easure the balance of power in the West Indies is totally
destroyed. It has followed the balance of power in Europe. It is not
alone what shall be left nominally to the Assassins that is theirs.
Theirs is the whole empire of Spain in America. That stroke finishes
all. I should be glad to see our suppliant negotiator in the act of
putting his feather to the ear of the Directory, to make it unclench the
fist, and, by his tickling, to charm that rich prize out of the iron
gripe of robbery and ambition! It does not require much sagacity to
discern that no power wholly baffled and defeated in Europe can flatter
itself with conquests in the West Indies. In that state of things it can
neither keep nor hold. No! It cannot even long make war, if the grand
bank and deposit of its force is at all in the West Indies. But here a
scene opens to my view too important to pass by, perhaps too critical to
touch. Is it possible that it should not present itself in all its
relations to a mind habituated to consider either war or peace on a
large scale or as one whole?

Unfortunately, other ideas have prevailed. A remote, an expensive, a
murderous, and, in the end, an unproductive adventure, carried on upon
ideas of mercantile knight-errantry, without any of the generous
wildness of Quixotism, is considered as sound, solid sense; and a war in
a wholesome climate, a war at our door, a war directly on the enemy, a
war in the heart of his country, a war in concert with an internal ally,
and in combination with the external, is regarded as folly and romance.

My dear friend, I hold it impossible that these considerations should
have escaped the statesmen on both sides of the water, and on both sides
of the House of Commons. How a question of peace can be discussed
without having them in view I cannot imagine. If you or others see a way
out of these difficulties, I am happy. I see, indeed, a fund from whence
equivalents will be proposed. I see it, but I cannot just now touch it.
It is a question of high moment. It opens another Iliad of woes to
Europe.

Such is the time proposed for making _a common political peace_ to which
no one circumstance is propitious. As to the grand principle of the
peace, it is left, as if by common consent, wholly out of the question.

Viewing things in this light, I have frequently sunk into a degree of
despondency and dejection hardly to be described; yet out of the
profoundest depths of this despair, an impulse