Volume 2 — CHAPTER XIX.

Summary—The Function of Sea Power and the Policy of Great Britain in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

THE outbreak of the French Revolutionary War found Great Britain unprepared. For nearly ten years her course had been directed by the second Pitt, who, though inheriting the lofty spirit and indomitable constancy of his father, yet loved peace rather than war, and sought the greatness and prosperity of his country through the development of her commerce and manufactures and the skilful management of her finances. He strove also consistently for the reduction of expenditure, including that for the military, and even for the naval establishment. As late as February 17, 1792, when the Revolution had already been nearly three years in progress and France was on the eve of declaring war against Prussia and Austria, he avowed his expectation of many years of peace for the British empire; and the estimates provided for only sixteen thousand seamen and marines. "Unquestionably," said he, "there never was a time in the history of this country, when, from the situation of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace than at the present moment." When the war with Germany began, Great Britain proclaimed and steadily maintained an attitude of neutrality; and the Minister asserted over and over again, to France and to her enemies, the intention not to interfere with the internal affairs of that country. This purpose continued unshaken through the tremendous events of the succeeding summer and autumn; through the assaults on the Tuileries on June 20 and August 10, through the suspension of the king which immediately followed the latter date, through the revolting massacres of September, finally through the deposition of the King and the proclamation of the Republic. Doubtless these events gave a series of shocks to public opinion in Great Britain, alienating the friends and embittering the enemies of the Revolution; doubtless whatever sympathy with the French advance towards freedom the ministers felt was chilled and repelled by the excesses and anarchy which marked its steps; but, whatever their personal feelings, no indication appears, either in their public actions or in their private correspondence as since revealed, of any intention to depart from a strict, even though cold, neutrality, until near the end of the year 1792.

The leaders of the party in France, which at this time was exerting the greatest influence upon the course of the Revolution, had long favored war with foreign nations, as the surest means to destroy the monarchy and unite public feeling in favor of the Republic and of the Revolution. The course of events had justified their forecast. Prussia and Austria had given provocation; and, although the latter at least would not have proceeded to extremes, war had been proclaimed and the fall of the monarchy had followed. There was, however, one nation with which the revolutionists imagined themselves to be in sympathy, and which they thought also as a whole sympathized with them. That nation was the English; between England and France there was to be friendship, and concurrence of effort to a common end. Herein the French leaders fatally misconceived the character of English freedom, and the nature of its successive advances to the conditions in which it then stood, and through which Englishmen hoped for yet further enlargement. Reverence for the past, and, in the main, for the existing order of things; profound regard for law and for an orderly method of making needful changes; a constant reference to the old rights and customs of the English people; respect for vested rights, for agreements, for treaties,—such were the checks which had modified and controlled the actions of the English, even when most profoundly moved. The spirit which dominated the French Revolution was that of destruction. The standard, by which all things human were to be tried, was a declaration of human rights put forth by its leaders, which contained indeed many noble, true, and most essential principles; but, if aught existing did not at once square with those principles, the forces of the Revolution were to advance against it and sweep it from the face of the earth. No respect for the past, no existent prescriptive rights, no treaties that seemed contrary to natural rights, were to control the actions of the revolutionists. They were to destroy, and to rebuild from the foundation, according to their own interpretation of what justice demanded.

The courses and aims, therefore, of the two nations were wholly divergent, and, as these were but the expression in either case of the national temper, the hope of sympathy and concurrence was delusive; but it was a natural delusion, fostered in the hearts of the sanguine Frenchmen by the utterances of many warm-hearted friends of freedom in the rival nation, and by the more violent words of a limited number of revolutionary societies. The former of these were, however, quickly alienated by the atrocities which began to stain the progress of the Revolution; while the latter, being supposed by the French leaders to represent the feeling of the British nation, as distinguished from its Government, contributed to draw them further in that path of reckless enmity to existing institutions which led to the war with Great Britain.

Still, so long as the exponents of French public feeling confined themselves to violent and irregular action within their own borders, and to declamations, which did not go beyond words, against the governments and institutions of other nations, the British ministry remained quiet, though watchful. There are extant private letters, written in the early part of November, 1792, by the Prime Minister, and by his relative, Lord Grenville, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, which indicate that they rejoiced in having maintained the neutrality of Great Britain, and that they looked forward to its continuance, though with anxiety. But on the 19th of that month the National Convention, which then comprised within itself both the executive and legislative functions of the French Government, adopted a declaration that it would grant fraternity and succor to all people who should wish to recover their liberty; [471] and it charged administrative officers to give republican generals the necessary orders to carry help to those people and to defend their citizens who had been molested, or who might be subject to molestation, on account of their devotion to the cause of liberty. As if further to emphasize the scope of this decree, for such in effect it was, it was ordered to be translated and printed in all languages.

By this official action the French Government had taken a great and important step, radically modifying its relations to all other states. The decree did not mention the governments with which France was then at war, limiting to their people the application of its terms. On the contrary, when a member of the Convention, a month later, proposed to insert words which should restrict its operation to those peoples "against whose tyrants France was, or should hereafter be, at war," and gave, as his reason, to remove the uneasiness of Great Britain, the motion found no support. The previous question was moved, and the Convention passed on to other business. [472]

The men who then wielded the power of France had thus gone beyond a simple inveighing against other governments, and the mere use of words calculated to excite discontent among the people of other states, and had announced an intention to interfere forcibly in their internal affairs whenever called upon to do so by citizens who, in the opinion of the French Government, were deprived of their just liberty or molested in their efforts to recover it. The anarchist of our own day, who contents himself with verbally attacking existing laws and institutions, however vehemently, may remain untouched so long as he confines himself to the expression and advocacy of his opinions; but when he incites others to action in order to carry out his ideas, he is held responsible for the effect of his words; and when he takes measures leading to violence, he is open to arrest and punishment. Such as this, among governments, was the step taken by France in November, 1792. She not only incited the citizens of other states to rebellion, but announced her intention of supporting them, and gave to her generals the necessary orders for carrying that purpose into effect.

Meanwhile the Austrian Netherlands was rapidly overrun and annexed to the French Republic, which thus abandoned the lofty posture of disinterestedness, and the disclaimers of all desire for conquest which the leaders of the Revolution had made from the tribune of the Convention. Soon after followed a decree declaring the navigation of the Scheldt, the great artery of Belgium, open to the sea. This set aside, without negotiation, the compacts of the previous owners of the Netherlands, by which the navigation of the river from the sea was reserved to Holland, within whose territory the mouth lay,—an agreement consecrated by renewed treaties, and which, by long standing, had become part of the public law of Europe. The act strikingly showed the determination of the French leaders to disregard treaties which conflicted with their construction of the natural rights of man; for they were at peace with Holland, yet made no attempt to obtain their end by negotiation.

The interests and the peace of Great Britain were now seriously threatened. For over a century her statesmen had held, and held rightly, that the possession of Belgium by France was incompatible with her security. They had supported the legal, though iniquitous, claim of the Dutch to the exclusive navigation of the Scheldt; and, above all, the country was bound by a treaty of alliance to defend Holland, whose rights as defined by treaty had been rudely set aside by France. Moreover, on the 28th of November deputations from the British revolutionary societies were received at the bar of the Convention, and the President of the latter, in reply to their address, made a speech strongly hostile to the British Government, affecting to distinguish between it and the people over whom it ruled; a pretence which was equally maintained in the United States of America, where the French minister the following year dared to appeal openly to the people against the policy of their government.

On the 1st of December the British Government issued a proclamation, calling out the militia on account of seditions and insurrectionary movements dangerous to the state, and at the same time, as required by law, summoned Parliament to meet on the 15th. The hopes and the patience of Pitt were alike exhausted; and although he still continued to listen to any overtures that contained a promise of peace, he had determined to exact guarantees, amounting to more than words, which should assure the safety of Great Britain and her ally, Holland. Meantime the British forces should be organized and got ready to act. The French Government had proclaimed its intention of interfering in the affairs and overthrowing the institutions of all states, when, in its judgment, their citizens were molested in their efforts for freedom. To await supinely the moment when it should please France to act would be the decision of folly; nor was it possible, for one imbued with English traditions, to view without distrust a government which appeared to look for justice by disregarding law, and avowedly disowned existing compacts and treaties in favor of a speculative somewhat called the Rights of Man, concerning which, its own passions being the judge, revelations as numerous might be expected as were vouchsafed to Mahomet.

