sail of the line, which had been so long
watched, and could not have escaped, was to be delivered up to us; the
ships to be detained till six months after the end of the war, and the
sailors sent home by us, and to be by us protected in their voyage
through the Swedish fleet, and to be at liberty to fight immediately
against our ally, the king of Sweden. Secondly, that a French army of
more than twenty thousand men, already beaten, and no longer able to
appear in the field, cut off from all possibility of receiving
reinforcements or supplies, and in the midst of a hostile country
loathing and abhorring it, was to be transported with its arms,
ammunition, and plunder, at the expence of Great Britain, in British
vessels, and landed within a few days march of the Spanish
frontier,--there to be at liberty to commence hostilities immediately!

Omitting every characteristic which distinguishes the present contest
from others, and looking at this issue merely as an affair between two
armies, what stupidity of mind to provoke the accusation of not merely
shrinking from future toils and dangers, but of basely shifting the
burthen to the shoulders of an ally, already overpressed!--What
infatuation, to convey the imprisoned foe to the very spot, whither, if
he had had wings, he would have flown! This last was an absurdity as
glaring as if, the French having landed on our own island, we had taken
them from Yorkshire to be set on shore in Sussex; but ten thousand times
worse! from a place where without our interference they had been
virtually blockaded, where they were cut off, hopeless, useless, and
disgraced, to become an efficient part of a mighty host, carrying the
strength of their numbers, and alas! the strength of their glory, (not
to mention the sight of their plunder) to animate that host; while the
British army, more numerous in the proportion of three to two, with all
the population and resources of the peninsula to aid it, within ten days
sail of it's own country, and the sea covered with friendly shipping at
it's back, was to make a long march to encounter this same enemy, (the
British forfeiting instead of gaining by the treaty as to superiority of
numbers, for that this would be the case was clearly foreseen) to
encounter, in a new condition of strength and pride, those whom, by its
deliberate act, it had exalted,--having taken from itself, meanwhile,
all which it had conferred, and bearing into the presence of its nob