to his own territory.  They might dispute about the value of their several shares, but the contiguity to each of the demandants always furnished the means of an adjustment.  Though hereafter the world will have cause to rue this iniquitous measure, and they most who were most concerned in it, for the moment there was wherewithal in the object to preserve peace amongst confederates in wrong.  But the spoil of France did not afford the same facilities for accommodation.  What might satisfy the House of Austria in a Flemish frontier afforded no equivalent to tempt the cupidity of the King of Prussia.  What might be desired by Great Britain in the West Indies must be coldly and remotely, if at all, felt as an interest at Vienna, and it would be felt as something worse than a negative interest at Madrid.  Austria, long possessed with unwise and dangerous designs on Italy, could not be very much in earnest about the conservation of the old patrimony of the House of Savoy; and Sardinia, who owed to an Italian force all her means of shutting out France from Italy, of which she has been supposed to hold the key, would not purchase the means of strength upon one side by yielding it on the other:  she would not readily give the possession of Novara for the hope of Savoy.  No Continental power was willing to lose any of its Continental objects for the increase of the naval power of Great Britain; and Great Britain would not give up any of the objects she sought for, as the means of an increase to her naval power, to further their aggrandizement.

The moment this war came to be considered as a war merely of profit, the actual circumstances are such that it never could become really a war of alliance.  Nor can the peace be a peace of alliance, until things are put upon their right bottom.

I don’t find it denied, that, when a treaty is entered into for peace, a demand will be made on the Regicides to surrender a great part of their conquests on the Continent.  ’Will they, in the present state of the war, make that surrender without an equivalent?  This Continental cession must of course be made in favor of that party in the alliance that has suffered losses.  That party has nothing to furnish towards an equivalent.  What equivalent, for instance, has Holland to offer, who has lost her all?  What equivalent can come from the Emperor, every part of whose territories contiguous to France is already within the pale of the Regicide dominion?  What equivalent has Sardinia to offer for Savoy, and for Nice,—­I may say, for her whole being?  What has she taken from the faction of France?  She has lost very near her all, and she has gained nothing.  What equivalent has Spain to give?  Alas! she has already paid for her own ransom the fund of equivalent,—­and a dreadful equivalent it is, to England and to herself.  But I put Spain out of the question:  she is a province of the Jacobin empire, and she must make peace or war according to the orders she receives from the Directory of Assassins.  In effect and substance, her crown is a fief of Regicide.