My dear friend, I hold it impossible that these considerations should
have escaped the statesmen on both sides of the water, and on both sides
of the House of Commons. How a question of peace can be discussed
without having them in view I cannot imagine. If you or others see a way
out of these difficulties, I am happy. I see, indeed, a fund from whence
equivalents will be proposed. I see it, but I cannot just now touch it.
It is a question of high moment. It opens another Iliad of woes to
Europe.
Such is the time proposed for making _a common political peace_ to which
no one circumstance is propitious. As to the grand principle of the
peace, it is left, as if by common consent, wholly out of the question.
Viewing things in this light, I have frequently sunk into a degree of
despondency and dejection hardly to be described; yet out of the
profoundest depths of this despair, an impulse which I have in vain
endeavored to resist has urged me to raise one feeble cry against this
unfortunate coalition which is formed at home, in order to make a
coalition with France, subversive of the whole ancient order of the
world. No disaster of war, no calamity of season, could ever strike me
with half the horror which I felt from what is introduced to us by this
junction of parties under the soothing name of peace. We are apt to
speak of a low and pusillanimous spirit as the ordinary cause by which
dubious wars terminate in humiliating treaties.
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