possibly be preserved but by her remaining a very great and preponderating power.  The design at present evidently pursued by the combined potentates, or of the two who lead, is totally to destroy her as such a power.  For Great Britain resolves that she shall have no colonies, no commerce, and no marine.  Austria means to take away the whole frontier, from the borders of Switzerland to Dunkirk.  It is their plan also to render the interior government lax and feeble, by prescribing, by force of the arms of rival and jealous nations, and without consulting the natural interests of the kingdom, such arrangements as, in the actual state of Jacobinism in France, and the unsettled state in which property must remain for a long time, will inevitably produce such distraction and debility in government as to reduce it to nothing, or to throw it back into its old confusion.  One cannot conceive so frightful a state of a nation.  A maritime country without a marine and without commerce; a continental country without a frontier, and for a thousand miles surrounded with powerful, warlike, and ambitious neighbors!  It is possible that she might submit to lose her commerce and her colonies:  her security she never can abandon.  If, contrary to all expectations, under such a disgraced and impotent government, any energy should remain in that country, she will make every effort to recover her security, which will involve Europe for a century in war and blood.  What has it cost to France to make that frontier?  What will it cost to recover it?  Austria thinks that without a frontier she cannot secure the Netherlands.  But without her frontier France cannot secure herself.  Austria has been, however, secure for an hundred years in those very Netherlands, and has never been dispossessed of them by the chance of war without a moral certainty of receiving them again on the restoration of peace.  Her late dangers have arisen not from the power or ambition of the king of France.  They arose from her own ill policy, which dismantled all her towns, and discontented all her subjects by Jacobinical innovations.  She dismantles her own towns, and then says, “Give me the frontier of France!” But let us depend upon it, whatever tends, under the name of security, to aggrandize Austria, will discontent and alarm Prussia.  Such a length of frontier on the side of France, separated from itself, and separated from the mass of the Austrian country, will be weak, unless connected at the expense of the Elector of Bavaria (the Elector Palatine) and other lesser princes, or by such exchanges as will again convulse the Empire.