rosity and justice, which are to grow with the extent of her
power. To talk of the balance of power to the governors of such a
country was a jargon which they could not understand even through an
interpreter. Before men can transact any affair, they must have a
common language to speak, and some common, recognized principles on
which they can argue; otherwise all is cross purpose and confusion. It
was, therefore, an essential preliminary to the whole proceeding, to fix
whether the balance of power, the liberties and laws of the Empire, and
the treaties of different belligerent powers in past times, when they
put an end to hostilities, were to be considered as the basis of the
present negotiation.

The whole of the enemy's plan was known when Lord Malmesbury was sent
with his scrap of equivalents to Paris. Yet, in this unfortunate attempt
at negotiation, instead of fixing these points, and assuming the balance
of power and the peace of Europe as the basis to which all cessions on
all sides were to be subservient, our solicitor for peace was directed
to reverse that order. He was directed to make mutual concessions, on a
mere comparison of their marketable value, the base of treaty. The
balance of power was to be thrown in as an inducement, and a sort of
make-weight to supply the manifest deficiency, which must stare him and
the world in the face, between those objects which he was to require the
enemy to surrender and those which he had to offer as a fair equivalent.

To give any force to this inducement, and to make it answer even the
secondary purpose of equalizing equivalents having in themselves no
natural proportionate value, it supposed that the enemy, contrary to the
most notorious fact, did admit this balance of power to be of some
value, great or small; whereas it is plain, that, in the enemy's
estimate of things, the consideration of the balance of power, as we
have said before, was so far from going in diminution of the value of
what the Directory was desired to surrender, or of giving an additional
price to our objects offered in exchange, that the hope of the utter
destruction of that balance became a new motive to the junto of
Regicides for preserving, as a means for realizing that hope, what we
wished them to abandon.

Thus stood the basis of the treaty, on laying the first stone of the
foundation. At the very best, upon our side, the question stood upon a
mere naked bargain and sale. Unthinking people h