Will this author say, that, in a war with Spain, such an assistance would not be of absolute necessity?
that it would not be the most gross of all follies to refuse it?
In the next place, his method of stating a medium of six years of war, and six years of peace, to decide this question, is altogether unfair.
To say, in derogation of the advantages of a war, that navigation is not equal to what it was in time of peace, is what hitherto has never been heard of.

No war ever bore that test but the war which he so bitterly laments.

One may lay it down as a maxim, that an average estimate of an object in a steady course of rising or of falling, must in its nature be an unfair one; more particularly if the cause of the rise or fall be visible, and its continuance in any degree probable.

Average estimates are never just but when the object fluctuates, and no reason can be assigned why it should not continue still to fluctuate.

The author chooses to allow nothing at all for this: he has taken an average of six years of the war.