandoned the service, and the men are veterans well enough disciplined, and very expert. In this piratical way they must make war with good advantage. They must do so, even on the side of Flanders, either offensively or defensively. This shews the difference between the policy of Louis the XIVth, who built a wall of brass about his kingdom; and that of Joseph the Second,

who premeditatedly uncovered his whole frontier.

That Spain, from the actual and unexpected prevalence of French power, is in a most perilous situation; perfectly dependent on the mercy of that republic. If Austria is broken, or even humbled, she will not dare to dispute its mandates.

In the present state of things, we have nothing at all to dread from the power of Spain by sea, or by land, or from any rivalry in

commerce.

That we have much to dread from the connections into which Spain may be forced.

From the circumstances of her territorial possessions, of her resources, and the whole of her civil and political state, we may be authorized safely, and with undoubted confidence to affirm, that

Spain is not a substantive power :

That she must lean on France, or on Eng

land.

That it is as much for the interest of Great Britain to prevent the predominancy of a French interest in that kingdom, as if Spain were a province of the crown of Great Britain, or a state actually dependent on it; full as much so as ever Portugal was reputed to be. This is a dependency of much greater value ; and its destruction, or its being carried to any other dependency, of much more serious misfortune.

One of these two things must happen. Either Spain must submit to circumstances, and take such conditions as France will impose; or she must engage in hostilities along with the emperour, and the king of Sardinia.

If Spain should be forced or awed into a treaty with the republic of France, she must open her ports and her commerce, as well as the land communication for the French labourers, who were accustomed annually to gather in the harvest in Spain. Indeed she must grant a free communication for travellers and traders through her whole country. In that case it is not conjectural, it is certain, the clubs will give law in the provinces; Bourgoing, or some such miscreant, will give law at Madrid.

In this England may acquiesce if she pleases; and France will conclude a triumphant peace with Spain under her absolute dependence, with a broad highway into that and into every state of Europe. She actually invites Great Britain to divide with her the spoils of the new world, and to make a partition of the Spanish monarchy. Clearly it is better to do so, than to suffer France to possess

these spoils, and that territory alone; which, without doubt, unresisted by us, she is altogether as able, as she is willing to do.

This plan is proposed by the French, in the way in which they propose all their plans; and in the only way in which indeed they can propose them, where there is no regular communication between his majesty and their republic. What they propose is a plan. It is a plan also to resist their predatory project. To remain quiet, and to suffer them to make use of a naval power before our face, so as to awe and bully Spain into a submissive peace, or to drive them into a ruinous war, without any measure on our part, I fear is no plan at all.

However, if the plan of co-operation which France desires, and which her affiliated societies here ardently wish and are constantly writing up, should not be adopted, and the war between the emperour and France should continue, I think it not at all likely that Spain should not be drawn into the quarrel. In that case, the neutrality of England will be a thing absolutely impossible. The time only is the subject of deliberation.

Then the question will be, whether we are to defer putting ourselves into a posture for the common defence, either by armament, or nego ciation, or both, until Spain is actually attacked; that is, whether our court will take a decided part for Spain, whilst Spain on her side, is yet in a condition to act with whatever degree of vigour she may have; whilst that vigour is yet unexhausted; or whether we shall connect ourselves with her broken fortunes; after she shall have received material blows, and when we shall have the whole slow length of that always unwieldy, and ill constructed, and then wounded and crippled body, to drag after us, rather than to aid us. Whilst our disposition is uncertain, Spain will not dare to put herself in such a state of defence as will make her hostility formidable, or her neutrality respectable.

If the decision is such as the solution of this question, (I take it to be the true question) conducts to no time is to be lost. But the measures, though prompt, ought not to be rash and indigested. They ought to be well chosen, well combined, and well pursued. The system must be general; but it must be executed, not successively, or with interruption, but all together, uno flatu, in one melting, and one mould.

sovereigns, full of secret heart burning, distrust and mutual accusation. Perhaps it may labour under worse evils. There is no vigour any where, except the distempered vigour and energy of France. That country has but too much life in it, when every thing around is so disposed to tameness and languor. The very vices of the French system at home tend to give force to foreign exertions. The generals must join the armies. They must lead them to enterprise, or they are likely to perish by their hands. Thus without law or government of her own, France gives law to all the governments in Europe.

