vignon must go from
the Pope; Savoy (at least) from the King of Sardinia, if not Nice.
Liege, Mentz, Salm, Deux-Ponts, and Basle must be separated from
Germany. On this side of the Rhine, Liege (at least) must be lost to the
Empire, and added to France. Mr. Fox's general principle fully covered
all this. How much of these territories came within his rule he never
attempted to define. He kept a profound silence as to Germany. As to
the Netherlands he was something more explicit. He said (if I recollect
right) that France on that side might expect something towards
strengthening her frontier. As to the remaining parts of the
Netherlands, which he supposed France might consent to surrender, he
went so far as to declare that England ought not to permit the Emperor
to be repossessed of the remainder of the ten Provinces, but that _the
people_ should choose such a form of independent government as they
liked. This proposition of Mr. Fox was just the arrangement which the
usurpation in France had all along proposed to make. As the
circumstances were at that time, and have been ever since, his
proposition fully indicated what government the Flemings _must_ have in
the stated extent of what was left to them. A government so set up in
the Netherlands, whether compulsory, or by the choice of the
_sans-culottes_, (who he well knew were to be the real electors, and the
sole electors,) in whatever name it was to exist, must evidently depend
for its existence, as it had done for its original formation, on France.
In reality, it must have ended in that point to which, piece by piece,
the French were then actually bringing all the Netherlands,--that is, an
incorporation with France as a body of new Departments, just as Savoy
and Liege and the rest of their pretended independent popular
sovereignties have been united to their republic. Such an arrangement
must have destroyed Austria; it must have left Holland always at the
mercy of France; it must totally and forever cut off all political
communication between England and the Continent. Such must have been the
situation of Europe, according to Mr. Fox's system of politics, however
laudable his personal motives may have been in proposing so complete a
change in the whole system of Great Britain with regard to all the
Continental powers.

24. After it had been generally supposed that all public business was
over for the session, and that Mr. Fox had exhausted all the modes of
pressing thi