France without a struggle will indeed be less for our honor, but on every principle of our author it must be more for our advantage.  According to his representation of things, the question is only concerning the most easy fall.  France had not discovered, our statesman tells us, at the end of that war, the triumphs of defeat, and the resources which are derived from bankruptcy.  For my poor part, I do not wonder at their blindness.  But the English ministers saw further.  Our author has at length let foreigners also into the secret, and made them altogether as wise as ourselves.  It is their own fault if (vulgato imperii arcano) they are imposed upon any longer.  They now are apprised of the sentiments which the great candidate for the government of this great empire entertains; and they will act accordingly.  They are taught our weakness and their own advantages.

He tells the world,[40] that if France carries on the war against us in Germany, every loss she sustains contributes to the achievement of her conquest.  If her armies are three years unpaid, she is the less exhausted by expense.  If her credit is destroyed, she is the less oppressed with debt.  If her troops are cut to pieces, they will by her policy (and a wonderful policy it is) be improved, and will be supplied with much better men.  If the war is carried on in the colonies, he tells them[41] that the loss of her ultramarine dominions lessens her expenses, and insures her remittances:—­

    Per damna, per caedes, ab ipso
    Ducit opes animumque ferro.

If so, what is it we can do to hurt her?—­it will be all an imposition, all fallacious.  Why, the result must be,—­

                Occidit, occidit
    Spes omnis, et fortuna nostri
    Nominis.

The only way which the author’s principles leave for our escape, is to reverse our condition into that of France, and to take her losing cards into our hands.  But though his principles drive him to it, his politics will not suffer him to walk on this ground.  Talking at our ease and of other countries, we may bear to be diverted with such speculations; but in England we shall never be taught to look upon the annihilation of our trade, the ruin of our credit, the defeat of our armies, and the loss of our ultramarine dominions (whatever the author may think of them), to be the high road to prosperity and greatness.

The reader does not, I hope, imagine that I mean seriously to set about the refutation of these uningenious paradoxes and reveries without imagination.  I state them only that we may discern a little in the questions of war and peace, the most weighty of all questions, what is the wisdom of those men who are held out to us as the only hope of an expiring nation.  The present ministry is indeed of a strange character:  at once indolent and distracted.  But if a ministerial system should be formed, actuated by such maxims as are avowed in this piece, the vices of the present ministry would become their virtues; their indolence would be the greatest of all public benefits, and a distraction that entirely defeated every one of their schemes would be our only security from destruction.