The
balance of power was to be thrown in as an inducement, and a sort of
make-weight to supply the manifest deficiency, which must stare him and
the world in the face, between those objects which he was to require the
enemy to surrender and those which he had to offer as a fair equivalent.
To give any force to this inducement, and to make it answer even the
secondary purpose of equalizing equivalents having in themselves no
natural proportionate value, it supposed that the enemy, contrary to the
most notorious fact, did admit this balance of power to be of some
value, great or small; whereas it is plain, that, in the enemy's
estimate of things, the consideration of the balance of power, as we
have said before, was so far from going in diminution of the value of
what the Directory was desired to surrender, or of giving an additional
price to our objects offered in exchange, that the hope of the utter
destruction of that balance became a new motive to the junto of
Regicides for preserving, as a means for realizing that hope, what we
wished them to abandon.
Thus stood the basis of the treaty, on laying the first stone of the
foundation. At the very best, upon our side, the question stood upon a
mere naked bargain and sale. Unthinking people here triumphed, when they
thought they had obtained it; whereas, when obtained as a basis of a
treaty, it was just the worst we could possibly have chosen. As to our
offer to cede a most unprofitable, and, indeed, beggarly, chargeable
counting-house or two in the East Indies, we ought not to presume that
they would consider this as anything else than a mockery.
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