If the Czar refuse to agree to such "a healing temperament," we shall have "nothing to regret but the time we lost to exert all the means that Heaven has made us master of, to reduce him to a peace advantageous to Great Britain." War would become inevitable. In that case
"it ought no less to animate our Ministry to pursue their present measures, than fire with indignation the breast of every honest Briton that a Czar of Muscovy, who owes his naval skill to our instructions, and his grandeur to our forbearance, should so soon deny to Great Britain the terms which so few years ago he was fain to take up with from the Sublime Porte."
"'Tis every way our interest to have the Swede restored to those provinces which the Muscovite has wrested from that crown in the Baltic. _Great Britain can no longer hold the balance in that sea_," since she "_has raised the Muscovite to be a maritime Power there_.... Had we performed the articles of our alliance made by King William with the crown of Sweden, that gallant nation would ever have been a bar strong enough against the Czar coming into the Baltic.... Time must confirm us, that the Muscovite's _expulsion from the Baltic_ is _now_ the principal end of our Ministry."
Butler & Tanner. The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Secret Diplomatic History of The Eighteenth Century, by Karl Marx