This great mass of political matter must have been always under the views of thinkers for the public, whether they act in office or not. Among events, even the late calamitous events were in the book of contingency. Of course, they must have been in design, at least, provided for. A plan which takes in as many as possible of the states concerned, will rather tend to facilitate and simplify a rational scheme for preserving Spain, (if that were our sole, as I think it ought to be our principal object) than to delay and perplex it.

If we should think that a provident policy (perhaps now more than provident, urgent and necessary) should lead us to act, we cannot take measures as if nothing had been done. We must see the faults, if any, which have conducted to the present misfortunes; not for the sake of criticism, military or political, or from the common motives of blaming persons and counsels which have not been successful; but in order, if we can, to administer some remedy to these disasters, by the adoption of plans, more bottomed in principle, and built on with more descretion. Mistakes may be lessons.

For, in the first place, the united sovereigns very much injured their cause by admitting,

that they had nothing to do with the interiour arrangements of France; in contradiction to the whole tenour of the public law of Europe, and to the correspondent practice of all its states, from the time we have any history of them. In this particular, the two German courts seem to have as little consulted the publicists of Germany, as their own true interests, and those of all the sovereigns of Germany and Europe. This admission of a false principle in the law of nations brought them into an apparent contradiction, when they insisted on the re-establishment of the royal authority in France. But this confused and contradictory proceeding gave rise to a practical errour of worse consequences. It was derived from one and the same root; namely, that the person of the monarch of France was every thing; and the monarchy, and the intermediate orders of the state, by which the monarchy was upheld, were nothing. So that, if the united potentates had succeeded so far as to re-establish the authority of that king, and that he should be so ill-advised as to confirm all the confiscations, and to recognise as a lawful body, and to class himself with that rabble of murderers (and there wanted not persons who would so have advised him) there was nothing in the principle, or in the proceeding of the united powers, to prevent such an arrangement.

An expedition to free a brother sovereign from prison, was undoubtedly a generous and chivalrous undertaking. But the spirit and generosity would not have been less, if the policy had been more profound, and more comprehensive; that is, if it had taken in those considerations, and those persons, by whom, and, in some measure, for whom monarchy exists. This would become a bottom for a system of solid and permanent policy, and of operations conformable to that system.

The same fruitful errour was the cause why nothing was done to impress the people of France (so far as we can at all consider the inhabitants of France as a people) with an idea that the government was ever to be really French, or indeed any thing else than the nominal government of a monarch, a monarch absolute as over them, but whose sole support was to arise from foreign potentates, and who was to be kept on his throne by German forces; in short, that the king of France was to be a viceroy to the emperour and the king of Prussia.

It was the first time that foreign powers, interfering in the concerns of a nation divided into parties, have thought proper to trust wholly out of their councils, to postpone, to discoun

tenance, to reject, and in a manner to disgrace the party whom those powers came to support. The single person of a king cannot be a party. Woe to the king who is himself his party' The royal party with the king or his representatives at its head, is the royal cause. Foreign powers have hitherto chosen to give to such wars as this, the appearance of a civil contest, and not that of an hostile invasion. When the Spaniards, in the sixteenth century, sent aids to the chiefs of the league, they appeared as allies to that league, and to the imprisoned king (the cardinal de Bourbon) which the league had set up. When the Germans came to the aid of the Protestant princes, in the same series of civil wars, they came as allies. When the English came to the aid of Henry the Fourth, they appeared as allies at that prince. So did the French always when they intermeddled in the affairs of Germany. They came to aid a party there. When the English and Dutch intermeddled in the succession of Spain, they appeared as allies to the emperour Charles the Sixth. In short the policy has been as uniform as its principles were obvious to an ordinary eye.

According to all the old principles of law and policy, a regency ought to have been appointed by the French princes of the blood, nobles, and parliament, and then recognised by the combined powers. Fundamental law and ancient usage, as well as the clear reason of the thing, have always ordained it during an imprisonment of the king of France; as in the case of John, and of Francis the First. A monarchy ought not to be left a moment without a representative, having an interest in the succession. The orders of the state ought also to have been recognised in those among whom alone they existed in freedom, that is in the emigrants.

