had any other designs than the extirpation of true religion, and the
universal slavery of mankind, have been daily increased. We shall find
that they have increased by the declension of the house of Austria,
which treaties and our interest engage us to support.

But had their acquisitions been made only by the force of arms, had they
grown stronger only by victories, and more wealthy only by plunder, our
ministers might, with some appearance of reason, have imputed their
success to accident, and informed us, that we gained, in the mean time,
a sufficient counterbalance to those advantages, by an uninterrupted
commerce, and by the felicity of peace; peace, which, in every nation,
has been found to produce affluence, and of which the wisest men have
thought that it could scarcely be too dearly purchased.

But peace has, in this nation, by the wonderful artifices of our
ministers, been the parent of poverty and misery; we have been so far
from finding our commerce extended by it, that we have enjoyed it only
by a contemptible patience of the most open depredations, by a long
connivance at piracy, and by a continued submission to insults, which no
other nation would have borne.

We have been so far from seeing any part of our taxes remitted, that we
have been loaded with more rigorous exactions to support the expenses of
peace, than were found necessary to defray the charges of a war against
those, whose opulence and power had incited them to aspire to the
dominion of the world.

How these taxes have been employed, and why our trade has been
neglected, why our allies have been betrayed, and why the ancient
enemies of our country have been suffered to grow powerful by our