The whole of the enemy’s plan was known when Lord Malmesbury was sent with his scrap of equivalents to Paris.  Yet, in this unfortunate attempt at negotiation, instead of fixing these points, and assuming the balance of power and the peace of Europe as the basis to which all cessions on all sides were to be subservient, our solicitor for peace was directed to reverse that order.  He was directed to make mutual concessions, on a mere comparison of their marketable value, the base of treaty.  The balance of power was to be thrown in as an inducement, and a sort of make-weight to supply the manifest deficiency, which must stare him and the world in the face, between those objects which he was to require the enemy to surrender and those which he had to offer as a fair equivalent.

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,