[Sidenote: Fall of the Coalition.]

But in Parliament Pitt was as powerless as he was influential in the country. His renewed proposal of Parliamentary Reform, though he set aside the disfranchisement of rotten boroughs as a violation of private property, and limited himself to the disfranchisement of boroughs convicted of corruption, and to the addition of one hundred members to the county representation, was rejected by a majority of two to one. Secure in their parliamentary majority, and heedless of the power of public opinion outside the walls of the House of Commons, the new Ministers entered boldly on a greater task than had as yet taxed the constructive genius of English statesmen. To leave such a dominion as Warren Hastings had built up in India to the control of a mere Company of traders was clearly impossible; and Fox proposed to transfer its political government from the Directors of the Company to a board of seven Commissioners. The appointment of the seven was vested in the first instance in Parliament, and afterwards in the Crown; their office was to be held for five years, but they were removable on address from either House of Parliament. The proposal was at once met with a storm of opposition. The scheme indeed was an injudicious one; for the new Commissioners would have been destitute of that practical knowledge of India which belonged to the Company, while the want of any immediate link between them and the actual Ministry of the Crown would have prevented Parliament from exercising an effective control over their acts. But the real faults of this India Bill were hardly noticed in the popular outcry against it. It had challenged the hostility of powerful influences. The merchant-class was galled by the blow levelled at the greatest merchant-body in the realm: corporations trembled at the cancelling of a charter; the king viewed the measure as a mere means of transferring the patronage of India to the Whigs. But it might have defied the opposition of corporations and the king had it not had to meet the bitter hostility of the nation at large. With the nation the faults of the bill lay not in this detail or that, but in the character of the Ministry which proposed it. To give the rule and patronage of India over to the existing House of Commons was to give a new and immense power to a body which misused in the grossest way the power it possessed. It was the sense of this popular feeling which encouraged the king to exert his personal influence to defeat the measure in the Lords, and on its defeat to order his Ministers to deliver up the seals. The unpopularity of Shelburne stood in the way of his resumption of office, and in December 1783 Pitt accepted the post of First Lord of the Treasury. His position would at once have been untenable had the country gone with its nominal representatives. He was defeated again and again by large majorities in the Commons; but the majorities dwindled as a shower of addresses from every quarter, from the Tory University of Oxford as from the Whig Corporation of London, proved that public opinion went with the Minister and not with the House. It was the general sense of this that justified Pitt in the firmness with which, in the teeth of addresses for his removal from office, he delayed the dissolution of Parliament for five months, and gained time for that ripening of the national sentiment on which he counted for success. When the election of 1784 came the struggle was at once at an end. The public feeling took a strength which broke through the corrupt influences that commonly governed its representation. Every great constituency, the counties and the large towns, returned supporters of Pitt. Of the majority which had defeated him in the Commons, a hundred and sixty members were unseated. Fox hardly retained his seat for Westminster, Burke lost his seat for Bristol, and only a fragment of the Whig party was saved by its command of nomination boroughs.

[Sidenote: Pitt's temper.]

When Parliament came together after the overthrow of the Coalition, the Minister of twenty-five was master of England as no Minister had been before. Even George the Third yielded to his sway, partly through gratitude for the triumph he had won for him, partly from a sense of the madness which was soon to strike him down, but still more from a gradual discovery that the triumph which he had won over his political rivals had been won, not to the profit of the crown, but of the nation at large. The Whigs, it was true, were broken, unpopular, and without a policy; while the Tories, whom the Coalition had disgusted with Lord North, as it had estranged Fox from their opponents, clung to the Minister who had "saved the king." But it was the support of a new political power that really gave his strength to the young Minister. The sudden rise of English industry was pushing the manufacturer to the front; and the manufacturer pinned his faith from the first in William Pitt. All that the trading classes loved in Chatham, his nobleness of temper, his consciousness of power, his patriotism, his sympathy with a wider world than the world within the Parliament-house, they saw in his son. He had little indeed of the poetic and imaginative side of Chatham's genius, of his quick perception of what was just and what was possible, his far-reaching conceptions of national policy, his outlook into the future of the world. Pitt's flowing and sonorous commonplaces rang hollow beside the broken phrases which still make his father's eloquence a living thing to Englishmen. On the other hand he possessed some qualities in which Chatham was utterly wanting. His temper, though naturally ardent and sensitive, had been schooled in a proud self-command. His simplicity and good taste freed him from his father's ostentation and extravagance. Diffuse and commonplace as his speeches seem to the reader, they were adapted as much by their very qualities of diffuseness and commonplace as by their lucidity and good sense to the intelligence of the classes whom Pitt felt to be his real audience. In his love of peace, his immense industry, his despatch of business, his skill in debate, his knowledge of finance, he recalled Sir Robert Walpole; but he had virtues which Walpole never possessed, and he was free from Walpole's worst defects. He was careless of personal gain. He was too proud to rule by corruption. His lofty self-esteem left no room for any jealousy of subordinates. He was generous in his appreciation of youthful merits; and the "boys" he gathered round him, such as Canning and Lord Wellesley, rewarded his generosity by a devotion which death left untouched. With Walpole's cynical inaction Pitt had no sympathy whatever. His policy from the first was a policy of active reform, and he faced every one of the problems, financial, constitutional, religious, from which Walpole had shrunk. Above all, he had none of Walpole's scorn of his fellowmen. The noblest feature in his mind was its wide humanity. His love for England was as deep and personal as his father's love, but of the sympathy with English passion and English prejudice which had been at once his father's weakness and strength he had not a trace. When Fox taunted him with forgetting Chatham's jealousy of France and his faith that she was the natural foe of England, Pitt answered nobly that "to suppose any nation can be unalterably the enemy of another is weak and childish."

