marched to Paris in the next
campaign, and dictated peace to the _Grand Monarque_ in his gorgeous
halls of Versailles. It was short-sighted economy which entailed upon
the nations the costs and burdens of the next ten years of the War of
the Succession, as it did the still greater costs and burdens of the
Revolutionary War, after the still more decisive success of the Allies
in the summer of 1793, when the iron frontier of the Netherlands was
entirely broken through, and their advanced posts, without any force to
oppose them, were within an hundred and sixty miles of Paris.

This parsimony of the Allied governments, and their invincible
repugnance to the efforts and sacrifices which could alone bring, and
certainly would have brought, the war to an early and glorious issue, is
the cause of the subsequent conversion of the war into one of blockades
and sieges, and of its being transferred to Flanders, where its progress
was necessarily slow, and cost enormous, from the vast number of
strongholds which required to be reduced at every stage of the Allied
advance. It was said at the time, that in attacking Flanders in that
quarter, Marlborough took the bull by the horns; that France on the side
of the Rhine was far more vulnerable, and that the war was fixed in
Flanders, in order by protracting it to augment the profits of the
generals employed. Subsequent writers, not reflecting on the difference
of the circumstances, have observed the successful issue of the
invasions of France from Switzerland and the Upper Rhine in 1814, and
Flanders and the Lower Rhine in 1815, and concluded that a similar
result would have attended a like bold invasion under Marlborough and
Eugene. There never was a greater mistake. The great object of the war
was to wrest Flanders from France; when the lilied standard floated on
Brussels and Antwerp, the United Provinces were constantly in danger of
being swallowed up, and there was no security for the independence
either of England, Holland, or any of the German States. If Marlborough
and Eugene had had two hundred thousand effective men at their disposal,
as Wellington and Blucher had in 1815, or three hundred thousand, as
Schwartzenberg and Blucher had in 1814, they would doubtless have left
half their force behind them to blockade the fortresses, and with the
other half marched direct to Paris. But as they had never had more than
eighty thousand on their muster-rolls, and could not bring at any t