Mistakes may be lessons.
There seem, indeed, to have been several mistakes in the political
principles on which the war was entered into, as well as in the plans
upon which it was conducted,--some of them very fundamental, and not
only visibly, but I may say palpably erroneous; and I think him to have
less than the discernment of a very ordinary statesman, who could not
foresee, from the very beginning, unpleasant consequences from those
plans, though not the unparalleled disgraces and disasters which really
did attend them: for they were, both principles and measures, wholly new
and out of the common course, without anything apparently very grand in
the conception to justify this total departure from all rule.
For, in the first place, the united sovereigns very much injured their
cause by admitting that they had nothing to do with the interior
arrangements of France,--in contradiction to the whole tenor of the
public law of Europe, and to the correspondent practice of all its
states, from the time we have any history of them.
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