[Sidenote: His statesmanship.]

The temper of the time, and the larger sympathy of man with man which especially marks the eighteenth century as a turning-point in the history of the human race, was everywhere bringing to the front a new order of statesmen, such as Turgot and Joseph the Second, whose characteristics were a love of mankind, and a belief that as the happiness of the individual can only be secured by the general happiness of the community to which he belongs, so the welfare of individual nations can only be secured by the general welfare of the world. Of these Pitt was one. But he rose high above the rest in the consummate knowledge and the practical force which he brought to the realization of his aims. His strength lay in finance; and he came forward at a time when the growth of English wealth made a knowledge of finance essential to a great Minister. The progress of the nation was wonderful. Population more than doubled during the eighteenth century, and the advance of wealth was even greater than that of population. Though the war had added a hundred millions to the national debt, the burden was hardly felt. The loss of America only increased the commerce with that country, and industry, as we have seen, had begun that great career which was to make England the workshop of the world. To deal wisely with such a growth required a knowledge of the laws of wealth which would have been impossible at an earlier time. But it had become possible in the days of Pitt. If books are to be measured by the effect which they have produced on the fortunes of mankind, the "Wealth of Nations" must rank among the greatest of books. Its author was Adam Smith, an Oxford scholar and a professor at Glasgow. Labour, he contended, was the one source of wealth, and it was by freedom of labour, by suffering the worker to pursue his own interest in his own way, that the public wealth would best be promoted. Any attempt to force labour into artificial channels, to shape by laws the course of commerce, to promote special branches of industry in particular countries, or to fix the character of the intercourse between one country and another, is not only a wrong to the worker or the merchant, but actually hurtful to the wealth of a state. The book was published in 1776, at the opening of the American war, and studied by Pitt during his career as an undergraduate at Cambridge. From that time he owned Adam Smith for his master; and he had hardly become Minister before he took the principles of the "Wealth of Nations" as the groundwork of his policy.

[Sidenote: Pitt and Parliamentary reform.]

It was thus that the ten earlier years of Pitt's rule marked a new point of departure in English statesmanship. He was the first English Minister who really grasped the part which industry was to play in promoting the welfare of the world. He was not only a peace Minister and a financier, as Walpole had been, but a statesman who saw that the best security for peace lay in the freedom and widening of commercial intercourse between nations; that public economy not only lessened the general burdens but left additional capital in the hands of industry; and that finance might be turned from a mere means of raising revenue into a powerful engine of political and social improvement. That little was done by Pitt himself to carry these principles into effect was partly owing to the mass of ignorance and prejudice with which he had to contend, and still more to the sudden break of his plans through the French Revolution. His power rested above all on the trading classes, and these were still persuaded that wealth meant gold and silver, and that commerce was best furthered by jealous monopolies. It was only by patience and dexterity that the mob of merchants and country squires who backed him in the House of Commons could be brought to acquiesce in the changes he proposed. How small his power was when it struggled with the prejudices around him was seen in the failure of the first great measure he brought forward. The question of parliamentary reform which had been mooted during the American war had been coming steadily to the front. Chatham had advocated an increase of county members, who were then the most independent part of the Lower House. The Duke of Richmond talked of universal suffrage, equal electoral districts, and annual Parliaments. Wilkes anticipated the Reform Bill of a later time by proposing to disfranchise the rotten boroughs, and to give members in their stead to the counties and to the more populous and wealthy towns. William Pitt had made the question his own by bringing forward a motion for reform on his first entry into the House, and one of his earliest measures as Minister was to bring in a bill in 1785 which, while providing for the gradual extinction of all decayed boroughs, disfranchised thirty-six at once, and transferred their members to counties. He brought the king to abstain from opposition, and strove to buy off the borough-mongers, as the holders of rotten boroughs were called, by offering to compensate them for the seats they lost at their market-value. But the bulk of his own party joined the bulk of the Whigs in a steady resistance to the bill, while it received no effective support from the general opinion of the people without. The more glaring abuses, indeed, within Parliament itself, the abuses which stirred Chatham and Wilkes to action, had in great part disappeared. The bribery of members had ceased. Burke's Bill of Economical Reform had just dealt a fatal blow at the influence which the king exercised by suppressing a host of useless offices, household appointments, judicial and diplomatic charges, which were maintained for the purpose of corruption. But what was probably the most fatal obstacle to any pressure for reform was the triumph of public opinion to which Pitt owed his power. The utter overthrow of the Coalition, the complete victory of public opinion, had done much to diminish the sense of any real danger from the opposition which Parliament had shown till now to the voice of the nation. England, then as now, was indifferent to all but practical grievances; and the nation cared little for anomalies in the form of representation so long as it felt itself represented. "Terribly disappointed and beat," as Wilberforce tells us Pitt was by the rejection of his measure, the temper of the House and of the people was too plain to be mistaken, and though his opinion remained unaltered, he never brought it forward again.

