They might
dispute about the value of their several shares, but the contiguity to
each of the demandants always furnished the means of an adjustment.
Though hereafter the world will have cause to rue this iniquitous
measure, and they most who were most concerned in it, for the moment
there was wherewithal in the object to preserve peace amongst
confederates in wrong. But the spoil of France did not afford the same
facilities for accommodation. What might satisfy the House of Austria in
a Flemish frontier afforded no equivalent to tempt the cupidity of the
King of Prussia. What might be desired by Great Britain in the West
Indies must be coldly and remotely, if at all, felt as an interest at
Vienna, and it would be felt as something worse than a negative interest
at Madrid. Austria, long possessed with unwise and dangerous designs on
Italy, could not be very much in earnest about the conservation of the
old patrimony of the House of Savoy; and Sardinia, who owed to an
Italian force all her means of shutting out France from Italy, of which
she has been supposed to hold the key, would not purchase the means of
strength upon one side by yielding it on the other: she would not
readily give the possession of Novara for the hope of Savoy. No
Continental power was willing to lose any of its Continental objects for
the increase of the naval power of Great Britain; and Great Britain
would not give up any of the objects she sought for, as the means of an
increase to her naval power, to further their aggrandizement.
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