France joined a few years afterwards, and, "in spite of her ruined finances and her peaceful king, aimed a mortal blow at the British monarchy." Yet, notwithstanding this long-standing and inveterate animosity of the French court to this country, we find the same France, in the next paragraph but one, stigmatized as republican and Corsican, "with centric and eccentric scribbled o'er," as if these were important distinctions, though Vetus himself "would prefer for France the scourge of Bonaparte, to the healthier, and to England not less hostile, sovereignty of the banished house of Bourbon." Why then pertinaciously affix these obnoxious epithets? They are bad ornaments of style—they are worse interpreters of truth.
To prove his general axiom, that in order to be stable, "the conditions of peace must bear hard on one of the parties," Vetus asks, "Were the powers that partitioned unhappy Poland so conciliated by her acquiescence in their first encroachments, as to abstain from offering her any second wrong?" Now this is an instance precisely in point to prove the direct reverse of Vetus's doctrine: for here was a treaty in which the terms bore exceedingly hard on one of the parties, and yet this only led to accumulated wrongs by a renewal of war. We say that hard conditions of peace, in all cases, will lead to a rupture. If the parties are nearly equal, they will lead to resistance to unfounded claims; if quite unequal—to an aggravation of oppression. But would Russia and Prussia have been more lenient or deterred from their encroachments, if Poland had pretended to impose hard conditions of peace on them? These governments partitioned Poland, not in consequence of any treaty good or bad, but because they had the will and the power to do so. Vetus would terrify the French into moderation by hard conditions of peace, and yet he supposes us to be in the same relation to France as Poland to its implacable enemies.
"Did the wretched complaisance of the leading continental courts in their several treaties with France, ensure their tranquillity even for a moment?" This is still altering the record. The
