never can confer true glory and happiness upon a nation that has attained power sufficient to protect itself.  Your favourites, the Romans, though no doubt having the fear of the Carthaginians before their eyes, yet were impelled to carry their arms out of Italy by ambition far more than by a rational apprehension of the danger of their condition.  And how did they enter upon their career?  By an act of atrocious injustice.  You are too well read in history for me to remind you what that act was.  The same disregard of morality followed too closely their steps everywhere.  Their ruling passion, and sole steady guide, was the glory of the Roman name, and the wish to spread the Roman power.  No wonder, then, if their armies and military leaders, as soon as they had destroyed all foreign enemies from whom anything was to be dreaded, turned their swords upon each other.  The ferocious cruelties of Sylla and Marius, of Catiline, and of Antony and Octavius, and the despotism of the empire, were the necessary consequences of a long course of action pursued upon such blind and selfish principles.  Therefore, admiring as I do your scheme of martial policy, and agreeing with you that a British military power may, and that the present state of the world requires that it ought to be, predominant in Italy, and Germany, and Spain; yet still, I am afraid that you look with too much complacency upon conquest by British arms, and upon British military influence upon the Continent, for its own sake.  Accordingly, you seem to regard Italy with more satisfaction than Spain.  I mean you contemplate our possible exertions in Italy with more pleasure, merely because its dismembered state would probably keep it more under our sway—­in other words, more at our mercy.  Now, I think there is nothing more unfortunate for Europe than the condition of Germany and Italy in these respects.  Could the barriers be dissolved which have divided the one nation into Neapolitans, Tuscans, Venetians, &c., and the other into Prussians, Hanoverians, &c., and could they once be taught to feel their strength, the French would be driven back into their own Land immediately.  I wish to see Spain, Italy, France, Germany, formed into independent nations; nor have I any desire to reduce the power of France further than may be necessary for that end.  Woe be to that country whose military power is irresistible!  I deprecate such an event for Great Britain scarcely less than for any other Land.  Scipio foresaw the evils with which Rome would be visited when no Carthage should be in existence for her to contend with.  If a nation have nothing to oppose or to fear without, it cannot escape decay and concussion within.  Universal triumph and absolute security soon betray a State into abandonment of that discipline, civil and military, by which its victories were secured.  If the time should ever come when this island shall have no more formidable enemies by land than it has at this moment by sea, the extinction of all that