Much controversy there has been in Parliament, and not a little amongst us out of doors, about the instrumental means of this nation towards the maintenance of her dignity and the assertion of her rights.  On the most elaborate and correct detail of facts, the result seems to be, that at no time has the wealth and power of Great Britain been so considerable as it is at this very perilous moment.  We have a, vast interest to preserve, and we possess great means of preserving it:  but it is to be remembered that the artificer may be incumbered by his tools, and that resources may be among impediments.  If wealth is the obedient and laborious slave of virtue and of public honor, then wealth is in its place and has its use; but if this order is changed, and honor is to be sacrificed to the conservation of riches, riches, which have neither eyes nor hands, nor anything truly vital in them, cannot long survive the being of their vivifying powers, their legitimate masters, and their potent protectors.  If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free:  if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.  We are bought by the enemy with the treasure from our own coffers.  Too great a sense of the value of a subordinate interest may be the very source of its danger, as well as the certain ruin of interests of a superior order.  Often has a man lost his all because he would not submit to hazard all in defending it.  A display of our wealth before robbers is not the way to restrain their boldness or to lessen their rapacity.  This display is made, I know, to persuade the people of England that thereby we shall awe the enemy and improve the terms of our capitulation:  it is made, not that we should fight with more animation, but that we should supplicate with better hopes.  We are mistaken.  We have an enemy to deal with who never regarded our contest as a measuring and weighing of purses.  He is the Gaul that puts his sword into the scale.  He is more tempted with our wealth as booty than terrified with it as power.  But let us be rich or poor, let us be either in what proportion we may, Nature is false or this is true, that, where the essential public force (of which money is but a part) is in any degree upon a par in a conflict between nations, that state which is resolved to hazard its existence rather than to abandon its objects must have an infinite advantage over that which is resolved to yield rather than to carry its resistance beyond a certain point.  Humanly speaking, that people which bounds its efforts only with its being must give the law to that nation which will not push its opposition beyond its convenience.

If we look to nothing but our domestic condition, the state of the nation is full even to plethora; but if we imagine that this country can long maintain its blood and its food as disjoined from the community of mankind, such an opinion does not deserve refutation as absurd, but pity as insane.