[Sidenote: Pitt's finance.]

The failure of his constitutional reform was more than compensated by the triumphs of his finance. When he entered office public credit was at its lowest ebb. The debt had been doubled by the American war, yet large sums still remained unfunded, while the revenue was reduced by a vast system of smuggling which turned every coast-town into a nest of robbers. The deficiency in the revenue was met for the moment by new taxes, but the time which was thus gained served to change the whole face of public affairs. The first of Pitt's financial measures—his plan for gradually paying off the debt by a sinking fund—was undoubtedly an error; but it had a happy effect in restoring public confidence. He met the smuggler by a reduction of Custom-duties which made his trade unprofitable. He revived Walpole's plan of an Excise. Meanwhile the public expenses were reduced, and commission after commission was appointed to introduce economy into every department of the public service. The rapid developement of the national industry which we have already noted no doubt aided the success of these measures. Credit was restored. The smuggling trade was greatly reduced. In two years there was a surplus of a million, and though duty after duty was removed the revenue rose steadily with every remission of taxation. Meanwhile Pitt was showing the political value of the new finance in a wider field. Ireland, then as now, was England's difficulty. The tyrannous misgovernment under which she had groaned ever since the battle of the Boyne was producing its natural fruit; the miserable land was torn with political faction, religious feuds, and peasant conspiracies; and so threatening had the attitude of the Protestant party which ruled it become during the American war that they had forced the English Parliament to relinquish its control over their Parliament in Dublin. Pitt saw that much at least of the misery and disloyalty of Ireland sprang from its poverty. The population had grown rapidly, while culture remained stationary and commerce perished. And of this poverty much was the direct result of unjust law. Ireland was a grazing country, but to protect the interest of English graziers the import of its cattle into England was forbidden. To protect the interests of English clothiers and weavers, its manufactures were loaded with duties. To redress this wrong was the first financial effort of Pitt, and the bill which he introduced in 1785 did away with every obstacle to freedom of trade between England and Ireland. It was a measure which, as he held, would "draw what remained of the shattered empire together," and repair in part the loss of America by creating a loyal and prosperous Ireland; and, struggling almost alone in face of a fierce opposition from the Whigs and the Manchester merchants, he dragged it through the English Parliament, though only to see it flung aside by the Protestant faction under Grattan which then ruled the Parliament of Ireland. But the defeat only spurred him to a greater effort elsewhere. If Ireland was England's difficulty, France had been looked upon as England's natural enemy. We have seen how nobly Pitt rebuked prejudices such as this; but he knew that nothing could so effectively dispel it as increased intercourse between nation and nation. In 1787 therefore he concluded a Treaty of Commerce with France which enabled subjects of both countries to reside and travel in either without licence or passport, did away with all prohibition of trade on either side, and reduced every import duty.

[Sidenote: England and Europe.]

