On the
contrary, my clear opinion is, that the liberties of Europe cannot
possibly be preserved but by her remaining a very great and
preponderating power. The design at present evidently pursued by the
combined potentates, or of the two who lead, is totally to destroy her
as such a power. For Great Britain resolves that she shall have no
colonies, no commerce, and no marine. Austria means to take away the
whole frontier, from the borders of Switzerland to Dunkirk. It is their
plan also to render the interior government lax and feeble, by
prescribing, by force of the arms of rival and jealous nations, and
without consulting the natural interests of the kingdom, such
arrangements as, in the actual state of Jacobinism in France, and the
unsettled state in which property must remain for a long time, will
inevitably produce such distraction and debility in government as to
reduce it to nothing, or to throw it back into its old confusion. One
cannot conceive so frightful a state of a nation. A maritime country
without a marine and without commerce; a continental country without a
frontier, and for a thousand miles surrounded with powerful, warlike,
and ambitious neighbors! It is possible that she might submit to lose
her commerce and her colonies: her security she never can abandon.
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