If any excuse could be made for expeditions so likely to end in ruin, it must be that justice required them; and that if we suffer, we at least suffer in support of right, and in an honest endeavour to promote the execution of the great laws of moral equity; that if we fail of success, we shall always have the consolation of having meant well, and of having deserved those victories which we could not gain.

But, upon an impartial survey of the cause in which we are going to engage, and on which we are about to hazard our own happiness, and that of our posterity, I can discover no such apparent justice on the side of the queen of Hungary, as ought to incite distant nations to espouse her quarrel, to raise armies in her favour, to consider her cause as that of human nature, and to prosecute those that invade her territories, as the enemies of general society.

The Pragmatick sanction, my lords, by which she claims all the hereditary dominions of her family, cannot change the nature of right and wrong, nor invalidate any claim before subsisting, unless by the consent of the prince by whom it was made.  The elector of Bavaria may, therefore, urge in his own defence, that by the elder sister he has a clear and indisputable right, a right from which he never receded, as he never concurred in the Pragmatiok sanction; he may, therefore, charge this illustrious princess, for whom so many troops are raised, and for whom so much blood is about to be shed, with usurpation, with detention of the dominions of other potentates, and with an obstinate assertion of a false title.

That the Pragmatick sanction is generally understood to be unjust, appears sufficiently from the conduct of those powers who, though engaged by solemn stipulations to support it, yet look unconcerned on the violation of it, and appear convinced, that the princes who are now dividing among themselves the Austrian dominions, produce claims which cannot be opposed without a manifest disregard of justice.

The pretensions of these princes ought, indeed, to have been more attentively considered, when this guaranty was first demanded; for it is evident, that either no such compact ought to have been made, or that it ought now to be observed; and that those who now justify the neglect of it, by urging its injustice, ought to have refused accession to it for the same reason.  But it is probable, that they will urge in their defence, what cannot easily be confuted, that their consent was obtained by misrepresentations; and that he who has promised to do any thing on the supposition that it is right, is not bound by that promise, when he has discovered it to be wrong.

But though justice may, my lords, be pretended, I am far from doubting that policy has, in reality, supplied the motives upon which these powers proceed.  Since the world is evidently governed more by interest than virtue, I think it not unreasonable to imagine, that they form their measures according to their own expectations of advantage; and as I do not believe our countrymen distinguished from the rest of mankind by any peculiar disregard of themselves, it may not be improper to examine, even in this place, whether by restoring the house of Austria to its ancient greatness, we shall promote our own happiness, or that of the empire, or of the rest of Europe.