The immediate result of this treaty was a great increase of trade between France and England; and brief as its course was fated to be, it at once set Pitt on a higher level than any rival statesman of his time. But the spirit of humanity which breathed through his policy had to wrestle with difficulties both at home and abroad. No measure secured a warmer support from the young Minister than the bill for the suppression of the slave-trade; but in 1788 it was defeated by the vigorous opposition of the trading classes and the prejudice of the people at large. His efforts to sap the enmity of nation against nation by a freer intercourse encountered a foe even more fatal than English prejudice, in the very movement of which his measures formed a part. Across the Channel this movement was growing into a revolution which was to change the face of the world. That such a revolution must one day come, every observer who had compared the state of Europe with that of England had long seen to be inevitable. So far as England was concerned, the Puritan resistance of the seventeenth century had in the end succeeded in checking the general tendency of the time to religious and political despotism. Since the Revolution of 1688 freedom of conscience and the people's right to govern itself through its representatives in Parliament had been practically established. Social equality had begun long before. Every man from the highest to the lowest was subject to, and protected by, the same law. The English aristocracy, though exercising a powerful influence on government, were possessed of few social privileges, and hindered from forming a separate class in the nation by the legal and social tradition which counted all save the eldest son of a noble house as commoners. No impassable line parted the gentry from the commercial classes, and these again possessed no privileges which could part them from the lower classes of the community. Public opinion, the general sense of educated Englishmen, had established itself after a short struggle as the dominant element in English government. But in all the other great states of Europe the wars of religion had left only the name of freedom. Government tended to a pure despotism. Privilege was supreme in religion, in politics, in society. Society itself rested on a rigid division of classes from one another, which refused to the people at large any equal rights of justice or of industry.

[Sidenote: France.]

We have already seen how alien such a conception of national life was from the ideas which the wide diffusion of intelligence during the eighteenth century was spreading throughout Europe; and in almost every country some enlightened rulers were striving by administrative reforms to satisfy in some sort the sense of wrong which was felt around them. The attempts of sovereigns like Frederick the Great in Prussia and Joseph the Second in Austria and the Netherlands were rivalled by the efforts of statesmen such as Turgot in France. It was in France indeed that the contrast between the actual state of society and the new ideas of public right was felt most keenly. Nowhere had the victory of the Crown been more complete. The aristocracy had been robbed of all share in public affairs; it enjoyed social privileges and exemption from any contribution to the public burdens without that sense of public duty which a governing class to some degree always possesses. Guilds and monopolies fettered the industry of the trader and the merchant, and cut them off from the working classes, as the value attached to noble blood cut off both from the aristocracy. If its political position indeed were compared with that of most of the countries round it, France stood high. Its government was less oppressive, its general wealth was larger and more evenly diffused, there was a better administration of justice, and greater security for public order. Poor as its peasantry seemed to English eyes, they were far above the peasants of Germany or Spain. Its middle class was the quickest and most intelligent in Europe. Under Lewis the Fifteenth opinion was practically free, and a literary class had sprung up which devoted itself with wonderful brilliancy and activity to popularizing the ideas of social and political justice which it learned from English writers, and in the case of Montesquieu and Voltaire from personal contact with English life. The moral conceptions of the time, its love of mankind, its sense of human brotherhood, its hatred of oppression, its pity for the guilty and the poor, its longing after a higher and nobler standard of life and action, were expressed by a crowd of writers, and above all by Rousseau, with a fire and eloquence which carried them to the heart of the people. But this new force of intelligence only jostled roughly with the social forms with which it found itself in contact. The philosopher denounced the tyranny of the priesthood. The peasant grumbled at the lord's right to judge him in his courts and to exact feudal services from him. The merchant was galled by the trading restrictions and the heavy taxation. The country gentry rebelled against their exclusion from public life and from the government of the country. Its powerlessness to bring about any change at home turned all this new energy into sympathy with a struggle against tyranny abroad. Public opinion forced France to ally itself with America in its contest for liberty, and French volunteers under the Marquis de Lafayette joined Washington's army. But while the American war spread more widely throughout the nation the craving for freedom, it brought on the Government financial embarrassments from which it could only free itself by an appeal to the country at large. Lewis the Sixteenth resolved to summon the States-General, which had not met since the time of Richelieu, and to appeal to the nobles to waive their immunity from taxation. His resolve at once stirred into vigorous life every impulse and desire which had been seething in the minds of the people; and the States-General no sooner met at Versailles in May 1789 than the fabric of despotism and privilege began to crumble. A rising in Paris destroyed the Bastille, and the capture of this fortress was taken for the dawn of a new era of constitutional freedom in France and through Europe. Even in England men thrilled with a strange joy at the tidings of its fall. "How much is this the greatest event that ever happened in the world," Fox cried with a burst of enthusiasm, "and how much the best!"

[Sidenote: Pitt and Russia.]