There are some who can only account for the different lines of action followed by Pitt, before and after 1792, in both cases with the indomitable tenacity of his race and lineage, by conceiving two entirely different personalities in the same man,—a sudden and portentous change, unprecedented save by miracle as in the case of St. Paul. More truly may be seen in him the same man acting under circumstances wholly different, and in the later instance unforeseen. It was not given to Pitt to read the future of the French Revolution with the prophetic eye of Burke. He had the genius, not of the seer, but of the man of affairs; but that he had the latter in an eminent degree is evident from the very rapidity of the change, when he was at last forced to the conviction that external conditions were wholly changed. He was at heart the minister of peace, the financier, the promoter of commerce and of gradual and healthy reforms; but in a great speech, delivered before he had begun to fear that peace would end in his time, he impressed upon his hearers his own profound conviction that all the blessings which England then enjoyed rested upon the union of liberty with law. Having enumerated the material circumstances to which the existing prosperity of the nation was to be ascribed, he continued:—

"But these are connected with others more important. They are obviously and necessarily connected with the duration of peace, the continuance of which, on a secure and durable footing, must ever be the first object of the foreign policy of this country. They are connected still more with its internal tranquillity, and with the natural effects of a free but well-regulated government.... This is the great and governing cause, the operation of which has given scope to all the other circumstances which I have enumerated. It is the union of liberty with law, which, by raising a barrier equally firm against the encroachments of power and the violence of popular commotion, affords to property its just security, produces the exertion of genius and labor, the extent and solidity of credit, the circulation and increase of capital; which forms and upholds the national character and sets in motion all the springs which actuate the great mass of the community through all its various descriptions.... On this point, therefore, let us principally fix our attention; let us preserve this first and most essential object, and every other is in our power." [473]

It was perfectly consistent with this position that, when Pitt saw a neighboring state in convulsions from the struggle of a turbulent minority for liberty without law; when that state had not only proclaimed its purpose, but taken steps to promote a similar condition in other nations; when societies representing a small, but active and radical, minority in England were openly fraternizing with France; when the great leader of the English Opposition had, from his seat in Parliament, praised the French soldiery for joining the mobs,—it was perfectly consistent with his past that Pitt should oppose with all his powers a course of action which not only endangered the internal peace upon which the prosperity of England rested, but also carried into the realm of international relations the same disorganizing principles, the same disregard for law, covenant, and vested right that had reduced France to her then pitiful condition. Not only Great Britain, but the European world was threatened with subversion. That Pitt did not bewail aloud the wreck of his hopes, the frustration of his career, the diversion of his energies from the path that was dearest to him, shows the strength, not the instability, of the man. That he laid aside the reforms he had projected, and discouraged all movements towards internal change, which, by dividing the wills of the people, might weaken their power for external action, proves but that concentration of purpose which, sacrificing present gratification to future good, achieves great ends. Never does the trained seaman appear greater, has well said the naval novelist Cooper, than when, confronted with unexpected peril, he turns all his energies from the path in which they were before directed, to meet the new danger. "Never," writes Lanfrey of the critical period between Essling and Wagram, "had the maxim of sacrificing the accessory to the principal, of which Napoleon's military conceptions afford so many admirable examples, and which is true in every art, been applied with more activity and fitness.... The complications which he most feared were to him, for the moment, as though they did not exist. No secondary event had power to draw him off from the great task he had primarily assigned to himself." [474] All instinctively recognize the courage as well as the wisdom of this conduct in the dangers which the seaman and the soldier are called to meet; why deny its application to the no less urgent, and at times more momentous, issues presented to the statesman? If, as may fairly be claimed, it is to the maritime power of Great Britain that Europe owes the arrest of a subversive revolution, if to that maritime power is due that a great, irresistible, and beneficent movement toward the liberty and welfare of the masses survived a convulsion that threatened its destruction, then to Pitt, as the master spirit who directed the movements of the British nation, the gratitude of Europe is also due.

When Parliament met on the 15th of December, the king's speech mentioned the disturbances that had taken place in the country and the threatening state of affairs in Europe, and recommended an increase in the land and sea forces of the kingdom. This measure was alleged, among other grievances by France, as indicating an unfriendly feeling toward her on the part of the British Government; but it has been reasonably urged that she had already manned a fleet superior to that which Great Britain had in commission, besides keeping ready for instant service a large number of other ships, which could have no possible enemy except the British navy. Viewed simply as measures of precaution, of the necessity for which every state is its own judge, it is difficult to criticise severely either government; but the fact remains that France had been the first to arm her fleet, and that Great Britain did not do the same until substantial grounds of offence had been given.

By a singular coincidence, on the same day that Parliament met, the National Convention issued a second celebrated decree, yet more decisive in its character than that of November 19, which it was evidently meant to emphasize and supplement. The generals of the Republic were now directed "in every country which the armies of the French Republic shall occupy, to announce the abolition of all existing authorities, of nobility, of serfage, of every feudal right and every monopoly; to proclaim the sovereignty of the people and convoke the inhabitants in assemblies to form a provisional government, to which no officer of a former government, no noble, nor any member of the former privileged corporations, shall be eligible." To this was added the singular and most significant declaration that "the French nation will treat as enemies any people which, refusing liberty and equality, desires to preserve its prince and privileged castes, or to make any accommodation with them." It was impossible to announce more clearly that this was no mere war of opinions, but, on the contrary, one of principles and methods fraught with serious and practical consequences; nor could any despot have worded a more contemptuous denial of the rights of a people concerning their form of government. The revolutionary spirit, which underlay the frequent changes of men in the French Government, showed how fixed was its purpose to alter forcibly the institutions of other states, regardless of the habits and affections of their citizens, by the systems imposed upon the smaller neighboring nations, hammered all upon the anvil of French centralization, in defiance of the wishes and the struggles of the people concerned. Europe thus found itself face to face with a movement as enthusiastic in its temper and as radical in its demands as the invasions of the Mahometans.

To this fanatical, yet lofty, and in the masses of the French people generous and devoted spirit, continental Europe had no equal force to oppose. It is a common remark that the eighteenth century saw the appearance of several ruling princes who were possessed with the liberal views of the rising school of philosophers, and who sincerely desired to effect the improvement and elevation of their people,—to remove grievances, to lighten burdens, to advance the general welfare. The wisdom or strength of these men had not been equal to the task they had assumed. There still remained unjustifiable inequalities of conditions, grievous abuses, a depression of the lower orders, and a stagnation among the upper, which seemed to place insurmountable obstacles in the way of advance, and made it impossible for the masses to feel a living, national interest in governments which contributed so little to their happiness. This good-will among the sovereigns of the day was indeed a most encouraging symptom. It made it possible to effect the needed changes and to advance without a violent break with the past,—to have reform and progress without revolution; but to achieve these ends was beyond the power of the ruler alone: there was needed the voice and co-operation of all classes in the state. This Louis XVI. had sought to obtain; but unfortunately, not only for France but for Europe, the most numerous and important of the orders of the States-General had met the difficulties of the situation, the outcome of centuries, not with firmness, but with impatience. From the beginning was shown the determination to break with the past,—to proceed at a bound to the desired goal. No regard was had to the fitness of the people for such sudden change, to the immense conservative force of established custom, nor to the value of continuity in the life of a nation. Nor was this all. Law, as well as custom, was lightly set at nought. The first Assembly threw off the fetters imposed by its instructions, and assumed powers which had not been confided to it. By means of these usurped faculties the Constituent Assembly radically changed the constitution of France.

The instantaneous effect upon the French people and upon the internal condition of the state is well known. As the far-reaching character of the movement, and its lack of efficient elements for self-control, became evident, the anxieties of conservative men in other nations, however desirous of steady progress in human liberty, could not fail to be aroused. It was notorious, long before 1792, that ill-balanced as was the new constitutional frame of government in France, and radical as was the temper of the leading members of the Legislative Assembly, the deliberations of the latter were overawed by the clubs and the populace of Paris, and that government had practically passed into the hands of the mob which was worked by the clubs and the radical municipality of the city. The grotesque yet terrible scenes of June 20 and August 10, the hideous massacres of September, not merely showed the frantic excesses of which a French mob is capable, but also and more solemnly evinced how completely governmental control was swallowed up in anarchy. Still, all these things were internal to France, and it might be hoped would so remain until the French people had worked their own solution of their troubles. The decrees of November 19 and December 15 blasted this hope, and formally announced that French beliefs and methods were to be forcibly spread throughout Europe. How was the assault to be met?

Few statesmen of that day expected that this mighty and furious spirit of misrule would so soon bend its neck to an uncontrolled and energetic despotism. The coming of the one man, Napoleon, was dimly seen in the distance by the thoughtful, who knew that anarchy clears the way for absolute power; but the speedy appearance and tyrannous efficiency of the Committee of Public Safety, with its handmaid the Revolutionary Tribunal, were not foreseen. The statesmen of 1793 saw the strength, but were more impressed by the superficial exhibition of disorder in the popular outburst. They expected to repress it, to drive it back within the limits of France, and impose the guarantees necessary for the security of Europe, by meeting it with numerous, well-organized armies of veteran troops, and by a solid, orderly financial system, wielding plentiful resources. In short, they thought to cope with a mighty spirit by means of elaborate and powerful machinery. The means were insufficient. The living spirit developed the rude but efficient organism which was needed to direct its energies and which was in sympathy with its aims; the elaborate machinery of armies and finances failed, because not quickened by the life of the nations by whose rulers it was wielded.

