virtually his Allies:  their weapons may be against him, but he will laugh at their weapons,—­for he knows, though they themselves do not, that their souls are for him.  Look at the preamble to the Armistice!  In what is omitted and what is inserted, the French Ruler could not have fashioned it more for his own purpose if he had traced it with his own hand.  We have then trampled upon a fundamental principle of justice, and countenanced a prime maxim of iniquity; thus adding, in an unexampled degree, the foolishness of impolicy to the heinousness of guilt.  A conduct thus grossly unjust and impolitic, without having the hatred which it inspires neutralised by the contempt, is made contemptible by utterly wanting that colour of right which authority and power, put forth in defence of our Allies—­in asserting their just claims and avenging their injuries, might have given.  But we, instead of triumphantly displaying our power towards our enemies, have ostentatiously exercised it upon our friends; reversing here, as every where, the practice of sense and reason;—­conciliatory even to abject submission where we ought to have been haughty and commanding,—­and repulsive and tyrannical where we ought to have been gracious and kind.  Even a common law of good breeding would have served us here, had we known how to apply it.  We ought to have endeavoured to raise the Portugueze in their own estimation by concealing our power in comparison with theirs; dealing with them in the spirit of those mild and humane delusions, which spread such a genial grace over the intercourse, and add so much to the influence of love in the concerns of private life.  It is a common saying, presume that a man is dishonest, and that is the readiest way to make him so:  in like manner it may be said, presume that a nation is weak, and that is the surest course to bring it to weakness,—­if it be not rouzed to prove its strength by applying it to the humiliation of your pride.  The Portugueze had been weak; and, in connection with their Allies the Spaniards, they were prepared to become strong.  It was, therefore, doubly incumbent upon us to foster and encourage them—­to look favourably upon their efforts—­generously to give them credit upon their promises—­to hope with them and for them; and, thus anticipating and foreseeing, we should, by a natural operation of love, have contributed to create the merits which were anticipated and foreseen.  I apply these rules, taken from the intercourse between individuals, to the conduct of large bodies of men, or of nations towards each other, because these are nothing but aggregates of individuals; and because the maxims of all just law, and the measures of all sane practice, are only an enlarged or modified application of those dispositions of love and those principles of reason, by which the welfare of individuals, in their connection with each other, is promoted.  There was also here a still more urgent call for these courteous and humane principles as guides of conduct; because, in exact proportion to the physical weakness of Governments, and to the distraction and confusion which cannot but prevail, when a people is struggling for independence and liberty, are the well-intentioned and the wise among them remitted for their support to those benign elementary feelings of society, for the preservation and cherishing of which, among other important objects, government was from the beginning ordained.