" Whatever else has been said was
much in the same spirit. Reasons of this kind never touched the
substantial merits of the war. They were in the nature of dilatory
pleas, exceptions of form, previous questions. Accordingly, all the
arguments against a compliance with what was represented as the popular
desire (urged on with all possible vehemence and earnestness by the
Jacobins) have appeared flat and languid, feeble and evasive. They
appeared to aim only at gaining time. They never entered into the
peculiar and distinctive character of the war. They spoke neither to the
understanding nor to the heart. Cold as ice themselves, they never could
kindle in our breasts a spark of that zeal which is necessary to a
conflict with an adverse zeal; much less were they made to infuse into
our minds that stubborn, persevering spirit which alone is capable of
bearing up against those vicissitudes of fortune which will probably
occur, and those burdens which must be inevitably borne, in a long war.
I speak it emphatically, and with a desire that it should be marked,--in
a _long_ war; because, without such a war, no experience has yet told us
that a dangerous power has ever been reduced to measure or to reason. I
do not throw back my view to the Peloponnesian War of twenty-seven
years; nor to two of the Punic Wars, the first of twenty-four, the
second of eighteen; nor to the more recent war concluded by the Treaty
of Westphalia, which continued, I think, for thirty.
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