The country and commerce were
both your own when you began to conquer, in the same manner and form
as they had been your own a hundred years before. Nations have
sometimes been induced to make conquests for the sake of reducing
the power of their enemies, or bringing it to a balance with their
own. But this could be no part of your plan. No foreign authority
was claimed here, neither was any such authority suspected by you,
or acknowledged or imagined by us. What then, in the name of heaven,
could you go to war for? Or what chance could you possibly have in the
event, but either to hold the same country which you held before,
and that in a much worse condition, or to lose, with an amazing
expense, what you might have retained without a farthing of charges?
War never can be the interest of a trading nation, any more than
quarrelling can be profitable to a man in business. But to make war
with those who trade with us, is like setting a bull-dog upon a
customer at the shop-door. The least degree of common sense shows
the madness of the latter, and it will apply with the same force of
conviction to the former. Piratical nations, having neither commerce
or commodities of their own to lose, may make war upon all the
world, and lucratively find their account in it; but it is quite
otherwise with Britain: for, besides the stoppage of trade in time
of war, she exposes more of her own property to be lost, than she
has the chance of taking from others. Some ministerial gentlemen in
parliament have mentioned the greatness of her trade as an apology for
the greatness of her loss.
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