of time.  In its execution, they who went the nearest way to work were obliged to cover an incredible extent of country.  It left to the enemy every means of destroying this extended line of weakness.  Ill success in any part was sure to defeat the effect of the whole.  This is true of Austria.  It is still more true of England.  On this false plan, even good fortune, by further weakening the victor, put him but the further off from his object.

As long as there was any appearance of success, the spirit of aggrandizement, and consequently the spirit of mutual jealousy, seized upon all the coalesced powers.  Some sought an accession of territory at the expense of France, some at the expense of each other, some at the expense of third parties; and when the vicissitude of disaster took its turn, they found common distress a treacherous bond of faith and friendship.

The greatest skill, conducting the greatest military apparatus, has been employed; but it has been worse than uselessly employed, through the false policy of the war.  The operations of the field suffered by the errors of the cabinet.  If the same spirit continues, when peace is made, the peace will fix and perpetuate all the errors of the war; because it will be made upon the same false principle.  What has been lost in the field, in the field may be regained.  An arrangement of peace in its nature is a permanent settlement:  it is the effect of counsel and deliberation, and not of fortuitous events.  If built upon a basis fundamentally erroneous, it can only be retrieved by some of those unforeseen dispensations which the all-wise, but mysterious, Governor of the world sometimes interposes, to snatch nations from ruin.  It would not be pious error, but mad and impious presumption, for any one to trust in an unknown order of dispensations, in defiance of the rules of prudence, which are formed upon the known march of the ordinary providence of God.

It was not of that sort of war that I was amongst the least considerable, but amongst the most zealous advisers; and it is not by the sort of peace now talked of that I wish it concluded.  It would answer no great purpose to enter into the particular errors of the war.  The whole has been but one error.  It was but nominally a war of alliance.  As the combined powers pursued it, there was nothing to hold an alliance together.  There could be no tie of honor in a society for pillage.  There could be no tie of a common interest, where the object did not offer such a division amongst the parties as could well give them a warm concern in the gains of each other, or could, indeed, form such a body of equivalents as might make one of them willing to abandon a separate object of his ambition for the gratification of any other member of the alliance.  The partition of Poland offered an object of spoil in which the parties might agree.  They were circumjacent, and each might take a portion convenient