that the armies of the Allies were of this way of thinking, and that, when they evacuated all these countries, it was a stratagem of war to decoy France into ruin,—­or that, if in a treaty we should surrender them forever into the hands of the usurpation, (the lease the author supposes,) it is a master-stroke of policy to effect the destruction of a formidable rival, and to render her no longer an object of jealousy and alarm.  This, I assure the author, will infinitely facilitate the treaty.  The usurpers will catch at this bait, without minding the hook which this crafty angler for the Jacobin gudgeons of the new Directory has so dexterously placed under it.

Every symptom of the exacerbation of the public malady is, with him, (as with the Doctor in Moliere,) a happy prognostic of recovery.—­Flanders gone. Tant mieux.—­Holland subdued.  Charming!—­Spain beaten, and all the hither Germany conquered.  Bravo!  Better and better still!—­But they will retain all their conquests on a treaty.  Best of all!—­What a delightful thing it is to have a gay physician, who sees all things, as the French express it, couleur de rose! What an escape we have had, that we and our allies were not the conquerors!  By these conquests, previous to her utter destruction, she is “wholly to lose that preponderance which she held in the scale of the European powers.”  Bless me! this new system of France, after changing all other laws, reverses the law of gravitation.  By throwing in weight after weight, her scale rises, and will by-and-by kick the beam.  Certainly there is one sense in which she loses her preponderance:  that is, she is no longer preponderant against the countries she has conquered.  They are part of herself.  But I beg the author to keep his eyes fixed on the scales for a moment longer, and then to tell me, in downright earnest, whether he sees hitherto any signs of her losing preponderance by an augmentation of weight and power.  Has she lost her preponderance over Spain by her influence in Spain?  Are there any signs that the conquest of Savoy and Nice begins to lessen her preponderance over Switzerland and the Italian States,—­or that the Canton of Berne, Genoa, and Tuscany, for example, have taken arms against her,—­or that Sardinia is more adverse than ever to a treacherous pacification?  Was it in the last week of October that the German States showed that Jacobin.  France was losing her preponderance?  Did the King of Prussia, when he delivered into her safe custody his territories on this side of the Rhine, manifest any tokens of his opinion of her loss of preponderance?  Look on Sweden and on Denmark:  is her preponderance less visible there?