Fortunately for Europe and for freedom, another spirit, less demonstrative but equally powerful, was already living and animating another great nation, peculiarly fitted by position and by the character of its power to grapple with and exhaust that which was vicious and destructive in the temper of the French Revolution. As already said, the great feature of English freedom was its respect for law, for established authority, for existing rights; its conservative while progressive character, in which it was directly opposed to the subversive principles of the French. But the English temper, when once aroused, was marked also by a tenacity of purpose, a constancy of endurance, which strongly supported the conservative tendencies of the race and were equally foreign to the French character. Once embarked in the strife, and definitely committed for the time to the preservation, rather than to the progress, of society, under leaders who strongly embodied the national traits, hatred of the enemy's principles became more conspicuous, superficially, than the love of freedom, which yet retained its hold deep in the hearts of both rulers and people. War does not live on the benevolent emotions, though it may be excited by them. The position and the maritime power of England were great factors, great determining factors in the final issue of the French Revolutionary wars; but these were but the machinery of the British power. The great gain to the cause of stability in human history was made when the spirit of order and law, embodied in the great nation which it had created, rose against the spirit of lawlessness and anarchy, which had now possessed a people who for long years and by nature had been submissively subject to external authority. Two living forces had met in a desperate struggle, which was not indeed for life and death, for both would survive; but from which should result the predominance of the one that was compatible with reasonable freedom, and the subjection of the other, which knew no mean between anarchy and servile submission. Less ebullient, but more steadfast and deeply rooted, the former wore out the latter; it forced it back through the stage of prostration under absolute power until it had returned to the point whence it started, there to renew its journey under conditions that made it no longer a danger to the whole world.

Such being the profound nature of the strife, its course may be regarded under two aspects, not necessarily opposed, but rather complementary. First, and obviously, there is the policy of the leaders on either side, the objects which they proposed to themselves, the steps by which they sought to compass those objects, and the results of their various movements. Secondly, there is the more obscure and wider question as to the relative influence of the great elements of power which entered as unconscious factors in the strife,—mighty forces, wielded or directed by statesmen, and yet after all their masters. Of these factors Sea Power was one, and among the most important.

The circumstances of the times had placed this force wholly in the hands of Great Britain. She wielded it as absolute mistress. Its action, like that of all the other forces in the strife, depended in part upon the direction given it by the British leaders for the purposes of war. From this point of view, its structure appears to be simple and rudimentary; the related movements of a few principal parts are open to inspection and susceptible of criticism. But from another point of view, in its course and influence, this wonderful and mysterious Power is seen to be a complex organism, endued with a life of its own, receiving and imparting countless impulses, moving in a thousand currents which twine in and around one another in infinite flexibility, not quite defying the investigation which they provoke, but rendering it exceedingly laborious. This Power feels and is moved by many interests; it has a great history in the past, it is making a great and yet more wonderful history in the present. Grown to the size of a colossus, which overshadows the earth without a second,—unless it be the new rival rising in the Western hemisphere,—it is now assailed with a fury and virulence never before displayed. Attacked in every quarter and by every means, sought to be cut off alike from the sources and from the issues of its enterprise, it adapts itself with the readiness of instinct to every change. It yields here, it pushes there; it gives ground in one quarter, it advances in another; it bears heavy burdens, it receives heavy blows; but throughout all it lives and it grows. It does not grow because of the war, but it does grow in spite of the war. The war impedes and checks, but does not stop, its progress. Drained of its seamen for the war-fleets, it modifies the restrictions of generations, throws open its ports to neutral ships, its decks to neutral seamen, and by means of those allies maintains its fair proportions, until the enemy proclaims that the neutral who carries but a bale of British goods, even to his own country, ceases thereby to be a neutral and becomes the enemy of France; a proclamation which but precipitated the ruin of French commerce, without markedly injuring that of its rival.

The maritime power and commercial prosperity of Great Britain sprang essentially from the genius and aptitudes of her people, and were exceptionally favored and developed by the peculiar situation of the British Islands. To these natural advantages the policy of the government added somewhat, as at times it also ignorantly imposed obstacles; but the actions of statesmen only modified, for good or ill, they did not create the impulses which originated and maintained the maritime activity of the British people. The most celebrated measure designed to foster that activity, Cromwell's Navigation Act, had now been in operation for a century and a quarter; but, while its superficial effects had secured the adherence of the British people and the envy of foreign states, shrewder economists, even a century ago, had come to regard it as an injury to the commercial prosperity of the country. They justified it only as a means of forcing the development of the merchant marine, the nursery of the naval force upon which the safety of Great Britain must depend. Whatever the fluctuations of its fortunes or the mistakes of governments in the past, the sea power of Great Britain had at the opening of the French Revolution attained proportions, and shown a tenacity of life, which carried the promise of the vast expansion of our own day. Painfully harassed during the American Revolution, and suffering from the combined attacks of France, Spain, and Holland, seeing then large portions of its carrying trade pass into the hands of neutrals, and bereft by the event of the war of its most powerful colonies, it had not only survived these strains, but by the immediate and sustained reaction of the peace had, in 1793, more than regained its pre-eminence. Once more it stood ready, not only to protect its own country, but to sustain, with its well-proved vitality, the demands of the continental war; where the armies of her allies, long untouched by the fires which breathed in France and England, were but a part of the machinery through which the maritime power of the latter energized.

How far the ministers of the day understood, and how wisely they used, the sea power of Great Britain, is a question that will demand a separate consideration. That is the question of military policy,—of the strategy of the war. We have first to consider the influence of the maritime power in itself, and the functions discharged by Great Britain simply in consequence of possessing this great and unique resource. The existence, powers, and unconscious working of a faculty obviously offer a subject for consideration distinct from the intelligent use of the faculty; though a correct appreciation of the former conduces to an accurate criticism of the latter.

Because of the decay of the French navy during the early years of the war, the Republic, after 1795, virtually abandoned all attempt to contest control of the sea. A necessary consequence was the disappearance of its merchant shipping, a result accelerated by the capture of most of its colonies, and the ruin of its colonial system by the outbreaks of the blacks. So great was this loss, due rather to the natural operation of Great Britain's naval supremacy than to any particular direction by the ministry, that the Executive Directory, in a message to the Council of Five Hundred, January 13, 1799, could use the expression, scarcely exaggerated, "It is unhappily too true that there is not a single merchant vessel sailing under the French flag." Two years later the Minister of the Interior reported to the Consular Government that the commerce with Asia, Africa, and America was almost naught, the importations direct from all those quarters of the globe amounting to only 1,500,000 francs, while the exports to them were but 300,000 francs. As the advancing tide of French conquest extended the territory and alliances of the Republic, the commerce of its new friends was involved in the same disaster that had befallen its own. The shipping of Spain and Holland thus also disappeared from the sea, and a large part of their colonies likewise passed into the hands of Great Britain, to swell the commerce and to employ the shipping of the latter. The navy of neither of these Powers exerted any effect upon the control of the sea, except so far as they occupied the attention of detachments of the British navy, so marked had the numerical and moral superiority of the latter become.

The disappearance of so large a body of merchant shipping as that of France, Holland, and Spain, could not, of course, imply the total loss to commerce and to the world of the traffic previously done by it. Much less could these three countries wholly dispense with the supplies for which, during peace, they had chiefly depended upon the sea. On the contrary, the necessity for importing many articles by sea was increased by the general continental war, which not only created a long hostile frontier, prohibitory of intercourse on the land side, but also, by drawing great numbers of workers from their ordinary occupations to the armies of all parties, caused a material diminution in the products of Europe at large. In France, shut in both by land and sea, with a million of men under arms, and confronted with the stern determination of England to reduce her by starvation, the danger and the suffering were particularly great; and had there not been a singularly abundant and early harvest in 1794, the aim of her enemy might then have been in great measure reached.

