When an author undertakes to treat of public happiness, he ought to be
certain that he does not mistake passion for right, nor imagination
for principle. Principle, like truth, needs no contrivance. It will
ever tell its own tale, and tell it the same way. But where this is
not the case, every page must be watched, recollected, and compared
like an invented story.

I am surprised at this passage of the Abbe. It means nothing or it
means ill; and in any case it shows the great difference between
speculative and practical knowledge. A treaty according to the Abbe's
language would have neither duration nor affection; it might have
lasted to the end of the war, and then expired with it.--But France,
by acting in a style superior to the little politics of narrow
thinking, has established a generous fame, and won the love of a
country she was before a stranger to. She had to treat with a people
who thought as nature taught them; and, on her own part, she wisely
saw there was no present advantage to be obtained by unequal terms,
which could balance the more lasting ones that might flow from a kind
and generous beginning.

From this part the Abbe advances into the secret transactions of the
two Cabinets of Versailles and Madrid, respecting the independence of
America, through which I mean not to follow him. It is a circumstance
sufficiently striking, without being commented on, that the former
union of America with Britain, produced a power, which, in her hands,
had was becoming dangerous to the world: and there is no improbability
in supposing, that had the latter known as much of the strength of
former, before she began the quarrel, as she has known since, that
instead of attempting to reduce her to unconditional submission, would
have proposed to her the conquest of Mexico. But from the countries