Austrian province on one side, and her partition of Poland on the other. He can scarcely express his astonishment and regret, that Holland and Denmark should so long have escaped falling into our grasp, after the brilliant example of ‘rapacity and obduracy’ set to our phlegmatic, plodding, insipid, _commercial_ spirit by Prussia and Russia. But now that we have rescued ‘our natural prey’ from the French, it is to be hoped, that we shall make sure of it. Vetus’s great principles of morality seem to be borrowed from those of Peachum, and his acknowledgements of merit to flow much in the same channel:—‘A good clever lad, this Nimming Ned—there’s not a handier in the whole gang, nor one more industrious to save goods from the fire!’—His chief objection to that ‘revolutionist,’ Bonaparte, (Vetus too is a projector of revolutions) is not, evidently, to his being a robber, but because he is at the head of a different gang; and we are only required to bestir ourselves as effectually as he does, _for the good of mankind_! But Vetus, whose real defect is a contraction of intellectual vision, sees no alternative between this rapacious and obdurate policy, and unconditional submission, between ‘restoring all’ or none. This is not sound logic. He wishes by a _coup sur_ to prevent an unfair and dishonourable peace, by laying down such rules as must make peace impossible, under any circumstances, or on any grounds that can enter into human calculation. According to him, our only security against the most wild and extravagant concessions, is the obstinate determination to make none; our only defence against the fascinations of our own folly, is to take refuge from the exercise of our discretion in his impregnable paradoxes.—‘The same argument which goes to justify a war, prescribes war measures of the most determined and active character.’ Good; because the nature and essence of war is _a trial of strength_; and, therefore, to make it as advantageous to ourselves as possible, we ought to exert all the strength that we possess. ‘The very object,’ continues Vetus, ‘that of weakening the enemy, for which we pursue those vigorous measures, and strip him of his possessions, renders it _necessary_ to keep him in that state of weakness by which he will be deterred from repeating his attack; and, _therefore, to hold inflexibly_ what we have acquired.’ Here again Vetus confounds himself, and, involving a plain principle in the mazes of a period, represents war not as a trial of strength between contending states, each exerting himself to the utmost, but as a voluntary assumption of superiority on the part of one of them. He talks of stripping the enemy of his possessions, and holding them inflexibly—as matters of course, as questions of will, and not of power.