Such a condition of things offered of course a great opening to neutral maritime states. They hastened to embrace it,—among others the United States, whose carrying trade grew very rapidly at this time; but the naval power of Great Britain during this period was so overwhelming, and her purpose so strong, that she succeeded in imposing severe restraints upon neutrals as well as enemies, in matters which she considered of prime importance. Sweden and Denmark strenuously resisted her claim to prevent the importation into France of provisions and naval stores; but failing, through the hostile attitude of the Czarina towards France, to receive the powerful support of Russia, as in 1780 they had done, they were forced to succumb to the Power of the Sea. The United States likewise were constrained by their impotence to yield, under protest, before the same overwhelming Power. While reserving the principle, they in practice conceded naval stores to be contraband, and on the subject of provisions accepted a compromise which protected their own citizens without materially injuring France. No serious attempt was made to change the existing rule of international law, by which enemies' property on board neutral ships was good prize. As seizure involved sending the ship into a port of the captor, and a possible detention there during the adjudication of suspected goods, the inconvenience of the process was a powerful deterrent. The English courts also held that the produce of hostile colonies was lawful prize if found in neutral bottoms; because, the trade of those colonies being by the mother countries interdicted to foreigners in peace, the concession of it in war was merely a ruse to defraud the other belligerent of his just rights of capture,—a plea uselessly contested by American writers. All these causes operated to the injury of both hostile and neutral commerce, and to the same extent, in appearance at least, to the benefit of the British; and they are cited simply as illustrative of the natural working of so great a force as the Sea Power of Great Britain then was. The results were due, not to the skill with which the force was used or distributed, but to sheer preponderance of existing brute strength.

By the destruction of the enemies' own shipping and by denying neutrals the right to carry to them many articles of the first importance, Great Britain placed the hostile countries in a state of comparative isolation, and created within their borders a demand for the prohibited merchandise which raised its price and made the supplying of it extremely profitable. When commercial intercourse is thus refused its usual direct roads, it seeks a new path, by the nearest circuitous course, with all the persistency of a natural force. The supply will work its way to the demand, though in diminished volume, through all the obstacles interposed by man. Even the contracted lines about a beleaguered city will thus be pierced by the ingenuity of the trader seeking gain; but when the blockade is extended over a long frontier, total exclusion becomes hopeless. In such cases the tendency of commerce is to seek a centre near the line which it intends to cross, and there to accumulate the goods which are to pass the hostile frontier and reach the belligerent. That centre will usually be in a neutral seaport, to which trade is free, and a clearance for which will afford no pretext for seizure or detention by the opposite belligerent. Thus, in the American Revolution, the neutral Dutch island of St. Eustatius became the rendezvous and depot of traders who purposed to introduce their goods, even contraband of war, into the West India islands of either party to that contest; and it was asserted that upon its capture by the British, in 1781, when war began with Holland, large amounts of property belonging to English merchants, but intended for French customers, were found there. So, in the American Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, the town of Nassau in the British Bahamas became a centre at which were accumulated stores of all kinds intended to break through the blockade of the Southern coast.

So again, in the wars of the French Revolution, as long as Holland remained in alliance with Great Britain, that country was the centre from which foreign goods poured into France and the continent of Europe; but when the United Provinces had been overrun by French troops, and a revolution in their government had attached them to the French policy, commerce, driven from their now blockaded coast, sought another depot farther to the eastward, and found it in Bremen, Hamburg, and some other German ports,—of which, however, Hamburg was by far the most favored and prosperous. Through Hamburg the coffee and sugar of the West Indies, the manufactured goods of Great Britain, the food products of America, the luxuries of the East, poured into Germany; and also into France, despite the prohibitive measures of French governments. An indication of this change in the course of commerce is found in the fact that the imports from Great Britain alone into Germany, which amounted to £2,000,000 in 1792, had in 1796, the year after Holland became allied to France, increased to £8,000,000, although the purchasing power of Germany had meanwhile diminished. In the same time the tonnage annually clearing from Great Britain to Germany increased from 120,000 to 266,000. Similar results, on a much smaller scale, were seen at Gibraltar when Spain attempted to prevent British goods entering her own ports; and again at Malta, when the possession of that island offered British commerce a foothold far advanced in the Central Mediterranean. Somewhat similar, likewise, were the advantages of the islands of Ceylon and Trinidad with reference to the mainlands of India and South America, which gave to them a particular commercial as well as strategic value, and led England to accept them as her compensations at the Peace of Amiens.

In such cases the temporary commercial centre not only reaps the profits of the broker, but all classes of its community benefit by the increase of employments, of floating capital, and of floating population. Precisely analogous to these was the office which her geographical position and unrivalled control of the sea enabled Great Britain to discharge toward the European world during the French Revolution. Her maritime power and commercial spirit, the gradual though rapid growth of past generations, enabled her at once to become the warehouse where accumulated the products of all nations and of all seas then open to commerce, and whence they were transhipped to the tempest-tossed and war-torn Continent. So also her watery bulwarks, traversed in every direction by her powerful navy, secured her peaceful working as the great manufactory of Europe, and thus fostered an immense development of her industries, which had become more than ever necessary to the welfare of the world, since those of Holland and France were either crippled for want of raw material or isolated by their impotence at sea. Great Britain impeded the direct admission of tropical products to the Continent; but their re-exportation from her own ports and the export of British manufactures became the two chief sources of her singular prosperity. The favorable reaction produced by this concentration within her borders of so much of the commercial machinery of the civilized world, is evident. Activities of every kind sprang up on all sides, increasing the employment of labor and the circulation of capital; and, while it is vain to contend that war increases the prosperity of nations, it must be conceded that such a state of things as we have depicted affords much compensation to the nation concerned, and may even increase its proportionate prosperity, when compared with that of its less fortunate enemies. To quote the words of Lanfrey: "The English nation had never at any time shown more reliance upon its own resources than when Pitt, in 1801, retired after eight years of war. The people bore without difficulty the heavy taxes which the war imposed upon them, and what was more astonishing still, Pitt had found no opposition in Parliament to his last Budget. The immense increase in the industrial prosperity of England triumphantly refuted the predictions of her enemies, as well as the complaints of alarmists. As the effect of every fresh declaration of war upon the Continent had been to diminish competition in the great market of the world and to throw into her hands the navies and colonies of her adversaries, the English had begun to look upon the loan of millions and the subsidies as so much premium paid for the development of their own resources." [475]

It is not, therefore, merely as a weapon of war in the hands of the ministry that the sea power of Great Britain is to be regarded; nor yet only as the fruitful mother of subsidies, upon whose bountiful breasts hung the impoverished and struggling nations of the Continent. Great as were its value and importance in these respects, it had yet a nobler and more vital function. Upon it depended the vigorous life of the great nation which supplied the only power of motive capable of coping with the demoniac energy that then possessed the spirit of the French. Great Britain, though herself unconscious of the future, was in the case of a man called upon to undergo a prolonged period of trial, exposure, and anxiety, severely testing all his powers, physical and mental. However sound the constitution, it is essential that, when thus assailed by adverse external influences, all its vital processes should be protected, nourished, and even stimulated, or else the bodily energies will flag, fail, and collapse. This protection, this nourishment, the maritime power ministered to the body politic of the state. Despite the undeniable sufferings of large classes among the people, the ministry could boast from year to year the general prosperity of the realm, the flourishing condition of commerce, the progressive preponderance and control of the sea exerted by the navy, and a series of naval victories of unprecedented brilliancy, which stimulated to the highest degree the enthusiasm of the nation. Such a combination of encouraging circumstances maintained in full tension the springs of self-confidence and moral energy, in the absence of which no merely material powers or resources are capable of effective action.

By the natural and almost unaided working of its intrinsic faculties, the sea power of Great Britain sustained the material forces of the state and the spirit of the people. From these we turn to the consideration of the more striking, though not more profound, effects produced by the use made of this maritime power by the British ministry—to the policy and naval strategy of the war—in curtailing the resources and sapping the strength of the enemy, and in compelling him to efforts at once inevitable, exhausting, and fruitless. In undertaking this examination, it will be first necessary to ascertain what were the objects the ministers proposed to achieve by the struggle in which they had embarked the nation. If these are found to agree, in the main, with the aim they should have kept before them, through realizing the character of the general contest, and Great Britain's proper part in it, the policy of the war will be justified. It will then only remain to consider how well the general direction given to the naval and military operations furthered the objects proposed,—whether the strategy of the war was well adapted to bring its policy to a successful issue.

The sudden revulsion of feeling in the British ministry, consequent upon the decrees of November 19 and December 15, has been mentioned. It was then realized that not only the internal quiet of Great Britain was endangered, but that the political stability of Europe was threatened by a Power whose volcanic energy could not be ignored. There was not merely the fear that extreme democratic principles would be transmitted from the masses of one country to those of another still unprepared to receive them. To say that the British Government went to war merely to divert the interest of the lower orders from internal to foreign relations is not a fair statement of the case. The danger that threatened England and Europe was the violent intervention of the French in the internal affairs of every country to which their armies could penetrate. This purpose was avowed by the Convention, and how sincerely was proved by the history of many an adjoining state within the next few years. Although the worst excesses of the Revolution had not yet occurred, enough had been done to indicate its tendencies, and to show that, where it prevailed, security of life, property, and social order disappeared.

Security, therefore, was from the first alleged as the great object of the war by the Prime Minister, who undoubtedly was the exponent of the government, as truly as he was the foremost man then in England. In his speech of February 12, 1793, upon the French declaration of war, he returns again and again to this word, as the key-note to the British policy.

