Spain was not expected to live out the year, it is plain enough that on one assumption--that, namely, of the paramount necessity of preventing the accession of a grandson of Louis to the Spanish throne--the negotiations could not with safety have been protracted much longer. The latter, in short, of the two questions which were propounded at the outset of the examination may be said to depend for its answer upon the former. Supposing that the exclusion of the Duke of Anjou or the Duke of Berry from the throne of Spain was a political object worth bargaining for at all, William cannot, I think, be charged with having paid an improvident price for it. Nor does it appear to me reasonably arguable that the object in question was not worth bargaining to obtain. It has been urged by some critics of this transaction that the apprehensions roused in those days at the prospect of a Bourbon prince succeeding to the throne of Charles were exaggerated; that experience has shown the fallacy of supposing that ties of kindred count for much in determining the policy of monarchs, and that it would certainly have been better that the Spanish throne should pass to the descendant of a French king than that the two Sicilies and other points of vantage on the Mediterranean should pass to a future French king himself. But those who so argue rely too much upon general principles and pay too little attention to the facts of the particular case. One might readily admit that ties of kindred count for little in determining the policy of monarchs, and at the same time retain the full conviction that the subsistence of the relation of grandfather and grandson between the then King of France--the man and the circumstances being what they were--and the King of Spain would have been fraught with the most disastrous consequences for all Europe. There could be no serious doubt that the Duke of Anjou or the Duke of Berry would be a mere puppet with his strings pulled from beyond the Pyrenees, and that the whole resources of his kingdom would at once have been drawn upon by Louis to enable him to resume the war. Had the French crown rested upon another head, or even had there been any probability that the new occupant of the Spanish throne would have time allowed him to outgrow the _regni novitas_ and strike out a policy of his own, the case would have been different. But we must judge of the situation by the light of the facts as they were. It is beside the point to argue that because a grandson of Louis after all succeeded the Spanish king, and after a desolating war for his dethronement continued to reign over Spain, and his children after him, without Europe being "a penny the worse"--it is beside the point, I say, to argue that an arrangement which operated not amiss for Europe from 1712 onwards would have been tolerable in 1698. Philip V. was well enough as a king of Spain, after his grandfather's power had been