By this measure 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 unclinch 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, which I have in vain endeavoured to resist, has urged me to raise one feeble cry against this unfortunate coalition which is formed at home, in order to make a coalition with France, subversive of the whole ancient order of the world.  No disaster of war, no calamity of season, could ever strike me with half the horror which I felt from what is introduced to us by this junction of parties, under the soothing name of peace.  We are apt to speak of a low and pusillanimous spirit as the ordinary cause by which dubious wars terminated in humiliating treaties.  It is here the direct contrary.  I am perfectly astonished at the boldness of character, at the intrepidity of mind, the firmness of nerve, in those who are able with deliberation to face the perils of Jacobin fraternity.