all moral
reflections, than to be at the expense of building navies, filling them
with men, and then hauling them into the ocean, to try which can
sink each other fastest. Peace, which costs nothing, is attended with
infinitely more advantage, than any victory with all its expense. But
this, though it best answers the purpose of nations, does not that
of court governments, whose habited policy is pretence for taxation,
places, and offices.

It is, I think, also certain, that the above confederated powers,
together with that of the United States of America, can propose with
effect, to Spain, the independence of South America, and the opening
those countries of immense extent and wealth to the general commerce of
the world, as North America now is.

With how much more glory, and advantage to itself, does a nation act,
when it exerts its powers to rescue the world from bondage, and to
create itself friends, than when it employs those powers to increase
ruin, desolation, and misery. The horrid scene that is now acting by the
English government in the East-Indies, is fit only to be told of Goths
and Vandals, who, destitute of principle, robbed and tortured the world
they were incapable of enjoying.

The opening of South America would produce an immense field of commerce,
and a ready money market for manufactures, which the eastern world does
not. The East is already a country full of manufactures, the importation
of which is not only an injury to the manufactures of England, but a
drain upon its specie. The balance against England by this trade is
regularly upwards of half a million annually sent out in the East-India
ships in silver; and this is the reason, together with German intrigue,
and German subsidies, that there is so little silver in England.

But any war is harvest to such governments, however ruinous it may be
to a nation. It serves to keep up deceitful expectations which prevent
people from looking into the defects and abuses of government. It is the
lo here! and the lo there! that amuses and cheats the multitude.

Never did so great an opportunity offer itself to England, and to all
Europe, as is produced by the two Revolutions of America and France. By
the former, freedom has a national champion in the western world; and by
the latter, in Europe. When another nation shall join France, despotism
and bad government will scarcely dare to appear. To use a trite
expression, the iron is becoming hot all over E