F the governments of Vienna and London, with that of the Hague, had by a
great and timely effort doubled his effective force when the French were
broken and disheartened
by defeat,
he would have marched to Paris in the next campaign, and dictated peace
to the _Grand Monarque_ in his gorgeous halls of Versailles. It was
short-sighted economy which entailed upon the nations the costs and
burdens of the
next ten years of the War of the Succession, as it did the still
greater costs and burdens of the Revolutionary
War, after the still more decisive success of the Allies in the summer
of 1793, when the iron frontier of the Netherlands was entirely
broken through, and their advanced posts, without any force to oppose
them, were within an hundred and
sixty miles of Paris. This parsimony
of the Allied governments, and their invincible repugnance to
the efforts and sacrifices which could alone bring, and certainly would
have brought, the war to
an early and
glorious issue, is the cause of the subsequent conversion of the war
into one of blockades and sieges, and of its being transferred to
Flanders,
where its progress was necessarily
slow, and cost enormous, from the
vast number of strongholds which required to be reduced at every
stag
