ue inestimable) was then powerful, was then
independent, and, though greatly endangered, was then full of energy and
spirit. But the great resource of Europe was in England: not in a sort
of England detached from the rest of the world, and amusing herself
with the puppet-show of a naval power, (it can be no better, whilst all
the sources of that power, and of every sort of power, are precarious,)
but in that sort of England who considered herself as embodied with
Europe, but in that sort of England who, sympathetic with the adversity
or the happiness of mankind, felt that nothing in human affairs was
foreign to her. We may consider it as a sure axiom, that, as, on the one
hand, no confederacy of the least effect or duration can exist against
France, of which England is not only a part, but the head, so neither
can England pretend to cope with France but as connected with the body
of Christendom.

Our account of the war, _as a war of communion_, to the very point in
which we began to throw out lures, oglings, and glances for peace, was a
war of disaster, and of little else. The independent advantages obtained
by us at the beginning of the war, and which were made at the expense of
that common cause, if they deceive us about our largest and our surest
interest, are to be reckoned amongst our heaviest losses.

The Allies, and Great Britain amongst the rest, (and perhaps amongst the
foremost,) have been miserably deluded by this great, fundamental error:
that it was in our power to make peace with this monster of a state,
whenever we chose to forget the crimes that made it great and the
designs that made it formidable. People imagined that their ceasing to
resist was the sure way to be secure. This "pale cast of thought"
sicklied over all their enterprises, and turned all their politics awry.
They could not, or rather they would not, read, in the most unequivocal
declarations of the enemy, and in his uniform conduct, that more safety
was to be found in the most arduous war than in the friendship of that
kind of being. Its hostile amity can be obtained on no terms that do not
imply an inability hereafter to resist its designs. This great, prolific
error (I mean that peace was always in our power) has been the cause
that rendered the Allies indifferent about the _direction_ of the war,
and persuaded them that they might always risk a choice and even a
change in its objects. They seldom improved any advantage,--hoping that
th