Pitt regarded the approach of France to sentiments of liberty which had long been familiar to England with greater coolness, but with no distrust. For the moment indeed his attention was distracted by an attack of madness which visited George the Third in 1788, and by the claim of a right to the Regency which was at once advanced by the Prince of Wales. The Prince belonged to the Whig party; and Fox, who was travelling in Italy, hurried home to support his claim in full belief that the Prince's Regency would be followed by his own return to power. Pitt successfully resisted the claim on the constitutional ground that in such a case the right to choose a temporary Regent, under what limitations it would, lay with Parliament; and a bill which conferred the Regency on the Prince, in accordance with this view, was already passing the Houses when the recovery of the king put an end to the long dispute. Foreign difficulties, too, absorbed Pitt's attention. Russia had risen into greatness under Catharine the Second; and Catharine had resolved from the first on the annexation of Poland, the expulsion of the Turks from Europe, and the setting up of a Russian throne at Constantinople. In her first aim she was baffled for the moment by Frederick the Great. She had already made herself virtually mistress of the whole of Poland, her armies occupied the kingdom, and she had seated a nominee of her own on its throne, when Frederick in union with the Emperor Joseph the Second forced her to admit Germany to a share of the spoil. If the Polish partition of 1773 brought the Russian frontier westward to the upper waters of the Dwina and the Dnieper, it gave Galicia to Maria Theresa, and West Prussia to Frederick himself. Foiled in her first aim, she waited for the realization of her second till the alliance between the two German powers was at an end through the resistance of Prussia to Joseph's schemes for the annexation of Bavaria, and till the death of Frederick removed her most watchful foe. Then in 1788 Joseph and the Empress joined hands for a partition of the Turkish Empire. But Prussia was still watchful, and England was no longer fettered as in 1773 by troubles with America. The friendship established by Chatham between the two countries, which had been suspended by Bute's treachery and all but destroyed during the Northern League of Neutral Powers, had been restored by Pitt through his co-operation with the successor of Frederick the Great in the restoration of the Dutch Stadtholderate. Its political weight was now seen in an alliance of England, Prussia, and Holland, in 1789, for the preservation of the Turkish Empire. A great European struggle seemed at hand. In such a struggle the sympathy and aid of France were of the highest importance; and it was only as weakening her in face of such a crisis that Pitt looked on the Revolution with any fear. But with the treaty the danger passed away. In the spring of 1790 Joseph died broken-hearted at the failure of his plans and the revolt of the Netherlands against his innovations; Austria practically withdrew from the war with the Turks; and the young Minister could give free expression to the sympathy with which the French movement inspired him.

[Sidenote: The French Revolution.]

In France indeed things were moving fast. By breaking down the division between its separate orders the States-General became a National Assembly, which abolished the privileges of the provincial parliaments, of the nobles, and the Church. In October 1789 the mob of Paris marched on Versailles and forced both King and Assembly to return with them to the capital; and a Constitution hastily put together was accepted by Lewis the Sixteenth in the stead of his old despotic power. To Pitt the tumult and disorder with which these great changes were wrought seemed transient matters. In January 1790 he still believed that "the present convulsions in France must sooner or later culminate in general harmony and regular order," and that when her own freedom was established, "France would stand forth as one of the most brilliant powers of Europe." But the coolness and goodwill with which Pitt looked on the Revolution were far from being universal in the nation at large. The cautious good sense of the bulk of Englishmen, their love of order and law, their distaste for violent changes and for abstract theories, as well as their reverence for the past, were rousing throughout the country a dislike of the revolutionary changes which were hurrying on across the Channel; and both the political sense and the political prejudice of the nation were being fired by the warnings of Edmund Burke. The fall of the Bastille, though it kindled enthusiasm in Fox, roused in Burke only distrust. "Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice," he wrote a few weeks later, "neither is safe." The night of the fourth of August, when the privileges of every class were abolished, filled him with horror. He saw, and rightly saw, in it the critical moment which revealed the character of the Revolution, and his part was taken at once. "The French," he cried in January, while Pitt was foretelling a glorious future for the new Constitution, "the French have shown themselves the ablest architects of ruin who have hitherto existed in the world. In a short space of time they have pulled to the ground their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts and their manufactures."

[Sidenote: Pitt and France.]

