We have not in the slightest degree impaired
the strength of the common enemy in any one of those points in which his
particular force consists,--at the same time that new enemies to
ourselves, new allies to the Regicide Republic, have been made out of
the wrecks and fragments of the general confederacy. So far as to the
selfish part. As composing a part of the community of Europe, and
interested in its fate, it is not easy to conceive a state of things
more doubtful and perplexing. When Louis the Fourteenth had made himself
master of one of the largest and most important provinces of
Spain,--when he had in a manner overrun Lombardy, and was thundering at
the gates of Turin,--when he had mastered almost all Germany on this
side the Rhine,--when he was on the point of ruining the august fabric
of the Empire,--when, with the Elector of Bavaria in his alliance,
hardly anything interposed between him and Vienna,--when the Turk hung
with a mighty force over the Empire on the other side,--I do not know
that in the beginning of 1704 (that is, in the third year of the
renovated war with Louis the Fourteenth) the state of Europe was so
truly alarming. To England it certainly was not. Holland (and Holland is
a matter to England of value inestimable) was then powerful, was then
independent, and, though greatly endangered, was then full of energy and
spirit. But the great resource of Europe was in England: not in a sort
of England detached from the rest of the world, and amusing herself
with the puppet-show of a naval power, (it can be no better, whilst all
the sources of that power, and of every sort of power, are precarious,)
but in that sort of England who considered herself as embodied with
Europe, but in that sort of England who, sympathetic with the adversity
or the happiness of mankind, felt that nothing in human affairs was
foreign to her.
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