s false or
this is true, that, where the essential public force (of which money is
but a part) is in any degree upon a par in a conflict between nations,
that state which is resolved to hazard its existence rather than to
abandon its objects must have an infinite advantage over that which is
resolved to yield rather than to carry its resistance beyond a certain
point. Humanly speaking, that people which bounds its efforts only with
its being must give the law to that nation which will not push its
opposition beyond its convenience.

If we look to nothing but our domestic condition, the state of the
nation is full even to plethora; but if we imagine that this country can
long maintain its blood and its food as disjoined from the community of
mankind, such an opinion does not deserve refutation as absurd, but pity
as insane.

I do not know that such an improvident and stupid selfishness deserves
the discussion which perhaps I may bestow upon it hereafter. We cannot
arrange with our enemy, in the present conjuncture, without abandoning
the interest of mankind. If we look only to our own petty _peculium_ in
the war, we have had some advantages,--advantages ambiguous in their
nature, and dearly bought. We have not in the slightest degree impaired
the strength of the common enemy in any one of those points in which his
particular force consists,--at the same time that new enemies to
ourselves, new allies to the Regicide Republic, have been made out of
the wrecks and fragments of the general confederacy. So far as to the
selfish part. As composing a part of the community of Europe, and
interested in its fate, it is not easy to conceive a state of things
more doubtful and perplexing. When Louis the Fourteenth had made himself
master of one of the largest and most important provinces of
Spain,--when he had in a manner overrun Lombardy, and was thundering at
the gates of Turin,--when he had mastered almost all Germany on this
side the Rhine,--when he was on the point of ruining the august fabric
of the Empire,--when, with the Elector of Bavaria in his alliance,
hardly anything interposed between him and Vienna,--when the Turk hung
with a mighty force over the Empire on the other side,--I do not know
that in the beginning of 1704 (that is, in the third year of the
renovated war with Louis the Fourteenth) the state of Europe was so
truly alarming. To England it certainly was not. Holland (and Holland is
a matter to England of val