Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/72

. "This language is in favour with the two extremes of English faction. The blind opponents of every minister how happens to be engaged in conducting a war" [Is war then a mere affair of accident?] "can see no danger in national dishonour; and cry out for peace with double vehemence, whenever it is least likely to be concluded well. The dependents, on the other hand, of any feeble government, will strive to lower the expectations of the country—to exclaim against immoderate exertion—to depreciate her powers in war, and her pretensions at a peace:—thus preparing an oblique defence for their employers, and undermining the honest disappointment" [Quere expectations] "of the people when they reflect how little has been done by war, and how much" [of that little] "undone by negociation. But besides being a factious expedient, it is a principle of action equally false and absurd. I deny that we effect any thing more by granting an enemy what are called favourable terms, than convince him that he may go to war with England, gratis. The conditions he obtains will encourage him to try the chance of another war, in the hope of a still more advantageous treaty." Here Vetus entirely shifts the state of the question. The terms of a peace, if not hard, must be immediately favourable! Because we grant an enemy such terms as he has a right to expect, it is made a conclusion that we are also to grant him such as he has no right to expect, and which will be so decidedly advantageous as to induce him to try his fortune still farther against so generous an adversary. That is, Vetus has no idea of the possibility of a just, fair, or honourable peace; his mind refuses to dwell for a moment on any arrangement of terms, which, by bearing hard on one party or another, will not be sure to end speedily, from the desire on one side to retrieve its affairs, and on the other to improve its advantages, in a renewal of war. "The only valid security for peace is the accession to our own strength, and the diminution of our rival's, by the resources and dominions we have wrested from him." First, this security can be good only on one side: secondly, it is not good at all: the