difficult to prove that an army of an hundred
thousand men, horse, foot, and artillery, might have been employed
against the enemy, on the very soil which he has usurped, at a far less
expense than has been squandered away upon tropical adventures. In these
adventures it was not an enemy we had to vanquish, but a cemetery to
conquer. In carrying on the war in the West Indies, the hostile sword is
merciful, the country in which we engage is the dreadful enemy. There
the European conqueror finds a cruel defeat in the very fruits of his
success. Every advantage is but a new demand on England for recruits to
the West Indian grave. In a West India war, the Regicides have for their
troops a race of fierce barbarians, to whom the poisoned air, in which
our youth inhale certain death, is salubrity and life. To them the
climate is the surest and most faithful of allies.

Had we carried on the war on the side of France which looks towards the
Channel or the Atlantic, we should have attacked our enemy on his weak
and unarmed side. We should not have to reckon on the loss of a man who
did not fall in battle. We should have an ally in the heart of the
country, who to our hundred thousand would at one time have added eighty
thousand men at the least, and all animated by principle, by enthusiasm,
and by vengeance: motives which secured them to the cause in a very
different manner from some of those allies whom we subsidized with
millions. This ally, (or rather, this principal in the war,) by the
confession of the Regicide himself, was more formidable to him than all
his other foes united. Warring there, we should have led our arms to the
capital of Wrong. Defeated, we could not fail (proper precautions taken)
of a sure retreat. Stationary, and only supporting the royalists, an
impenetrable barrier, an impregnable rampart, would have been formed
between the enemy and his naval power. We are probably the only nation
who have declined to act against an enemy when it might have been done
in his own country, and who, having an armed, a powerful, and a long
victorious ally in that country, declined all effectual cooeperation, and
suffered him to perish for want of support. On the plan of a war in
France, every advantage that our allies might obtain would be doubled
in its effect. Disasters on the one side might have a fair chance of
being compensated by victories on the other. Had we brought the main of
our force to bear upon that quarter, a