which distinguishes a good from a bad citizen. I know that futility, ignorance, and every kind of profligacy are general: but I know too that they are not universal, and therefore I do not despair. In all events, the merit of preserving our country from beggary, is little inferior to that of preserving it from slavery. They who engage therefore in so good a cause, and pursue it steadily in that public spirit, a revival of which can alone save this nation from misery, from oppression, and perhaps from confusion, the usual consequence of the other two; they will deserve better, I presume to say, the title of "ultimi Britanuorum," even if they should be defeated by the worst subjects of Britain, than that usurer Brutus, and that severe exactor of contributions, Cassius, deserved the title of "ultimi Romanorum," when they were defeated in another manner by the worst citizens of Rome.

After all that has been said in these papers, and all that might be said, concerning the conduct of the house of Austria, from the reign of king William to the present time, it may be proper to add something by way of precaution, and to prevent very false conclusions, that many will be ready to draw from very true premises.

It is notoriously true, that a spirit of bigotry, of tyranny, and of avarice in the court of Vienna, maintained long the troubles in Hungary, which might have been appeased much sooner than they were. Thus a great and constant diversion was kept up in favor of France, even at the time when the two houses of Austria and Bourbon were struggling for that great prize, the Spanish succession, till the French troops took possession of Passau, and the malcontents of Hungary raised contributions in the very suburbs of Vienna.

It is notoriously true, that we might have had nothing more than a defensive war, as I have said in the foregoing papers, to make against France, with an Austrian prince on the throne of Spain, at the death of Charles the Second; if the emperor Leopold would have concurred in the wise and practicable measures which king William proposed.

It is notoriously true, that we might have avoided the defeat at Almanza, and have supported much better the war in Spain; if a predilection for acquisitions in Italy had not determined the councils of Vienna to precipitate the evacuation of Mantua, wherein an army of French was blocked up after the battle of Turin, and which was let loose in this manner, against the opinion of the queen and the States General, time enough to beat us at Almanza.

Finally, for I will descend no more to particulars, it is notoriously true, that we might have taken Toulon, and have carried the war into the best provinces of France, for which queen Anne

had made, at a vast expense, all the necessary preparations; if the Austrians had not detached, in that very point of time, twelve thousand men on the expedition to Naples, and if prince Eugene had not shown too visibly, before persons still alive, that the taking of Toulon was the least of his objects.

These facts are sufficient to show, how much the mistaken policy of the court of Vienna has overloaded her allies during more than half a century, and has defeated the great design which these allies, and Britain in particular, carried on for her at the expense of infinite blood and treasure. Now there are many, in this kingdom, very ready to conclude from these facts, and from others of the same kind posterior to these, that our experience should teach us to neglect the interest of the house of Austria, and to be regardless of all that passes on the continent for the time to come. But surely such conclusions are very false. The principle of our conduct has been right, and our manner of pursuing it alone wrong. It was our neglect of the general interest of Europe, from the Pyrenean treaty to the revolution of our government in one thousand six hundred and eighty-eight, that gave to France a long opportunity, and the means of raising an exorbitant power. It has been zeal without knowledge, and a strange subserviency to private interests, which have almost exhausted this country, and defeated all our endeavors for the public good since that time. This we may alter. The principle of policy we cannot, as long as the division of power and property in Europe continues the same. We are an island indeed: but if a superior power gives the law to the continent, I apprehend that it will give it to us too in some great degree. Our forefathers apprehended, with reason, the exorbitant power of the house of Austria; and thought that the pretensions of Mary queen of Scots might give, even when she was a prisoner, opportunity and advantage, as they did no doubt, to this power to disturb our peace, and even to invade our island. The exorbitant power of the two branches of the house of Bourbon give surely in this respect, as well as in others, at least the same cause of apprehension now. It is, therefore, plainly our interest to maintain the rivalry between the families of Austria and of Bourbon; and for that purpose to assist the former on every occasion against the latter, as far as the common cause of Europe, not her private ambition, requires: and as far as our national circumstances may enable us to measure out our assistance in any conjuncture to her.