But in Parliament Burke stood alone. The Whigs, though distrustfully, followed Fox in his applause of the Revolution. The Tories, yet more distrustfully, followed Pitt; and Pitt warmly expressed his sympathy with the constitutional government which was ruling France. At this moment indeed the more revolutionary party in that country gave a signal proof of its friendship for England. Irritated by an English settlement at Nootka Sound in California, Spain appealed to France for aid in accordance with the Family Compact; and the French Ministry, with a party at its back which believed things had gone far enough, resolved on a war as the best means of checking the progress of the Revolution and restoring the power of the Crown. The revolutionary party naturally opposed this design; and after a bitter struggle the right of declaring war, save with the sanction of the Assembly, was taken from the king. With this vote all danger of hostilities passed away. "The French Government," Pitt asserted, "was bent on cultivating the most unbounded friendship for Great Britain," and he saw no reason in its revolutionary changes why Britain should not return the friendship of France. What told even more on his temper towards that country was a conviction that nothing but the joint action of France and England would in the end arrest the troubles of Eastern Europe. His intervention foiled for the moment a fresh effort of Prussia to rob Poland of Dantzig and Thorn. But though Russia was still pressing Turkey hard, a Russian war was so unpopular in England that a hostile vote in Parliament forced Pitt to discontinue his armaments; and a fresh union of Austria and Prussia, which promised at this juncture to bring about a close of the Turkish struggle, promised also a fresh attack on the independence of Poland. To prevent a new partition without the co-operation of France was impossible; and in the existing state of things Pitt saw nothing to hinder the continuance of a friendship which would make such a co-operation inevitable.

[Sidenote: Burke and the Revolution.]

But while Pitt was pleading for friendship between the two countries, Burke was resolved to make friendship impossible. In Parliament, as we have seen, he stood alone. He had long ceased, in fact, to have any hold over the House of Commons. The eloquence which had vied with that of Chatham during the discussions on the Stamp Act had become distasteful to the bulk of its members. The length of his speeches, the profound and philosophical character of his argument, the splendour and often the extravagance of his illustrations, his passionate earnestness, his want of temper and discretion, wearied and perplexed the squires and merchants about him. He was known nowadays as "the dinner-bell of the House," so rapidly did its benches thin at his rising. For a time his energies found scope in the impeachment of Hastings; and the grandeur of his appeals to the justice of England hushed detraction. But with the close of the impeachment his repute had again fallen; and the approach of old age, for he was now past sixty, seemed to counsel retirement from an assembly where he stood unpopular and alone. But age and disappointment and loneliness were forgotten as Burke saw rising across the Channel the embodiment of all that he hated—a Revolution founded on scorn of the past, and threatening with ruin the whole social fabric which the past had reared; the ordered structure of classes and ranks crumbling before a doctrine of social equality; a State rudely demolished and reconstituted; a Church and a Nobility swept away in a night. Against the enthusiasm of what he rightly saw to be a new political religion he resolved to rouse the enthusiasm of the old. He was at once a great orator and a great writer; and now that the House was deaf to his voice, he appealed to the country by his pen. The "Reflections on the French Revolution" which he published in October 1790 not only denounced the acts of rashness and violence which sullied the great change that France had wrought, but the very principles from which the change had sprung. Burke's deep sense of the need of social order, of the value of that continuity in human affairs "without which men would become like flies in a summer," blinded him to all but the faith in mere rebellion and the yet sillier faith in mere novelty which disguised a real nobleness of aim and temper even in the most ardent of the revolutionists. He would see no abuses in the past, now that it had fallen, or anything but the ruin of society in the future. He preached a crusade against men whom he regarded as the foes of religion and civilization, and called on the armies of Europe to put down a Revolution whose principles threatened every state with destruction.

[Sidenote: His failure in Parliament.]

The great obstacle to such a crusade was Pitt: and one of the grandest outbursts of the "Reflections" closed with a bitter taunt at the Minister. "The age of chivalry," Burke cried, "is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever." But neither taunt nor invective moved Pitt from his course. At the moment when the "Reflections" appeared he gave a fresh assurance to France of his resolve to have nothing to do with any crusade against the Revolution. "This country," he wrote, "means to persevere in the neutrality hitherto scrupulously observed with respect to the internal dissensions of France; and from which it will never depart unless the conduct held there makes it indispensable as an act of self-defence." So far indeed was he from sharing the reactionary panic which was spreading around him that he chose this time for supporting Fox in his Libel Act, a measure which, by transferring the decision on what was libellous in any publication from the judge to the jury, completed the freedom of the press; and himself passed in 1791 a bill which, though little noticed among the storms of the time, was one of the noblest of his achievements. He boldly put aside the dread which had been roused by the American war, that the gift of self-government to our colonies would serve only as a step towards their secession from the mother country, and established a House of Assembly and a Council in the two Canadas. "I am convinced," said Fox, who gave the measure his hearty support, "that the only method of retaining distant colonies with advantage is to enable them to govern themselves"; and the policy of the one statesman as well as the foresight of the other has been justified by the later history of our dependencies. Nor had Burke better success with his own party. Fox remained an ardent lover of the Revolution, and answered a fresh attack of Burke upon it with more than usual warmth. Till now a close affection had bound the two men together; but no sooner had this defence been uttered than the fanaticism of Burke declared their union to be over. "There is no loss of friendship," Fox exclaimed, with a sudden burst of tears. "There is!" Burke repeated. "I know the price of my conduct. Our friendship is at an end."

