Whence, then, can the compensation be demanded?  Undoubtedly from that power which alone has made some conquests.  That power is England.  Will the Allies, then, give away their ancient patrimony, that England may keep islands in the West Indies?  They never can protract the war in good earnest for that object; nor can they act in concert with us, in our refusal to grant anything towards their redemption.  In that case we are thus situated:  either we must give Europe, bound hand and foot, to France, or we must quit the West Indies without any one object, great or small, towards indemnity and security.  I repeat it, without any advantage whatever:  because, supposing that our conquest could comprise all that France ever possessed in the tropical America, it never can amount in any fair estimation to a fair equivalent for Holland, for the Austrian Netherlands, for the Lower Germany,—­that is, for the whole ancient kingdom or circle of Burgundy, now under the yoke of Regicide, to say nothing of almost all Italy, under the same barbarous domination.  If we treat in the present situation of things, we have nothing in our hands that can redeem Europe.  Nor is the Emperor, as I have observed, more rich in the fund of equivalents.

If we look to our stock in the Eastern world, our most valuable and systematic acquisitions are made in that quarter.  Is it from France they are made?  France has but one or two contemptible factories, subsisting by the offal of the private fortunes of English individuals to support them, in any part of India.  I look on the taking of the Cape of Good Hope as the securing of a post of great moment; it does honor to those who planned and to those who executed that enterprise; but I speak of it always as comparatively good,—­as good as anything can be in a scheme of war that repels us from a centre, and employs all our forces where nothing can be finally decisive.  But giving, as I freely give, every possible credit to these Eastern conquests, I ask one question:—­On whom are they made?  It is evident, that, if we can keep our Eastern conquests, we keep them not at the expense of France, but at the expense of Holland, our ally,—­of Holland, the immediate cause of the war, the nation whom we had undertaken to protect, and not of the Republic which it was our business to destroy.  If we return the African and the Asiatic conquests, we put them into the hands of a nominal state (to that Holland is reduced) unable to retain them, and which will virtually leave them under the direction of France.  If we withhold them, Holland declines still more as a state.  She loses so much carrying trade, and that means of keeping up the small degree of naval power she holds:  for which policy alone, and not for any commercial gain, she maintains the Cape, or any settlement beyond it.  In that case, resentment, faction, and even necessity, will throw her more and more into the power of the new, mischievous Republic.  But on the probable state of Holland I shall say more, when in this correspondence I come to talk over with you the state in which any sort of Jacobin peace will leave all Europe.