I do not know that such an improvident and stupid selfishness deserves the discussion which perhaps I may bestow upon it hereafter.  We cannot arrange with our enemy, in the present conjuncture, without abandoning the interest of mankind.  If we look only to our own petty peculium in the war, we have had some advantages,—­advantages ambiguous in their nature, and dearly bought.  We have not in the slightest degree impaired the strength of the common enemy in any one of those points in which his particular force consists,—­at the same time that new enemies to ourselves, new allies to the Regicide Republic, have been made out of the wrecks and fragments of the general confederacy.  So far as to the selfish part.  As composing a part of the community of Europe, and interested in its fate, it is not easy to conceive a state of things more doubtful and perplexing.  When Louis the Fourteenth had made himself master of one of the largest and most important provinces of Spain,—­when he had in a manner overrun Lombardy, and was thundering at the gates of Turin,—­when he had mastered almost all Germany on this side the Rhine,—­when he was on the point of ruining the august fabric of the Empire,—­when, with the Elector of Bavaria in his alliance, hardly anything interposed between him and Vienna,—­when the Turk hung with a mighty force over the Empire on the other side,—­I do not know that in the beginning of 1704 (that is, in the third year of the renovated war with Louis the Fourteenth) the state of Europe was so truly alarming.  To England it certainly was not.  Holland (and Holland is a matter to England of value inestimable) was then powerful, was then independent, and, though greatly endangered, was then full of energy and spirit.  But the great resource of Europe was in England:  not in a sort of England detached from the rest of the world, and amusing herself with the puppet-show of a naval power, (it can be no better, whilst all the sources of that power, and of every sort of power, are precarious,) but in that sort of England who considered herself as embodied with Europe, but in that sort of England who, sympathetic with the adversity or the happiness of mankind, felt that nothing in human affairs was foreign to her.  We may consider it as a sure axiom, that, as, on the one hand, no confederacy of the least effect or duration can exist against France, of which England is not only a part, but the head, so neither can England pretend to cope with France but as connected with the body of Christendom.

Our account of the war, as a war of communion, to the very point in which we began to throw out lures, oglings, and glances for peace, was a war of disaster, and of little else.  The independent advantages obtained by us at the beginning of the war, and which were made at the expense of that common cause, if they deceive us about our largest and our surest interest, are to be reckoned amongst our heaviest losses.