separate from that of the continent, what has she to do with continental Allies? If her interests may be and are interwoven with those of the rest of Europe, is it too much to expect from her a common sacrifice to the common cause? We quarrel with France on continental grounds; we strip her of her colonies to support the quarrel; and yet we refuse to restore any part of them, in order to secure peace. If so, we are only ostensible parties in the contest, and in reality robbers. ‘The first policy of a wise people is to make rival nations afraid to disturb them, to impress their enemies with a _terrific sense_,’ (how magnificent is this epic mode of expression) ‘that to attack them is to suffer not only transient defeats, but deep, grievous, and _irrecoverable losses_; and to hold in abhorrence any peace which shall not be a living record of _their own superiority_, and a monument worthy of those warriors, through whose noble blood it was obtained.’ If the losses sustained in war were to be irrecoverable, it is easy to foresee that the seat of empires would be very soon changed in almost all cases whatever. But Vetus here, as is customary with him when it tends to enforce the hyperbolical effect of his style, assumes as a broad ground of national wisdom, a physical impossibility. It is not in the nature of things that the losses of rival States should be irrecoverable. Vetus would do better to decree at once that the possessions of nations are _unassailable_ as well as _irrecoverable_, which would prevent war altogether. But still more preposterous is the madness or malice of the assertion, that no peace can be made by a wise nation, which is not a living record of _their own superiority_. ‘This is the key-stone which makes up the arch’ of Vetus’s indestructible war-system. Can it have escaped even the short-sighted logic of this writer, that to make superiority an indispensable condition of a wise peace is to proscribe peace altogether, because certainly this superiority cannot belong at the same time to both parties, and yet we conceive that the consent of both parties is necessary to a peace? Any other peace, we are told, than that which is at all times impracticable between rival states, ought not only never to be made, but it ought to be held in abhorrence, we ought to shudder at its approach as the last of evils, and throw it to an immeasurable distance from us. This is indeed closing up the avenues to peace, and shutting the gates of mercy on mankind, in a most consummate and scientific manner. Our philosophic rhetorician appears also to forget, in that high tone in which he speaks of the _monuments raised by the noble blood of warriors_, that these sort of monuments are cemented by the blood of others as well as by our own, and tell the survivors a double story. His heated imagination seems to have been worked up into a literal belief of his own assertion, that the French nation are a rank non-entity; or he supposes that there is