I am ready to allow all that has been said of the valour and experience of our troops, who have fully contributed their part to the great successes abroad; nor is it their fault, that those important victories had no better consequences at home, though it may be their advantage. War is their trade and business: to improve and cultivate the advantages of success, is an affair of the cabinet; and the neglect of this, whether proceeding from weakness or corruption, according to the usual uncertainty of wars, may be of the most fatal consequence to a nation. For, pray let me represent our condition in such a light, as I believe both parties will allow, though perhaps not the consequences I shall deduce from it. We have been for above nine years, blessed with a QUEEN, who besides all virtues that can enter into the composition of a private person, possesses every regal quality that can contribute to make a people happy: of great wisdom, yet ready to receive the advice of her counsellors: of much discernment in choosing proper instruments, when she follows her own judgment, and only capable of being deceived by that excess of goodness which makes her judge of others by herself. Frugal in her management in order to contribute to the public, which in proportion she does, and that voluntarily, beyond any of her subjects; but from her own nature, generous and charitable to all that want or deserve; and in order to exercise those virtues, denying herself all entertainments of expense which many others enjoy. Then if we look abroad, at least in Flanders, our arms have been crowned with perpetual success in battles and sieges, not to mention several fortunate actions in Spain. These facts being thus stated, which none can deny, it is natural to ask how we have improved such advantages, and to what account they have turned? I shall use no discouraging terms. When a patient grows daily worse by the tampering of mountebanks, there is nothing left but to call in the best physicians before the case grows desperate: But I would ask, whether France or any other kingdom, would have made so little use of such prodigious opportunities, the fruits whereof could never have fallen to the ground, without the extremist degree of folly and corruption, and where those have lain, let the world judge? Instead of aiming at peace, while we had the advantage of the war, which has been the perpetual maxim of all wise states, it has been reckoned factious and malignant even to express our wishes for it; and such a condition imposed, as was never offered to any prince who had an inch of ground to dispute; _Quae enim est conditio pacis; in qua ei cum quo pacem facias, nihil concedi potest?_[8]