Thus, laying down a firm foundation on the recognition of the authorities of the kingdom of France, according to nature and its fundamental laws, and not according to the novel and inconsiderate principles of the usurpation which the united powers were come to extirpate, the king of Prussia and the emperour, as allies of the ancient kingdom of France, would have proceeded with dignity, first, to free the monarch, if possible; if not, to secure the monarchy as principal in the design; and in order to avoid all risks to that great object (the object of other ages than the present, and of other countries than that of France) they would of course avoid proceeding with more haste, or in a different manner than what the nature of such an object required.

Adopting this, the only rational systein, the rational mode of proceeding upon it, was to commence with an effective siege of Lisle, which the French generals must have seen taken before their faces, or be forced to fight. A plentiful country of friends, from whence to draw supplies, would have been behind them; a plentiful country of enemies, from whence to force supplies, would have been before them. Good towns were always within reach to deposit their hospitals and magazines. To march from Lisle to Paris, is through a less defensible country, and the distance is hardly so great as from Longwy to Paris.

If the old politic and military ideas had governed, the advance guard would have been formed of those who best knew the country, and had some interest in it, supported by some of the best light troops and light artillery, whilst the grand solid body of an army disciplined to perfection, proceeded leisurely, and in close connection with all its stores, provisions, and heavy cannon, to support the expedite body in case of misadventure, or to improve and complete its success.

The direct contrary of all this was put in practice. In consequence of the original sin of this project, the army of the French princes was every where thrown into the rear, and no part of it brought forward to the last moment, the time of the commencement of the secret negotiation. This naturally made an ill impression on the people, and furnished an occasion for the rebels at Paris to give out that the faithful subjects of the king were distrusted, despised, and abhorred by his allies. The march was directed through a skirt of Lorraine, and thence into a part of Champagne, the Duke of Brunswick leaving all the strongest places behind him; leaving also behind him, the strength of his artillery; and by this means giving a superiority to the French, in the only way in which the present France is able to oppose a German force.

In consequence of the adoption of those false politics, which turned every thing on the king's sole and single person, the whole plan of the war was reduced to nothing but a coup de main, in order to set that prince at liberty. If that failed every thing was to be given up.

The scheme of a coup de main, might (under favourable circumstances) be very fit for a partisan at the head of a light corps, by whose failure nothing material would be dedegnar. But for a royal army of eighty thousand men, headed by a king in

person, who was to march an hundred and fifty miles through an enemy's country-surely this was a plan unheard of.

Although this plan was not well chosen, and proceeded upon principles altogether ill judged and impolitic, the superiority of the military force might in a great degree have supplied the defects, and furnished a corrective to the mistakes. The greater probability was that the Duke of Brunswick would make his way to Paris, over the bellies of the rabble of drunkards, robbers, assassins, rioters, mutineers, and half-grown boys, under the illobeyed command of a theatrical, vapouring, reduced captain of cavalry, who opposed that great commander and great army. But-Diis aliter visum-He began to treat, the winds blew, and the rains beat, the house fell-because it was built upon sand-and great was the fall thereof. This march was not an exact copy of either of the two marches made by the Duke of Parma into France.

There is some secret. Sickness and weather may defeat an army pursuing a wrong plan; not that I believe the sickness to have been so great as it has been reported; but there is a great deal of superfluous humiliation in this business, a perfect prodigality of disgrace. Some advantage, real or imaginary, must compensate to a great sovereign, and to a great general, for so immense a loss of reputation. Longwy, situated as it is, might (one should think) be evacuated without a capitulation with a republic just proclaimed by the king of Prussia as an usurping and rebellious body. He was not far from Luxembourg. He might have taken away the obnoxious French in his flight. It does not appear to have been necessary that those magistrates who declared for their own king, on the faith, and under the immediate protection of the king of Prussia, should be delivered over to the gallows. It was not necessary that the emigrant nobility and gentry who served with the king of Prussia's army, under his immediate command, should be excluded from the cartel, and given up to be hanged as rebels. Never was so gross, and so cruel a breach of the public faith, not with an enemy, but with a friend. Dumourier has dropped very singular hints. spoken out more broadly. These accounts have never been contradicted. They tend to make an eternal rupture between the powers. The French have given out, that the Duke of Brunswick endeavoured to negociate some name and place for the captive king, among the murderers and proscribers of those who

Custine has