"Not only had his Majesty entered into no treaty, but no step even had been taken, and no engagement formed on the part of our Government, to interfere in the internal affairs of France, or attempt to dictate to them any form of constitution. I declare that the whole of the interference of Great Britain has been with the general view of seeing if it was possible, either by our own exertions or in concert with any other Power, to repress this French system of aggrandizement and aggression, with the view of seeing whether we could not re-establish the blessings of peace; whether we could not, either separately or jointly with other Powers, provide for the security of our own country and the general security of Europe."

It is only fair to Pitt to compare the thought underlying this speech of February 12, 1793, with that of February 17, 1792, already quoted, in order that there may be realized the identity of principle and conviction which moved him under circumstances so diverse. This position he continually maintained from year to year; nor did he, when taunted by the leader of the Opposition with lack of definiteness in the objects of the war, suffer himself to be goaded into any other statement of policy. It was in vain that the repeated jeer was uttered, that the ministry did not know what they were driving at; and when the constant recurrence of allied disasters and French successes on the Continent, preceding as they did the most brilliant successes of the British navy, made yet more poignant the exultation of the Opposition, Pitt still refused, with all his father's proud tenacity, to give any other account of his course than that he sought security—peace, yes, but only a secure peace. To define precisely what success on the part of Great Britain, or what reverses suffered by France, would constitute the required security, was to prophesy the uncertain fortunes of war, and the endurance of that strange madness which was impelling the French nation. When a man finds his interests or his life threatened by the persistent malice of a powerful enemy, he can make no reply to the question, how long or how far he will carry his resistance, except this: that when the enemy's power of injury is effectually curtailed, or when his own power of resistance ends, then, and then only, will he cease to fight. It fell to Pitt's lot, at one period of the war, to be brought face to face with the latter alternative; but the course of the French Government—of the Directory as well as of Napoleon—justified fully the presentiment of the British Government in 1793, that not until the aggressive power of France was brought within bounds, could Europe know lasting peace. Peace could not be hoped from the temper of the French rulers.

Whatever shape, therefore, the military operations might assume, the object of the war in the apprehension of the British minister was strictly defensive; just as the French invasion of the Austrian Netherlands, though an offensive military operation, was, in its inception, part of a strictly defensive war. To the larger and more general motive of her own security and that of Europe, there was also added, for Great Britain, the special treaty obligation to assist Holland in a defensive struggle,—an obligation which was brought into play by the French declaration of war against the United Provinces. It is necessary to note the two causes of war, because the relation of Great Britain to the wider conflict was different from that which she bore to the defence of Holland, and entailed a different line of action. The treaty called upon her to contribute a certain quota of land forces, and the character of her particular interest, in both the Netherlands and Holland, made it expedient and proper that British troops should enter the field for their protection; but after the disastrous campaign of 1794 had subdued Holland to France, and a revolution in its government had changed its relations to Great Britain, the troops were withdrawn, and did not again appear on the Continent until 1799, when favorable circumstances induced a second, but futile attempt to rescue the Provinces from French domination.

The part borne by the troops of England in the earlier continental campaigns was therefore but an episode, depending upon her special relations to Holland, and terminated by the subjection of that country to France. What was the relation of Great Britain to the wider struggle, in which, at the beginning, almost all the nations of the Continent were engaged? What functions could she discharge towards curtailing the power of France, and so restoring to Europe that security without which peace is but a vain word? Upon the answers to these questions should depend the criticism of the use made by the British ministry of the nation's power. To condemn details without having first considered what should be the leading outlines of a great design, is as unsafe as it is unfair; for steps indefensible in themselves may be justified by the exigencies of the general policy. It is not to be expected that, in a war of such vast proportions and involving such unprecedented conditions, serious mistakes of detail should not be made; but, if the great measures adopted bear a due proportion both to the powers possessed and to the end aimed at, then the government will have fulfilled all that can be demanded of it.

The sea power which constituted the chief strength of Great Britain furnished her with two principal weapons: naval superiority, which the course of the war soon developed into supremacy, and money. The traditional policy of a strong party in the state, largely represented in the governing classes, was bitterly adverse to a standing army; and the force actually maintained was to a great extent neutralized by the character of the empire, which, involving possessions scattered over all quarters of the globe, necessitated dispersion instead of concentrated action. The embarrassment thus caused was increased by the dangerously discontented condition of Ireland, involving the maintenance of a considerable permanent force there, with the possibility of having to augment it. Furthermore, the thriving condition of the manufactures and commerce of England, protected from the storm of war ravaging the Continent and of such vital importance to the general welfare of Europe, made it inexpedient to withdraw her people from the ranks of labor, at a time when the working classes of other nations were being drained for the armies.

For these reasons great operations on land, or a conspicuous share in the continental campaigns became, if not absolutely impossible to Great Britain, at least clearly unadvisable. It was economically wiser, for the purposes of the coalitions, that she should be controlling the sea, supporting the commerce of the world, making money and managing the finances, while other states, whose industries were exposed to the blast of war and who had not the same commercial aptitudes, did the fighting on land. This defines substantially the course followed by the ministry of the day, for which the younger Pitt has been most severely criticised. It is perhaps impossible to find any historian of repute who will defend the general military conduct of the Cabinet at whose head he stood; while the brilliant successes of the Seven Years' War have offered a ready text for disparagers, from his contemporary, Fox, to those of our own day, to draw a mortifying contrast between his father and himself. Yet what were the military enterprises and achievements of the justly famed Seven Years' War? They were enterprises of exactly the same character as those undertaken in the French Revolutionary War, and as those which, it may be added, are so constant a feature of English history, whether during times of European peace or of European war, that it may reasonably be suspected there is, in the conditions of the British empire, some constant cause for their recurrence. Like the petty wars which occur every few years in our generation, they were mixed military and naval expeditions, based upon the fleet and upon the control of the sea, scattered in all quarters of the world, employing bodies of troops small when compared to the size of continental armies, and therefore for the most part bearing, individually, the character of secondary operations, however much they may have conduced to a great common end.

It is an ungracious task to institute comparisons; but, if just conclusions are to be reached, the real facts of a case must be set forth. The elder Pitt had not to contend with such a navy as confronted his son at the outbreak of the French Revolution. The French navy, as is avowed by its historians, had received great and judicious care throughout the reign of Louis XVI.; it had a large and splendid body of ships in 1793; it enjoyed the proud confidence of the nation, consequent upon its actions in the war of 1778; and, although its efficiency was fatally affected by the legislation of the National Assembly and by the emigrations, it was still an imposing force. Not until years of neglect had passed over it, and the fatal Battle of the Nile had been fought, did its character and weight sink to the same relative insignificance that the elder Pitt encountered in the Seven Years' War. The elder, like the younger, shaped his system of war upon the control of the sea, upon the acquisition of colonies, upon subsidizing allies upon the Continent, and, as main outlines of policy, these were undoubtedly correct; but the former had in his favor heavy odds in the weak condition of the French navy, and in having on his side the great military genius of the age. On the side of the elder Pitt fought Frederick the Great, against a coalition, numerically overwhelming indeed, but half-hearted, ill-knit, and led by generals far inferior to their great opponent, often mere creatures of the most corrupt Court favor. Against the younger Pitt arose a greater than Frederick, at the very moment of triumph, when the combined effects of the sea power of England, of the armies of Austria, and of the incompetency of the Directory had brought the Revolution "to bay,"—to use the words of a distinguished French naval officer and student. [476] In 1796 and in 1799 Bonaparte, and Bonaparte alone, rescued from impending destruction—not France, for France was not the object of Pitt's efforts—but that "system of aggrandizement and aggression" to which France was then committed.

The elder Pitt saw his work completed, though by weaker hands; the younger struggled on through disappointment after disappointment, and died under the shadow of Austerlitz, worn out in heart and mind by the dangers of his country. Contemporaries and men of later generations, British and foreigners, have agreed in attributing to him the leading part in the coalitions against Revolutionary France; but they have failed to admit the specific difficulties under which he labored, and how nearly he achieved success. It is easy to indulge in criticism of details, and to set one undertaking against another; to show the failures of expeditions landed on the French coast in the Seven Years' War; to point out that Wolfe's conquest of Canada in 1759, by freeing the American colonies from their fear of France, promoted their revolt against Great Britain, while Nelson in 1798, and Abercromby in 1801, saved Egypt, and probably India also, to England; to say that the elder Pitt did not regain Minorca by arms, while the younger secured both it and Malta. Martinique fell to the arms of both; the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, Trinidad, prizes of the later war, may fairly be set against Havana and Manila of the earlier. In India, Clive, the first and greatest of British Indian heroes, served the elder Pitt; yet before the arms of the younger fell Mysore, the realm of Hyder Ali and Tippoo Saib, the most formidable enemies that Britain had yet met in the Peninsula. Such comparisons and arguments are endless; partly because there is much to be said on both sides, but chiefly because they concern details only, and do not touch the root of the matter.

