laid down in favor of the adverse power with whom he was to negotiate.
The adverse party himself may safely be trusted to take care of his
_own_ aggrandizement. But (as if the black boxes of the several parties
had been exchanged) Mr. Fox's English ambassador, by some odd mistake,
would find himself charged with the concerns of France. If we were to
leave France as she stood at the time when Mr. Fox proposed to treat
with her, that formidable power must have been infinitely strengthened,
and almost every other power in Europe as much weakened, by the
extraordinary basis which he laid for a treaty. For Avignon must go from
the Pope; Savoy (at least) from the King of Sardinia, if not Nice.
Liege, Mentz, Salm, Deux-Ponts, and Basle must be separated from
Germany. On this side of the Rhine, Liege (at least) must be lost to the
Empire, and added to France. Mr. Fox's general principle fully covered
all this. How much of these territories came within his rule he never
attempted to define. He kept a profound silence as to Germany. As to
the Netherlands he was something more explicit. He said (if I recollect
right) that France on that side might expect something towards
strengthening her frontier. As to the remaining parts of the
Netherlands, which he supposed France might consent to surrender, he
went so far as to declare that England ought not to permit the Emperor
to be repossessed of the remainder of the ten Provinces, but that _the
people_ should choose such a form of independent government as they
liked. This proposition of Mr. Fox was just the arrangement which the
usurpation in France had all along proposed to make. As the
circumstances were at that time, and have been ever since, his
proposition fully indicated what government the Flemings _must_ have in
the stated extent of what was left to them. A government so set up in
the Netherlands, whether compulsory, or by the choice of the
_sans-culottes_, (who he well knew were to be the real electors, and the
sole electors,) in whatever name it was to exist, must evidently depend