trust themselves to
its discretion, would be base enough to pick a quarrel with us for the
very purpose of a pretext to strip them of all they possessed? Or is it
likely, if the native French manufacturers and traders were capable of
rivalling us in point of skill, that any Frenchman would venture upon
that ostentatious display of wealth which a large cotton-mill, for
instance, requires, when he knows that by so doing he would only draw
upon himself a glance of the greedy eye of government, soon to be
followed by a squeeze from its rapacious hand? But I have dwelt too long
upon this. The sum of what I think, by conversation, I could convince
you of is, that your comparative estimate is erroneous, and materially
so, inasmuch as it makes no allowance for the increasing superiority
which a State, supposed to be independent and equitable in its dealings
to its subjects, must have over an oppressive government; and none for
the time which is necessary to give prosperity to peaceful arts, even if
the government should improve. Our country has a mighty and daily
growing forest of this sort of wealth; whereas, in France, the trees are
not yet put into the ground. For my own part, I do not think it possible
that France, with all her command of territory and coast, can outstrip
us in naval power, unless she could previously, by her land power, cut
us off from timber and naval stores, necessary for the building and
equipment of our fleet. In that intellectual superiority which, as I
have mentioned, we possess over her, we should find means to build as
many ships as she could build, and also could procure sailors to man
them. The same energy would furnish means for maintaining the men; and
if they could be fed and maintained, they would surely be produced. Why
then am I for _war_ with France? 1st. Because I think our naval
superiority may be more cheaply maintained, and more easily, by war than
by peace; and because I think, that if the war were conducted upon those
principles of martial policy which you so admirably and nobly enforce,
united with (or rather bottomed upon) those notions of justice and
right, and that knowledge of and reverence for the moral sentiments of
mankind, which, in my Tract, I attempted to portray and illustrate, the
tide of military success would immediately turn in our favour; and we
should find no more difficulty in reducing the French power than
Gustavus Adolphus did in reducing that of the German Empire