The objects of the two Pitts were different, for the circumstances of their generations were essentially diverse. The task of the one was to extend and establish the great colonial system, whose foundations had been laid by previous generations, and to sustain in Europe the balance of power between rival, but orderly, governments; that of the other was to steady the social order and political framework of Great Britain herself, and of Europe, against a hurricane which threatened to tear up both by the roots. Each in his day, to strengthen his country and to weaken the enemy, pursued the same great line of policy, which in the one age and in the other fitted the situation of Great Britain. To extend and consolidate her sea power; to lay the world under contribution to her commerce; to control the sea by an all-powerful navy; to extend her colonial empire by conquest, thereby increasing her resources, multiplying her naval bases, and depriving her enemy alike of revenues and of points whence he could trouble English shipping; to embarrass the great enemy, France, by subsidizing continental allies,—such was the policy of both the Pitts; such, alike in the Revolution and in the Seven Years' War, was the policy imposed by a due recognition, not only of the special strength of Great Britain, but of her position in relation to the general struggle. Frederick in the one case, Austria in the other, needed the money, which only the sustained commercial prosperity of England could supply. The difference in the actual careers run by the two statesmen is that the son had to meet far greater obstacles than the father, and that, so far as the part of Great Britain herself was concerned, he achieved equal, if not greater, successes. The father had to contend, not against the mighty fury of the French Revolution, but against the courtier generals and the merely professional soldiery of Louis XV. and his mistresses; he had an allied America; he met no mutiny of the British fleet; he was threatened by no coalition of the Baltic Powers; he encountered no Bonaparte. It was the boast of British merchants that under his rule "Commerce was united to and made to grow by war;" but British commerce increased during the French Revolution even more than it did in the earlier war, and the growth of the British navy, in material strength and in military glory, under the son, exceeded that under the father.

In history the personality of the elder statesman is far more imposing than that of the younger. The salient characteristic of the one was an imperious and fiery impetuosity; that of the other, reserve. The one succeeded in power a minister inefficient as an administrator, weak in nerve, and grotesque in personal appearance; the striking contrast presented by the first William Pitt to the Duke of Newcastle, his aggressive temper, the firm self-reliance of his character, his dazzling personality, around which a dramatic halo clung even in the hour of his death, made a vivid impression upon the imagination of contemporaries, and have descended as a tradition to our own days. Save to a few intimate friends, the second Pitt was known to his fellow-countrymen only on the benches of the House of Commons. A temper as indomitable as his father's bore in silence the vastly greater and more prolonged strain of a most chequered struggle; only a few knew that the strain was endured with a cheerfulness, a calmness, and a presence of mind, which of themselves betoken a born leader of men. In the darkest hour, when the last ally, Austria, had forsaken England and consented to treat with France, when the seamen of the fleet had mutinied, and British ships of war, taken violently from their officers, were blockading the approaches to London, Pitt was awakened during the night by a member of the Cabinet with some disastrous news. He listened quietly, gave his directions calmly and clearly, and dismissed the messenger. The latter, after leaving the house, thought it necessary to return for some further instruction, and found the minister again sleeping quietly. The incident is a drama in itself.

In considering the use made of Great Britain's powers for war by the administration of the second Pitt, the broad outlines should be regarded, not as a simply military question,—such as the combinations of a general officer in a campaign,—but as efforts of statesmanship, directing arms in an attempt to compass by force the requirements considered to be most decisive in a political situation. The office of the statesman is to determine, and to indicate to the military authorities, the national interests most vital to be defended, as well as the objects of conquest or destruction most injurious to the enemy, in view of the political exigencies which the military power only subserves. The methods by which the military force will proceed to the ends thus indicated to it—the numbers, character, equipment of the forces to be employed, and their management in campaign—are technical matters, to be referred to the military or naval expert by the statesman. If the latter undertakes to dictate in these, he goes beyond his last and commonly incurs misfortune.

It is not likely that such a division of labor, between the statesman, the soldier, and the seaman, is ever formally made. It is enough if it be practically recognized by the due influence of the military element in deciding details, and by its cheerful obedience in carrying out the views of the government whose servant it is. In criticising results it is fair to assume, where not otherwise proved, that for the general direction of the war the government is responsible, and that in the particular management of military movements the advice of professional men has had just weight. A somewhat striking illustration of this is to be found in the change of naval strategy, within the limits of the Channel fleet, when, without any change in the government, the positive convictions and stringent methods of Lord St. Vincent set aside, in 1800, the traditions of Lord Howe and Lord Bridport.

What then was the general direction imparted to military movements by a government which had announced its object in the war to be the attainment of security, by "repressing the French system of aggrandizement and aggression"?

Owing to the distracted condition of France, many confusing cross-lights were at first cast upon that central theatre of European disturbance, by movements whose force it was impossible rightly to estimate. Such were the risings in La Vendée and Brittany, the revolt at Lyon, the delivery of Toulon to the allied fleets. Experience justifies the opinion that such insurgent movements, involving but a part of a nation, are best left to themselves, supported only by money and supplies. If, thus aided, they have not the vitality to make good their cause, the presence of foreign troops, viewed ever with jealousy by the natives, will not insure success. It is, however, the French Revolution itself that furnishes the surest illustrations of this truth, shedding upon it a light which Pitt did not have to guide him. Such embarrassments of the French Government were naturally thought to give opportunity for powerful diversions; the more so as the amount of disaffection was much exaggerated, and the practice of partial descents upon the French coasts had come down unquestioned from previous wars.

To this mistake, as natural as any ever made in war, and to the treaty obligation to support Holland, is to be attributed much of the misdirection given to the British army in the first two years of the war. When the illusion was over, and Holland conquered, the military effort of Great Britain was at once concentrated on its proper objects of ruling the sea and securing positions that contributed to naval control and commercial development. Even in 1793 a respectable force had been sent to the West Indies, which in 1794 reduced all the Windward Islands. Stretching its efforts too far, reverses followed; but in 1795 a powerful fleet was sent with sixteen thousand troops commanded by Sir Ralph Abercromby, the best general officer revealed by the early part of the war. From the first, Pitt had seen the necessity of controlling the West Indies. That necessity was twofold: first, by far the greatest fraction of British trade, over one fourth of the whole, depended upon them; and, second, the enemy's islands were not only valuable as producing, they were above all the homes of cruisers that endangered all commerce, neutral as well as British. To control the whole Caribbean region was, among those objects that lay within the scope of the British Government, the one most essential to the success of the general war. To sneer at the attempt as showing merely a wish for sugar islands is to ignore the importance of the West Indies to the financial stability of Great Britain; upon whose solvency depended, not only the maritime war, but the coalitions whose aid was needed to repress "the system of French aggression."

Abercromby restored England's control over the lesser Antilles, except Guadeloupe, and added to her possessions Trinidad and the Dutch colonies on the mainland. Although unable to retain Haïti, whose ports were for some time occupied, the British navy ensured its loss to France and the final success of the negro revolt; and commercial relations were established with the new government. During the same period the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, and other Dutch and French possessions in India were reduced by similar expeditions. These not only extended the sphere of British commerce; they contributed yet more to its enlargement by the security resulting from the conversion of hostile to friendly ports, and the consequent diminution of enemy's cruisers.

It is a singular fact that neither the extraordinary commercial prosperity secured by these successes, nor the immense development of the navy during Pitt's administration, is mentioned in the celebrated denunciation of his "drivelling" war policy by Macaulay. Of naval administration the latter speaks, in order to assign the credit to another; on commercial and naval expansion he is silent. Yet no factors in the war were so important. The one sustained Great Britain, on whose shoulders was upborne the whole resistance of Europe; the other crushed France by a process of constriction which, but for Bonaparte, would have reduced her at an early period, and to free her from which Napoleon himself was driven to measures that ruined him. These important results were obtained by lengthening the cords and strengthening the stakes of British commerce, by colonial expansion and safe-guarding the seas, and by the growth of the navy,—none of which objects could have been accomplished without the hearty support of the Prime Minister. From the co-operation of these causes, and the restrictions placed on neutral trade, the commerce of Great Britain increased by 65 [477] per cent between 1792 and 1800, while the loss by capture was less than 2½ per cent on the annual volume of trade.

The directly offensive use of Great Britain's maritime power made by the ministry, in order to repress the French system of aggression, consisted in throwing back France upon herself, while at the same time cutting off her resources. The continental armies which begirt her on the land side were supported by subsidies; and also when practicable, as in the Mediterranean, by the co-operation of the British fleets, to whose influence upon his Italian campaign in 1796 Bonaparte continually alludes. To seaward the colonial system of France was ruined, raw material cut off from her manufactures, her merchant shipping swept from the sea. In 1797 the chief of the Bureau of Commerce in France wrote: "The former sources of our prosperity are either lost or dried up. Our agricultural, manufacturing, and industrial power is almost extinct." [478] At the same time, while not denying the right of neutrals to trade with ports not blockaded, every restriction that could be placed upon such trade by stringent, and even forced, interpretations of international law was rigorously imposed by a navy whose power was irresistible. Even provisions (and it will be well for Great Britain of the present day to recall the fact) were claimed to be contraband of war, on the ground that, in the then condition of France, when there was a reasonable hope of starving her into peace, to supply them contributed to prolong hostilities.

