s a domestic faction. The merits of the war with the former have been
argued solely on political grounds. To prevent the mischievous doctrines
of the latter from corrupting our minds, matter and argument have been
supplied abundantly, and even to surfeit, on the excellency of our own
government. But nothing has been done to make us feel in what manner the
safety of that government is connected with the principle and with the
issue of this war. For anything which in the late discussion has
appeared, the war is entirely collateral to the state of Jacobinism,--as
truly a foreign war to us and to all our home concerns as the war with
Spain in 1739, about _Guardacostas_, the Madrid Convention, and the
fable of Captain Jenkins's ears.

Whenever the adverse party has raised a cry for peace with the Regicide,
the answer has been little more than this: "That the administration
wished for such a peace full as much as the opposition, but that the
time was not convenient for making it." Whatever else has been said was
much in the same spirit. Reasons of this kind never touched the
substantial merits of the war. They were in the nature of dilatory
pleas, exceptions of form, previous questions. Accordingly, all the
arguments against a compliance with what was represented as the popular
desire (urged on with all possible vehemence and earnestness by the
Jacobins) have appeared flat and languid, feeble and evasive. They
appeared to aim only at gaining time. They never entered into the
peculiar and distinctive character of the war. They spoke neither to the
understanding nor to the heart. Cold as ice themselves, they never could
kindle in our breasts a spark of that zeal which is necessary to a
conflict with an adverse zeal; much less were they made to infuse into
our minds that stubborn, persevering spirit which alone is capable of
bearing up against those vicissitudes of fortune which will probably
occur, and those burdens which must be inevitably borne, in a long war.
I speak it emphatically, and with a desire that it should be marked,--in
a _long_ war; because, without such a war, no experience has yet told us
that a dangerous power has ever been reduced to measure or to reason. I
do not throw back my view to the Peloponnesian War of twenty-seven
years; nor to two of the Punic Wars, the first of twenty-four, the
second of eighteen; nor to the more recent war concluded by the Treaty
of Westphalia, which continued, I think, for thirty.