[Sidenote: His success with the country.]

Within the walls of Parliament however Burke as yet stood utterly alone. His "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs," in June 1791, failed to detach a follower from Fox; while Pitt coldly counselled him rather to praise the English Constitution than to rail at the French. "I have made many enemies and few friends," Burke wrote sadly to the French princes who had fled from their country and were gathering in arms at Coblentz, "by the part I have taken." But the opinion of the people was slowly drifting to his side; and a sale of thirty thousand copies showed that the "Reflections" echoed the general sentiment of Englishmen. At this moment indeed the mood of England was singularly unfavourable to any fair appreciation of the Revolution across the Channel. Her temper was above all industrial. Men who were working hard and fast growing rich, who had the narrow and practical turn of men of business, looked angrily at this sudden disturbance of order, this restless and vague activity, these rhetorical appeals to human feeling, these abstract and often empty theories. In England it was a time of political content and social well-being, of steady economic progress, as well as of a powerful religious revival; and an insular lack of imaginative interest in other races hindered men from seeing that every element of this content, of this order, of this peaceful and harmonious progress, of this reconciliation of society and religion, was wanting abroad. The sympathy which the first outbreak of the Revolution had roused among Englishmen grew cooler in fact with every step which the Revolution took. While the Declaration of the Rights of Man roused France to a frenzy of enthusiasm, it was set aside as a dream by the practical islanders who based their rights on precedent and not on theory. The abolition of all social privileges on the 12th of August, the most characteristic step in the French Revolution, was met with grave disapproval by a people more alien from social equality than any people in Europe. Every incident in the struggle between the French people and their king widened the breach of feeling. The anarchy of the country, the want of political sense in its Assembly, the paltry declamation of its clubs, the exaggerated sentiment, the universal suspicion, the suspension of every security for personal freedom, the arrests, the murders, the overthrow of the Church, the ruin of the Crown, were watched with an ever-growing severity by a nation whose chief instinct was one of order, whose bent was to practical politics, whose temper was sober and trustful, whose passionate love of personal liberty was only equalled by its passionate abhorrence of bloodshed in civil strife, and whose ecclesiastical and political institutions were newly endeared to it by a fresh revival of religious feeling, and by the constitutional attitude of its Government for a hundred years.

[Sidenote: The coalition against France.]

Sympathy in fact was soon limited to a few groups of reformers who gathered in "Constitutional Clubs," and whose reckless language quickened the national reaction. But in spite of Burke's appeals and the cries of the nobles who had fled from France and longed only to march against their country, Europe held back from any attack on the Revolution, and Pitt preserved his attitude of neutrality, though with a greater appearance of reserve. So anxious, in fact, did the aspect of affairs in the East make him for the restoration of tranquillity in France, that he foiled a plan which its emigrant nobles had formed for a descent on the French coast, and declared formally at Vienna that England would remain absolutely neutral should hostilities arise between France and the Emperor. But the Emperor was as anxious to avoid a French war as Pitt himself. Though Catharine, now her strife with Turkey was over, wished to plunge the two German powers into a struggle with the Revolution which would leave her free to annex Poland single-handed, neither Leopold nor Prussia would tie their hands by such a contest. The flight of Lewis the Sixteenth from Paris in June 1791 brought Europe for a moment to the verge of war; but he was intercepted and brought back: and for a while the danger seemed to incline the revolutionists in France to greater moderation. Lewis too not only accepted the Constitution, but pleaded earnestly with the Emperor against any armed intervention as certain to bring ruin to his throne. In their conference at Pillnitz therefore, in August, Leopold and the king of Prussia contented themselves with a vague declaration inviting the European powers to co-operate in restoring a sound form of government in France, availed themselves of England's neutrality to refuse all military aid to the French princes, and dealt simply with the affairs of Poland. But the peace they desired soon became impossible. The Constitutional Royalists in France availed themselves of the irritation caused by the Declaration of Pillnitz to revive the cry for a war which, as they hoped, would give strength to the throne. The more violent revolutionists, or Jacobins, on the other hand, abandoned their advocacy of peace. Under the influence of the "Girondists," the deputies from the south of France, whose aim was a republic, and who saw in a great national struggle a means of overthrowing the monarchy, they decided, in spite of the opposition of their leader, Robespierre, on a contest with the Emperor. Both parties united to demand the breaking up of an army which the emigrant princes had formed on the Rhine; and though Leopold before his death assented to this demand, France declared war against his successor, Francis, in April 1792.