So severe was the suffering and poverty caused by this isolation, that in the moment of his greatest triumph, immediately after signing the peace of Campo Formio, which left Great Britain without an ally, in October, 1797, Bonaparte wrote: "Either our government must destroy the English monarchy, or must expect to be itself destroyed by the corruption and intrigue of those active islanders. Let us concentrate all our activity upon the navy and destroy England." The Directory, conscious that its navy was paralyzed and that its guerre de course, pursued since 1795 against British commerce, had not seriously affected the latter, although 1797 was the year of its lowest depression, could see no further means of injuring England except by attacking the neutral carriers of her wares. Affecting to regard them as accomplices in Great Britain's crimes against humanity, it procured from the Convention, in January, 1798, a decree that "every vessel found at sea, having on board English merchandise as her cargo, in whole or in part, shall be declared lawful prize, whosoever shall be the proprietor of the merchandise, which shall be reputed contraband for this cause alone, that it comes from England or her possessions." At the same time orders were issued to confiscate property of British origin wherever found on shore, and domiciliary visits were authorized to insure its discovery. Napoleon was therefore perfectly justified in declaring in later years that the Directory outlined the policy of his Continental System, embodied in his Berlin and Milan decrees of 1806 and 1807.

To the Directory the attempt thus to destroy British prosperity worked disaster. To Napoleon it brought ruin, owing to the greater vigor, wider scope, and longer duration which he was able to impart to the process. The aim of his Berlin and Milan decrees, like that of the Directory, was to undermine British trade by depriving it of the necessary concurrence of neutral carriers. As this alone would not be enough, he determined to support the decrees by excluding Great Britain from her principal market, to close the entire Continent to all goods coming from her or her colonies, or even passing through her ports. For this purpose—to carry out this gigantic project—edict after edict was issued to France and her allied countries; for this purpose annexation after annexation to the empire was made; for this purpose a double cordon of French troops lined the shores of the Continent from France to the Baltic; for this purpose British goods were not only seized but publicly burned throughout his dominions; for this purpose demands were made upon all neutral states to exclude British manufactures and colonial produce; for this purpose the calamitous Spanish war was incurred; [479] and finally, for this purpose reiterated and imperious complaints were addressed to the czar on his failure to enforce the exclusion, and, upon his persistence, the fatal invasion of Russia followed.

The justice or wisdom of this course is not here in question. It is enough to say that it nearly ruined Great Britain, but entirely ruined Napoleon. The noticeable point, bearing upon the wisdom of Pitt's military policy, is that Napoleon was forced into it by that policy, because England was destroying him and he had no other means of injuring her. Great Britain's success not only followed, but was consequent upon steady adherence to the main features of Pitt's policy. Military writers say that success on a battle-field is of slight avail if the strategic line of operations is ill-chosen, and that even a great defeat may be redeemed if the position has been taken in accordance with the strategic conditions of the campaign. This amounts to saying, in non-military language, that hard blows are useless if not struck on the right spot. Numerous reverses attended the coalitions against France, although few fell upon Great Britain herself; but none was fatal because the general policy, begun by Pitt and continued by his successors, was strategically sound with reference to the object in view,—namely, "the repression of that system of aggression" which was the very spirit of the French Revolution, formulated by the Convention, adopted by the Directory, inherited and given its full logical development by Napoleon.

It is the fashion with the political heirs of Fox, Pitt's greatest opponent, to draw a marked contrast between the war which preceded and that which followed the Peace of Amiens. In the former it is Great Britain which, in a frenzy of hatred or panic fear toward the French Revolution, becomes the wanton aggressor, and turns a movement that, despite some excesses, was on the whole beneficent, into the stormy torrent of blood that poured over Europe. In the second war, Napoleon is the great culprit, the incarnate spirit of aggression, violence, faithlessness, and insolence; with whom peace was impossible. It is, however, notorious, and conceded by French writers, that the French leaders in 1791 and 1792 wanted war on the Continent; [480] the impartial conduct of the British Cabinet was admitted by the French Government when acknowledging the recall of the British ambassador six months before war broke out; [481] the decrees of November 19 and December 15 are before the reader, as is the refusal of the Convention to give the former a construction conciliatory to Great Britain; the treaty rights of Holland had been set aside by the high hand without an attempt at negotiation, and there can be little doubt that the purpose was already formed to invade her territory shortly. Despite all this, not Great Britain, but the Republic, declared war. The treatment, by the Convention and the Directory, of the lesser states that fell under their power, [482] their dealings with Great Britain, their aggressiveness, insolence, and bad faith were identical in spirit with the worst that can be said of Napoleon; the sole difference being that for a weak, incompetent, and many-headed government was substituted the iron rule of a single man of incomparable genius. Scruples were known to neither. The Berlin and Milan decrees, in which was embodied the Continental System that led Napoleon to his ruin, were, as he himself said, but the logical development of the Directory's decree of January, 1798, [483] against which even the long-suffering United States of America rebelled. Both measures struck at Great Britain through the hearts of allies and of neutrals, for whose rights and welfare, when conflicting with the course France wished to take, they showed equal disregard; both were framed in the very spirit of the first National (Constituent) Assembly, which set aside institutions and conventions that did not square with its own ideas of right; which sought justice, as it saw it, by overleaping law.

It is, however, far more important to note, and clearly to apprehend, that both measures were forced upon the rulers of France by the strategic lines of policy laid down by the ministry of Pitt. The decree of January, 1798, followed close upon the rupture of the peace conferences of Lille, initiated by Pitt in 1797; a rupture brought on by a display of arrogance and insolence on the part of the Directory, similar to that shown by it towards the United States at the same period, that can only be realized by reading the correspondence, [484] and which is now known to have been due, in part at least, to the hope of a bribe from the British ministry. [485] The Berlin decree, which formally began the Continental System, was issued in November, 1806, when Pitt had not been a year in his grave. Both were forced upon the French leaders by the evident hopelessness of reaching Great Britain in any other way, and because her policy of war was hurting France terribly, while sustaining her own strength. In other words, Great Britain, by the strategic direction she gave to her efforts in this war, forced the French spirit of aggression into a line of action which could not but result fatally. [486] But for Bonaparte, the result, nearly attained in 1795 and again in 1799, would have followed then; not even his genius could avert it finally.

It is related that a leader of antiquity once cried to his opponent, "If you are the great general you claim to be, why do you not come down and fight me?" and received the pertinent reply, "If you are the great general you say, why do you not make me come down and fight you?" This was precisely what Great Britain effected. By the mastery of the sea, by the destruction of the French colonial system and commerce, by her persistent enmity to the spirit of aggression which was incarnate in the French Revolution and personified in Napoleon, by her own sustained and unshaken strength, she drove the enemy into the battle-field of the Continental System, where his final ruin was certain. Under the feeble rule of the Directory that ruin came on apace; within a year it was evident that the only gainer by the system was the foe whom it sought to overthrow, that France herself and her allies, as well as neutral Powers, were but being broken down to the profit of Great Britain. Despite the first failure, there was a plausible attraction about the measure which led Napoleon, confident in his strength and genius, to apply it again with the relentless thoroughness characteristic of his reign. For a time it succeeded, owing not only to the vigor with which it was used, but also to Great Britain being exasperated into retaliatory steps which, by forbidding the trade of neutrals to and between all the ports thus closed to British commerce, stopped at its source the contraband trade, which eluded Napoleon's blockade and kept open the way for British exports to the Continent.

The strain, however, was too great to be endured by the great composite political system which the emperor had founded, and through which he hoped to exclude his enemy from every continental market. The privations of all classes, the sufferings of the poorer, turned men's hearts from the foreign ruler, who, in the pursuit of aims which they neither sympathized with nor understood, was causing them daily ills which they understood but too well. All were ready to fall away and rise in rebellion when once the colossus was shaken. The people of Spain, at one extremity of Europe, revolted in 1808; the Czar of Russia, at the other, threw down the gauntlet in 1810, by a proclamation which opened his harbors to all neutral ships bringing colonial produce, the object of Napoleon's bitterest reclamations. In the one case the people refused the ruler put over them to insure a more vigorous enforcement of the continental blockade; in the other the absolute monarch declined longer to burden his subjects with exactions which were ruining them for the same object. The Spanish outbreak gave England a foothold upon the Continent at a point most favorable for support by her maritime strength and most injurious to the emperor, not only from the character of the country and the people, but also because it compelled him to divide his forces between his most remote frontiers. The defection of the czar made a fatal breach in the line of the continental blockade, opening a certain though circuitous access for British goods to all parts of Europe. Incapable of anticipating defeat and of receding from a purpose once formed, Napoleon determined upon war with Russia. He, the great teacher of concentration, proceeded to divide his forces between the two extremes of Europe. The results are well known to all.