These are the measures and proportions, according to which alone political societies ought to unite in alliances, and to assist one another. There is a political, as well as a natural self-love; and the former ought to be, to every member of a commonwealth,

the same determining principle of action, where public interest is concerned, that the latter will be to him most certainly wherever his private interest is concerned. I have heard it often said of one man, that he was a friend or an enemy to the house of Austria; and of another, that he was a friend or an enemy to the house of Bourbon. But these expressions proceed generally from passion and prepossession, as the sentiments they impute must proceed, whenever they are real, from these causes, or from one which is still worse, from corruption. A wise prince, and a wise people, bear no regard to other states, except that which arises from the coincidence or repugnancy of their several interests; and this regard must therefore vary, as these interests do, in the perpetual fluctuation of human affairs. Thus queen Elizabeth and her people opposed the house of Austria, and supported the house of Bourbon, in the sixteenth century. Thus queen Anne and her people opposed the house of Bourbon, and supported the house of Austria, in the eighteenth. The first, indeed, was done with wiser council; the last with greater force of arms. By the first, our country was enriched; by the last, it was impoverished.

N. B.-These considerations were written thus far in the year seventeen hundred and forty-nine, but were never finished.

VOL. II.-40

THE

SUBSTANCE OF SOME LETTERS,

WRITTEN ORIGINALLY IN FRENCH, ABOUT THE YEAR 1720.

ΤΟ

M. DE POUILLY.

SINCE you are so curious to know what passed in a conversation lately between one of your acquaintance and myself, wherein you have been told that I maintained a very singular paradox, I will give you some account of it, a general and short account at least, of the first part, and one more particular and more full of the last, which is called paradoxical. You led me first, in my retreat, to abstract philosophical reasonings: and, though it be late to begin them at forty years of age, when the mind has not been accustomed to them earlier, yet I have learned enough under so good a guide, not to be afraid of engaging in them, whenever the cause of God and of natural religion is concerned.

They were both concerned, very deeply on the occasion you refer to. There had been much discourse, in the company that was present, concerning the absurd opinions, which many theistical philosophers entertained of old about the Supreme Being. Many had been cited, and many reflections had been made on them, by several, when the dispute became particular between Damon and me, he denying, and I affirming that there are sufficient proofs of the existence of one Supreme Being, the first intelligent cause of all things. You may be sure, I made use of those you furnished me with by a geometrical application of the doctrine of final causes, which shows, in various instances, what numberless chances there are against one, that intelligence and

* I chose to call him by this feigned name here.

design were employed in the production of each of these phe

nomena.

When I could not silence my adversary by these proofs though they carry probability up to a reasonable, if not to an absolute, certainty, I insisted on a proof which must give this certainty, I think, to every one who acknowledges that we are capable of demonstrative knowledge. I argued, a posteriori, from the intuitive knowledge of ourselves, and the sensitive knowledge of objects exterior to ourselves, which we have, up to that demonstrative knowledge of God's existence, which we are able to acquire by a due use of our reason. Here we stuck a little, and he was ready to deny all sensitive knowledge, on the chimerical notions of father Malebranche, and some other philosophers, without considering that he deprived himself, in denying the existence of God, of those expedients, by which the others pretended to account for the perception of the ideas of objects exterior to the mind, independently of any sensitive knowledge. I endeavored to show him, that to renounce sensitive knowledge, was to renounce, in some sort, humanity, and to place ourselves in some unknown rank, either above it, or below it. I endeavored to state the true notion, by stating the true bounds, of sensitive knowledge, which is not sufficient indeed to show us the inward constitutions of substances, and their real essences; but which is sufficient to prove to us their existence, and to distinguish them. by their effects. I concluded this article by quoting to him a passage in the logic of Port-royal, wherein it is said, that no man ever doubted, in good earnest, whether there is an earth, a sun, and a moon, no more than he doubted, whether the whole is bigger than a part: that we may say, with our mouths, that we doubt of all these things, because we may lie; but that we cannot oblige our minds to do so: from whence it is concluded, more generally than I shall conclude, that Pyrrhonians are not a sect persuaded of what they say, but a sect of liars. He did not insist much longer, but left me to pursue my argument from intuitive and sensitive knowledge, to a demonstration of God's existence, which great and fundamental truth results necessarily from a concurrence of all the kinds of human knowledge employed in the proof of it.

I was not interrupted by him in the course of this argument, nor did he attempt to break any links of this chain of demonstration, but followed the example of all those who refuse to yield to it. They are so far from considering the degrees, the bounds, and within these, the sufficiency, of human knowledge, that they ask continually, and that others endeavor, very often, vainly to give them, knowledge concerning the divine nature and attributes particularly, which it is impossible and unneces