There is some secret.  Sickness and weather may defeat an army pursuing a wrong plan:  not that I believe the sickness to have been so great as it has been reported; but there is a great deal of superfluous humiliation in this business, a perfect prodigality of disgrace.  Some advantage, real or imaginary, must compensate to a great sovereign and to a great general for so immense a loss of reputation.  Longwy, situated as it is, might (one should think) be evacuated without a capitulation with a republic just proclaimed by the king of Prussia as an usurping and rebellious body.  He was not far from Luxembourg.  He might have taken away the obnoxious French in his flight.  It does not appear to have been necessary that those magistrates who declared for their own king, on the faith and under the immediate protection of the king of Prussia, should be delivered over to the gallows.  It was not necessary that the emigrant nobility and gentry who served with the king of Prussia’s army, under his immediate command, should be excluded from the cartel, and given up to be hanged as rebels.  Never was so gross and so cruel a breach of the public faith, not with an enemy, but with a friend.  Dumouriez has dropped very singular hints.  Custine has spoken out more broadly.  These accounts have never been contradicted.  They tend to make an eternal rupture between the powers.  The French have given out, that the Duke of Brunswick endeavored to negotiate some name and place for the captive king, amongst the murderers and proscribers of those who have lost their all for his cause.  Even this has not been denied.

It is singular, and, indeed, a thing, under all its circumstances, inconceivable, that everything should by the Emperor be abandoned to the king of Prussia.  That monarch was considered as principal.  In the nature of things, as well as in his position with regard to the war, he was only an ally, and a new ally, with crossing interests in many particulars, and of a policy rather uncertain.  At best, and supposing him to act with the greatest fidelity, the Emperor and the Empire to him must be but secondary objects.  Countries out of Germany must affect him in a still more remote manner.  France, other than from the fear of its doctrinal principles, can to him be no object at all.  Accordingly, the Rhine, Sardinia, and the Swiss are left to their fate.  The king of Prussia has no direct and immediate concern with France; consequentially, to be sure, a great deal:  but the Emperor touches France directly in many parts; he is a near neighbor to Sardinia, by his Milanese territories; he borders on Switzerland; Cologne, possessed by his uncle, is between Mentz, Treves, and the king of Prussia’s territories on the Lower Rhine.  The Emperor is the natural guardian of Italy and Germany,—­the natural balance against the ambition of France, whether republican or monarchical.  His ministers and his generals, therefore, ought to have had their full share in every material consultation,—­which I suspect they had not.  If he has no minister capable of plans of policy which comprehend the superintendency of a war, or no general with the least of a political head, things have been as they must be.  However, in all the parts of this strange proceeding there must be a secret.