ense of each other, some at the
expense of third parties; and when the vicissitude of disaster took its
turn, they found common distress a treacherous bond of faith and
friendship.

The greatest skill, conducting the greatest military apparatus, has
been employed; but it has been worse than uselessly employed, through
the false policy of the war. The operations of the field suffered by the
errors of the cabinet. If the same spirit continues, when peace is made,
the peace will fix and perpetuate all the errors of the war; because it
will be made upon the same false principle. What has been lost in the
field, in the field may be regained. An arrangement of peace in its
nature is a permanent settlement: it is the effect of counsel and
deliberation, and not of fortuitous events. If built upon a basis
fundamentally erroneous, it can only be retrieved by some of those
unforeseen dispensations which the all-wise, but mysterious, Governor of
the world sometimes interposes, to snatch nations from ruin. It would
not be pious error, but mad and impious presumption, for any one to
trust in an unknown order of dispensations, in defiance of the rules of
prudence, which are formed upon the known march of the ordinary
providence of God.

It was not of that sort of war that I was amongst the least
considerable, but amongst the most zealous advisers; and it is not by
the sort of peace now talked of that I wish it concluded. It would
answer no great purpose to enter into the particular errors of the war.
The whole has been but one error. It was but nominally a war of
alliance. As the combined powers pursued it, there was nothing to hold
an alliance together. There could be no tie of _honor_ in a society for
pillage. There could be no tie of a common _interest_, where the object
did not offer such a division amongst the parties as could well give
them a warm concern in the gains of each other, or could, indeed, form
such a body of equivalents as might make one of them willing to abandon
a separate object of his ambition for the gratification of any other
member of the alliance. The partition of Poland offered an object of
spoil in which the parties _might_ agree. They were circumjacent, and
each might take a portion convenient to his own territory. They might
dispute about the value of their several shares, but the contiguity to
each of the demandants always furnished the means of an adjustment.
Though hereafter the world will have cause