of his rule may be in the eyes of neutral judges, it is a rule which no statesman before him ever laid down in favor of the adverse power with whom he was to negotiate.  The adverse party himself may safely be trusted to take care of his own aggrandizement.  But (as if the black boxes of the several parties had been exchanged) Mr. Fox’s English ambassador, by some odd mistake, would find himself charged with the concerns of France.  If we were to leave France as she stood at the time when Mr. Fox proposed to treat with her, that formidable power must have been infinitely strengthened, and almost every other power in Europe as much weakened, by the extraordinary basis which he laid for a treaty.  For Avignon must go from the Pope; Savoy (at least) from the King of Sardinia, if not Nice.  Liege, Mentz, Salm, Deux-Ponts, and Basle must be separated from Germany.  On this side of the Rhine, Liege (at least) must be lost to the Empire, and added to France.  Mr. Fox’s general principle fully covered all this.  How much of these territories came within his rule he never attempted to define.  He kept a profound silence as to Germany.  As to the Netherlands he was something more explicit.  He said (if I recollect right) that France on that side might expect something towards strengthening her frontier.  As to the remaining parts of the Netherlands, which he supposed France might consent to surrender, he went so far as to declare that England ought not to permit the Emperor to be repossessed of the remainder of the ten Provinces, but that the people should choose such a form of independent government as they liked.  This proposition of Mr. Fox was just the arrangement which the usurpation in France had all along proposed to make.  As the circumstances were at that time, and have been ever since, his proposition fully indicated what government the Flemings must have in the stated extent of what was left to them.  A government so set up in the Netherlands, whether compulsory, or by the choice of the sans-culottes, (who he well knew were to be the real electors, and the sole electors,) in whatever name it was to exist, must evidently depend for its existence, as it had done for its original formation, on France.  In reality, it must have ended in that point to which, piece by piece, the French were then actually bringing all the Netherlands,—­that is, an incorporation with France as a body of new Departments, just as Savoy and Liege and the rest of their pretended independent popular sovereignties have been united to their republic.  Such an arrangement must have destroyed Austria; it must have left Holland always at the mercy of France; it must totally and forever cut off all political communication between England and the Continent.  Such must have been the situation of Europe, according to Mr. Fox’s system of politics, however laudable his personal motives may have been in proposing so complete a change in the whole system of Great Britain with regard to all the Continental powers.