‘On Allies and Alliances; with Strictures on the Faith of Regular Governments’

This chapter presents the lecture by John Thelwall 'On Allies and Alliances; with Strictures on the Faith of Regular Governments’. The lecture continued the central theme: the ‘causes and calamities’ of war. In the lecture, Thelwall criticizes the tendency of governments to act only on the basis of short-term calculations of selfish interest, establishing treaties with particular nations while forgetting the common interest of all. The target is of course the British government who had strategically sought out a number of diplomatic relationships with other European countries in the hope of undermining Revolutionary France. By pointing to the always transient and usually damaging nature of such international alliances, Thelwall aims to vindicate his own claim that the only just wars are those of self-defence.