To give any force to this inducement, and to make it answer even the secondary purpose of equalizing equivalents having in themselves no natural proportionate value, it supposed that the enemy, contrary to the most notorious fact, did admit this balance of power to be of some value, great or small; whereas it is plain, that, in the enemy's estimate of things, the consideration of the balance of power, as we have said before, was so far from going in diminution of the value of what the Directory was desired to surrender, or of giving an additional price to our objects offered in exchange, that the hope of the utter destruction of that balance became a new motive to the junto of Regicides for preserving, as a means for realizing that hope, what we wished them to abandon. Thus stood the basis of the treaty, on laying the first stone of the foundation. At the very best, upon our side, the question stood upon a mere naked bargain and sale. Unthinking people here triumphed, when they thought they had obtained it; whereas, when obtained as a basis of a treaty, it was just the worst we could possibly have chosen. As to our offer to cede a most unprofitable, and, indeed, beggarly, chargeable counting-house or two in the East Indies, we ought not to presume that they would consider this as anything else than a mockery. As to anything of real value, we had nothing under heaven to offer, (for which we were not ourselves in a very dubious struggle,) except the island of Martinico only. When this object was to be weighed against the Directorial conquests, merely as an object of a value at market, the principle of barter became perfectly ridiculous: a single quarter in the single city of Amsterdam was worth ten Martinicos, and would have sold for many more years' purchase in any market overt in Europe. How was this gross and glaring defect in the objects of exchange to be supplied? It was to be made up by argument. And what was that argument? The extreme utility of possessions in the West Indies to the augmentation of the naval power of France. A very curious topic of argument to be proposed and insisted on by an ambassador of Great Britain! It is directly and plainly this:--"Come, we know that of all things you wish a naval power, and it is natural you should, who wish to destroy the very sources of the British greatness, to overpower our marine, to destroy our commerce, to eradicate our foreign influence, and to lay us open to an invasion, which at one stroke may complete our servitude and ruin and expunge us from among the nations of the earth. Here I have it in my budget, the infallible arcanum for that purpose. You are but novices in the art of naval resources. Let you have the West Indies back, and your maritime preponderance is secured, for which you would do well to be moderate in your demands upon the Austrian Netherlands."