When this war was ended, (I cannot stay now to examine how,) the object of the war was the object of the treaty.  When it was found impracticable, or less desirable than before, wholly to exclude a branch of the Bourbon race from that immense succession, the point of Utrecht was to prevent the mischiefs to arise from the influence of the greater upon the lesser branch.  His Lordship is a great member of the diplomatic body; he has, of course, all the fundamental treaties which make the public statute law of Europe by heart:  and, indeed, no active member of Parliament ought to be ignorant of their general tenor and leading provisions.  In the treaty which closed that war, and of which it is a fundamental part, because relating to the whole policy of the compact, it was agreed that Spain should not give anything from her territory in the West Indies to France.  This article, apparently onerous to Spain, was in truth highly beneficial.  But, oh, the blindness of the greatest statesman to the infinite and unlooked-for combinations of things which lie hid in the dark prolific womb of futurity!  The great trunk of Bourbon is cut down; the withered branch is worked up into the construction of a French Regicide Republic.  Here we have formed a new, unlooked-for, monstrous, heterogeneous alliance,—­a double-natured monster, republic above and monarchy below.  There is no centaur of fiction, no poetic satyr of the woods, nothing short of the hieroglyphic monsters of Egypt, dog in head and man in body, that can give an idea of it.  None of these things can subsist in Nature (so, at least, it is thought); but the moral world admits monsters which the physical rejects.

In this metamorphosis, the first thing done by Spain, in the honey-moon of her new servitude, was, with all the hardihood of pusillanimity, utterly to defy the most solemn treaties with Great Britain and the guaranty of Europe.  She has yielded the largest and fairest part of one of the largest and fairest islands in the West Indies, perhaps on the globe, to the usurped powers of France.  She completes the title of those powers to the whole of that important central island of Hispaniola.  She has solemnly surrendered to the regicides and butchers of the Bourbon family what that court never ventured, perhaps never wished, to bestow on the patriarchal stock of her own august house.

The noble negotiator takes no notice of this portentous junction and this audacious surrender.  The effect is no less than the total subversion of the balance of power in the West Indies, and indeed everywhere else.  This arrangement, considered in itself, but much more as it indicates a complete union of France with Spain, is truly alarming.  Does he feel nothing of the change this makes in that part of his description of the state of France where he supposes her not able to face one of our detached squadrons?  Does he feel nothing for the condition of Portugal under this new coalition?  Is it for