It was not by attempting great military operations on land, but by controlling the sea, and through the sea the world outside Europe, that both the first and the second Pitt ensured the triumph of their country in the two contests where either stood as the representative of the nation. Mistakes were made by both; it was the elder who offered to Spain to give Gibraltar for Minorca, which the younger recovered by force of arms. Mistakes many may be charged against the conduct of the war under the younger; but, with one possible exception, they are mistakes of detail in purely military direction, which cannot invalidate the fact that the general line of action chosen and followed was correct. To recur to the simile already borrowed from military art, the mistakes were tactical, not strategic; nor, it may be added, to any great degree administrative.

The possible exception occurred at the beginning of the war, in the spring and summer of 1793. It may be, as has been claimed by many, that a march direct upon Paris at that time by the forces of the Coalition would have crushed all opposition, and, by reducing the mob of the capital, have insured the submission of the country. It may be so; but in criticising the action of the British ministers, so far as it was theirs, it must be remembered that not only did men of the highest military reputation in Europe advise against the movement, but that the Duke of Brunswick, then second to none in distinction as a soldier, had tried it and failed a few months before. For unprofessional men to insist, against the best professional opinions at their command, is a course whose propriety or prudence can only be shown by the event,—a test to which the advance upon Paris, now so freely prescribed by the wisdom of after-sight, was not brought. One consideration, generally overlooked, may here be presented. To attempt so momentous and hazardous an enterprise, when the leaders to whom its conduct must be intrusted regard it as unwise, is to incur a great probability of disaster. Even Bonaparte would not force his plans upon Moreau, when the latter, in 1800, persisted in preferring his own. Yet this must statesmen have done, had they in 1793 ordered their generals to advance on Paris.

Once lost, the opportunity, if such it were, did not recur. It depended purely upon destroying the resistance of France before it had time to organize. Thenceforward there remained to encounter, not the policy of a court, playing its game upon the chess-board of war, with knights and pawns, castles and armies, but a nation in arms, breathing a fury and inspired by passions which only physical exhaustion could repress. Towards that exhaustion Great Britain could on the land side contribute effectually only by means of allies, and this she did. On the side of the sea, her own sphere of action, there were two things she needed to do. The first was to sustain her own strength, by fostering, widening, and guarding the workings of her commercial system; the second was to cut France off from the same sources of strength and life. Both were most effectually accomplished,—not, as Macaulay asserts, by the able administration of Earl Spencer (whose merit is not disputed), but by the general policy of the ministry in the extension of the colonial system, in the wise attention paid to the support of British commerce in all its details, and in the extraordinary augmentation of the navy. Between 1754 and 1760, the period embracing the most brilliant triumphs of the elder Pitt, the British navy increased by 33 per cent. Between 1792 and 1800, under his son, the increase was 82 per cent. How entirely the military management and direction of this mighty force depended upon the sea-officers, and not upon the statesman, when a civilian was at the head of the Admiralty, will be evident to any one studying closely the slackness of the Channel fleet immediately under the eye of Earl Spencer, or the paltry dispositions made in particular emergencies like the Irish invasion of 1796, and contrasting these with the vigor manifested at that very moment under Jervis in the Mediterranean, or later, in the admirable operations of the same officer in command of the Channel fleet.

Few indeed are the statesmen who are not thus dependent upon professional subordinates. Pitt was no exception. He was not a general or an admiral, nor does he appear so to have considered himself; but he realized perfectly where Great Britain's strength lay, and where the sphere of her efforts. By that understanding he guided her movements; and in the final triumph wrought by the spirit of the British nation over the spirit of the French Revolution, the greatest share cannot justly be denied to the chief who, in the long struggle against wind and tide, forced often to swerve from the direct course he would have followed by unforeseen dangers that rose around the ship in her passage through unknown seas, never forgot the goal "Security," upon which from the first his will was set. Fit indeed it was that he should drop at his post just when Trafalgar had been won and Austerlitz lost. That striking contrast of substantial and, in fact, decisive success with bewildering but evanescent disaster, symbolized well his troubled career, as it superficially appears. As the helm escaped his dying hands, all seemed lost, but in truth the worst was passed. "The pilot had weathered the storm."

The death of Pitt was followed by the formation of a ministry of somewhat composite character, centring round his relative and former colleague, Lord Grenville, and his life-long rival, Fox. This held office but for fourteen months; a period long enough for it to afford Napoleon the pretext for his Berlin decree, but not sufficient to impress any radical change upon the main lines of policy laid down by Pitt. Upon its fall in March, 1807, his devoted personal friends and political followers succeeded to power. Confronted almost immediately by the threatening union between the empires of the East and West, of which the known, if concealed, purpose was to divide between France and Russia the control of the Continent, and to subdue Great Britain also by commercial exhaustion, the ministry, both necessarily and by tradition, opposed to this combination the policy transmitted to them by their great leader. Colonial enterprises were multiplied, until it could be said of colonies, as the French Directory had before sorrowfully confessed concerning shipping, that not one was left under a flag hostile to Great Britain. The navy, expanding to its greatest numerical force in 1808, was maintained in equal strength, if in somewhat diminished numbers, up to the termination of the struggle. While unable to prevent the material growth of the French navy by ship-building carried on in its ports, Great Britain continued to impede its progress and cut off its supplies by the close watch maintained over the French coast, by confining its fleets to their harbors,—and so shutting them off from the one drill ground, the sea,—and finally by frustrating Napoleon's project of increasing his own power by violently seizing the vessels of smaller continental states.

The secure tenure of the great common and highway of commerce—the sea—was thus provided for. The enemy's navy was neutralized, his bases abroad cut off, his possessions became the markets as well as the sources of British trade. It was not enough, however, for commerce, that its transit should be comparatively safe. Its operations of exchange needed both materials and markets, both producers and consumers. From these, as is known, Napoleon sought to exclude it by the Continental System, which through the co-operation of Russia he thought could be rendered effective. To this again the ministry of Perceval and Canning opposed the Orders in Council, tempered by the license system, with the double object of prolonging the resistance of Great Britain and sapping that of her enemy; measures which but reproduced, on a vaster scale, the Rule of 1756, with the modifications introduced by Pitt, in 1798, for the same ends.

The question thus resolved itself, as has before been perhaps too often said, into a conflict of endurance,—which nation could live the longest in this deadly grapple. This brings us back again face to face with the great consideration: Was the struggle which began in 1793 one to be solved by a brilliant display of generalship, shattering the organized forces of an ordinary enemy, and with it crushing the powers of resistance in the state? Or had it not rather its origin in the fury of a nation, against which all coercion except that of exhaustion is fruitless? The aims, the tendencies, the excitement of the French people had risen to a pitch, and had made demands, which defied repression by any mere machinery or organization, however skilfully framed or directed. When the movement of a nation depends upon—nay, is the simple evidence of—a profound emotion permeating each individual of the mass, the mighty impulse, from its very diffusion, has not those vital centres of power, the destruction of which paralyzes the whole. Not till the period of passion—necessarily brief, but for the time resistless—has given place to the organization to which all social movement tends, is a people found to have, as the tyrant of antiquity wished, a single neck to be severed by a blow.

The frenzy of the French nation had spent itself, the period of organization had set in, when Bonaparte appeared upon the scene; but, as the tension of popular emotion slackened, there had not been found, in the imperfect organization which sought to replace it, the power to bear the burden of the state. No longer able to depend upon a homogeneous movement of the millions, but only upon the efficient working of the ordinary machinery of civil government and armies, in her case most imperfectly developed, France now offered to the attacks of her enemies those vital points, with which, when crushed, resistance ceases. Military reverses and exhaustion by bad government brought her in 1795, and again in 1799, to her last gasp. At both epochs Bonaparte saved her.

The great captain and organizer not only brought victory with him and restored the machinery of government; he supplied also a centre around which popular enthusiasm and confidence might once more rally. He became not only the exponent of national unity, but in a very real sense the embodiment of those aspirations and aggressive tendencies, which in the first days of the Revolution had bound Frenchmen together as one man, but had afterwards evaporated and frittered away for want of that definiteness of aim and sagacious direction which only a great leader can impart. Under his skilful manipulation the lofty sentiments of the early revolutionists became catchwords, which assured his hold upon the imaginations and enthusiasm of the people, again swayed as one man to follow him in his career of aggression. Metternich well said that Bonaparte was to him simply the incarnation of the Revolution. [487]