This is all that was originally demanded.  The expedition is disavowed, and the island is restored.  An injury is acknowledged by the reception of lord Rochford’s paper, who twice mentions the word injury, and twice the word satisfaction.

The Spaniards have stipulated, that the grant of possession shall not preclude the question of prior right, a question which we shall probably make no haste to discuss, and a right, of which no formal resignation was ever required.  This reserve has supplied matter for much clamour, and, perhaps the English ministry would have been better pleased had the declaration been without it.  But when we have obtained all that was asked, why should we complain that we have not more?  When the possession is conceded, where is the evil that the right, which that concession supposes to be merely hypothetical, is referred to the Greek calends for a future disquisition?  Were the Switzers less free, or less secure, because, after their defection from the house of Austria, they had never been declared independent before the treaty of Westphalia?  Is the king of France less a sovereign, because the king of England partakes his title?

If sovereignty implies undisputed right, scarce any prince is a sovereign through his whole dominions; if sovereignty consists in this, that no superiour is acknowledged, our king reigns at port Egmont with sovereign authority.  Almost every new-acquired territory is, in some degree, controvertible, and till the controversy is decided, a term very difficult to be fixed, all that can be had is real possession and actual dominion.

This, surely, is a sufficient answer to the feudal gabble of a man, who is every day lessening that splendour of character which once illuminated the kingdom, then dazzled, and afterwards inflamed it; and for whom it will be happy if the nation shall, at last, dismiss him to nameless obscurity, with that equipoise of blame and praise which Corneille allows to Richelieu, a man who, I think, had much of his merit, and many of his faults: 

  “Chacun parle a son gre de ce grand cardinal;
    Mais, pour moi, je n’en dirai rien: 
  Il m’a fait trop de bien pour en dire du mal;
    Il m’a fait trop de mal pour en dire du bien.”

To push advantages too far is neither generous nor just.  Had we insisted on a concession of antecedent right, it may not misbecome us, either as moralists or politicians, to consider what Grimaldi could have answered.  We have already, he might say, granted you the whole effect of right, and have not denied you the name.  We have not said, that the right was ours before this concession, but only that what right we had, is not, by this concession, vacated.  We have now, for more than two centuries, ruled large tracts of the American continent, by a claim which, perhaps, is valid only upon this consideration, that no power can produce a better; by the right of discovery,