If,
contrary to all expectations, under such a disgraced and impotent
government, any energy should remain in that country, she will make
every effort to recover her security, which will involve Europe for a
century in war and blood. What has it cost to France to make that
frontier? What will it cost to recover it? Austria thinks that without a
frontier she cannot secure the _Netherlands_. But without her frontier
France cannot secure _herself_. Austria has been, however, secure for an
hundred years in those very Netherlands, and has never been dispossessed
of them by the chance of war without a moral certainty of receiving them
again on the restoration of peace. Her late dangers have arisen not from
the power or ambition of the king of France. They arose from her own ill
policy, which dismantled all her towns, and discontented all her
subjects by Jacobinical innovations. She dismantles her own towns, and
then says, "Give me the frontier of France!" But let us depend upon it,
whatever tends, under the name of security, to aggrandize Austria, will
discontent and alarm Prussia.
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