The greatest skill conducting the greatest military apparatus has been employed; but it has been worse than uselessly employed, through the false policy of the war.  The operations of the field suffered by the errors of the cabinet.  If the same spirit continues when peace is made, the peace will fix and perpetuate all the errors of the war; because it will be made upon the same false principle.  What has been lost in the field, in the field may be regained.  An arrangement of peace in its nature is a permanent settlement; it is the effect of counsel and deliberation, and not of fortuitous events.  If built upon a basis fundamentally erroneous, it can only be retrieved by some of those unforeseen dispensations, which the all-wise but mysterious Governor of the world sometimes interposes, to snatch nations from ruin.  It would not be pious error, but mad and impious presumption, for any one to trust in an unknown order of dispensations, in defiance of the rules of prudence, which are formed upon the known march of the ordinary providence of God.

It was not of that sort of war that I was amongst the least considerable, but amongst the most zealous advisers; and it is not by the sort of peace now talked of, that I wish it concluded.  It would answer no great purpose to enter into the particular errors of the war.  The whole has been but one error.  It was but nominally a war of alliance.  As the combined powers pursued it there was nothing to hold an alliance together.  There could be no tie of honour, in a society for pillage.  There could be no tie of a common interest where the object did not offer such a division amongst the parties as could well give them a warm concern in the gains of each other, or could indeed form such a body of equivalents, as might make one of them willing to abandon a separate object of his ambition for the gratification of any other member of the alliance.  The partition of Poland offered an object of spoil in which the parties might agree.  They were circumjacent, and each might take a portion convenient to his own territory.  They might dispute about the value of their several shares, but the contiguity to each of the demandants always furnished the means of an adjustment.  Though hereafter the world will have cause to rue this iniquitous measure, and they most who were the most concerned in it, for the moment there was wherewithal in the object to preserve peace amongst confederates in wrong.  But the spoil of France did not afford the same facilities for accommodation.  What might satisfy the house of Austria in a Flemish frontier, afforded no equivalent to tempt the cupidity of the king of Prussia.  What might be desired by Great Britain in the West Indies, must be coldly and remotely, if at all, felt as an interest at Vienna; and it would be felt as something worse than a negative interest at Madrid.  Austria, long possessed with unwise and dangerous designs on Italy, could not be