If built upon a basis
fundamentally erroneous, it can only be retrieved by some of those
unforeseen dispensations which the all-wise, but mysterious, Governor of
the world sometimes interposes, to snatch nations from ruin. It would
not be pious error, but mad and impious presumption, for any one to
trust in an unknown order of dispensations, in defiance of the rules of
prudence, which are formed upon the known march of the ordinary
providence of God.
It was not of that sort of war that I was amongst the least
considerable, but amongst the most zealous advisers; and it is not by
the sort of peace now talked of that I wish it concluded. It would
answer no great purpose to enter into the particular errors of the war.
The whole has been but one error. It was but nominally a war of
alliance. As the combined powers pursued it, there was nothing to hold
an alliance together. There could be no tie of _honor_ in a society for
pillage. There could be no tie of a common _interest_, where the object
did not offer such a division amongst the parties as could well give
them a warm concern in the gains of each other, or could, indeed, form
such a body of equivalents as might make one of them willing to abandon
a separate object of his ambition for the gratification of any other
member of the alliance. The partition of Poland offered an object of
spoil in which the parties _might_ agree. They were circumjacent, and
each might take a portion convenient to his own territory.
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