So far as to the East Indies.

As to the West Indies,—­indeed, as to either, if we look for matter of exchange in order to ransom Europe,—­it is easy to show that we have taken a terribly roundabout road.  I cannot conceive, even if, for the sake of holding conquests there, we should refuse to redeem Holland, and the Austrian Netherlands, and the hither Germany, that Spain, merely as she is Spain, (and forgetting that the Regicide ambassador governs at Madrid,) will see with perfect satisfaction Great Britain sole mistress of the isles.  In truth, it appears to me, that, when we come to balance our account, we shall find in the proposed peace only the pure, simple, and unendowed charms of Jacobin amity.  We shall have the satisfaction of knowing that no blood or treasure has been spared by the Allies for support of the Regicide system.  We shall reflect at leisure on one great truth:  that it was ten times more easy totally to destroy the system itself than, when established, it would be to reduce its power,—­and that this republic, most formidable abroad, was of all things the weakest at home; that her frontier was terrible, her interior feeble; that it was matter of choice to attack her where she is invincible, and to spare her where she was ready to dissolve by her own internal disorders.  We shall reflect that our plan was good neither for offence nor defence.

It would not be at all difficult to prove that an army of an hundred thousand men, horse, foot, and artillery, might have been employed against the enemy, on the very soil which he has usurped, at a far less expense than has been squandered away upon tropical adventures.  In these adventures it was not an enemy we had to vanquish, but a cemetery to conquer.  In carrying on the war in the West Indies, the hostile sword is merciful, the country in which we engage is the dreadful enemy.  There the European conqueror finds a cruel defeat in the very fruits of his success.  Every advantage is but a new demand on England for recruits to the West Indian grave.  In a West India war, the Regicides have for their troops a race of fierce barbarians, to whom the poisoned air, in which our youth inhale certain death, is salubrity and life.  To them the climate is the surest and most faithful of allies.

Had we carried on the war on the side of France which looks towards the Channel or the Atlantic, we should have attacked our enemy on his weak and unarmed side.  We should not have to reckon on the loss of a man who did not fall in battle.  We should have an ally in the heart of the country, who to our hundred thousand would at one time have added eighty thousand men at the least, and all animated by principle, by enthusiasm, and by vengeance:  motives which secured them to the cause in a very different manner from some of those allies whom we subsidized with millions.  This ally, (or rather, this principal in the war,) by the confession of the Regicide himself, was more