CHAPTER IV

ENGLAND AND REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE

1792-1801

[Sidenote: England and the Revolutionists.]

That the war with Germany would widen into a vast European struggle, a struggle in which the peoples would rise against their oppressors, and the freedom which France had won diffuse itself over the world, no French revolutionist doubted for an hour. Nor did they doubt that in this struggle England would join them. It was from England that they had drawn those principles of political and social liberty which they believed themselves to be putting into practice. It was to England that they looked above all for approbation and sympathy, and on the aid of England that they confidently counted in their struggle with a despotic and priest-ridden Europe. Absorbed in the mighty events about them, and utterly ignorant of the real set of English feeling or the real meaning of Pitt's policy, they were astonished and indignant at his firm refusal of their alliance and his resolve to stand apart from the struggle. It was in vain that Pitt strove to allay this irritation by demanding only that Holland should remain untouched, and promising neutrality even though Belgium should be occupied by a French army, or that he strengthened these pledges by a reduction of military forces, and by bringing forward in 1792 a peace-budget which rested on a large remission of taxation. To the revolutionists at Paris the attitude of England remained unintelligible and irritating. Instead of the aid they had counted on, they found but a cold neutrality. In place of the sympathy on which they reckoned, they saw, now that they looked coolly across the Channel, a reserve passing into disapproval. The pen of Burke was denouncing the Revolution as the very negation of those principles on which English liberty rested. The priests and nobles who had fled from the new France were finding pity and welcome on English shores. And now that France flung herself on an armed Europe to win freedom for its peoples from their kings, England stood coldly apart. To men frenzied with a passionate enthusiasm, and frenzied yet more with a sudden terror at the dangers they were encountering, such an attitude of neutrality in such a quarter seemed like a stab in the back.

[Sidenote: Their efforts in England.]

But that this attitude was that of the English people as a whole was incredible to the French enthusiasts. Conscious as no Englishman could be conscious of the great evils they had overthrown, of the great benefits they had won for their country, they saw in the attitude of England only the sympathy of an aristocracy with the aristocracy they had struck down. The cries for a parliamentary reform which reached them across the Channel became in their ears cries of a people as powerless and oppressed as the people of France had been. They still clung to the hope of England's aid in the emancipation of Europe from despotism and superstition, but they came now to believe that England must itself be emancipated before such an aid could be given. Their first work therefore they held to be the bringing about a revolution in England which might free the people from the aristocracy and the aristocratic government which held it down. But this was far from being all the work they looked to accomplishing. The aristocracy which oppressed the people at home oppressed, as they believed, great peoples beyond the bounds of England itself. It was subjecting to its sway nation after nation in India. Its rule over Ireland was a masterpiece of tyranny. To rouse India, to rouse Ireland to a struggle which should shake off the English yoke, became necessary steps to the establishment of freedom in England itself. From the moment therefore that the opposition between the two countries declared itself, French agents were busy "sowing the revolution" in each quarter. In Ireland they entered into communication with the United Irishmen. In India they appeared at the courts of the native princes, and above all at the court of Mysore. Meanwhile in England itself they strove through a number of associations, which had formed themselves under the name of Constitutional Clubs, to rouse the same spirit which they had roused in France; and the French envoy, Chauvelin, protested warmly against a proclamation which denounced this correspondence as seditious.

[Sidenote: The Coalition attacks France.]

Such a course could only knit men of all parties together in a common resentment; and the effect of these revolutionary efforts on the friends of the Revolution was seen in a declaration which they wrested from Fox, that at such a moment even the discussion of parliamentary reform was inexpedient. A far worse result was the new strength they gave to its foes. Burke was still working hard in writings whose extravagance of style was forgotten in their intensity of feeling to spread alarm throughout Europe. He had from the first encouraged the emigrant princes to take arms, and sent his son to join them at Coblentz. "Be alarmists," he wrote to them; "diffuse terror!" But the royalist terror which he sowed would have been of little moment had it not roused a revolutionary terror in France itself. At the threat of war against the Emperor the two German Courts had drawn together, and reluctantly abandoning all hope of peace with France, gathered eighty thousand men under the Duke of Brunswick, and advanced slowly in August 1792 on the Meuse. France, though she had forced on the struggle, was really almost defenceless; her forces in Belgium broke at the first shock of arms into shameful rout; and the panic, as it spread from the soldiery to the nation at large, took violent and horrible forms. At the first news of Brunswick's advance the mob of Paris broke into the Tuileries on the 10th of August; and at its demand Lewis, who had taken refuge in the Assembly, was suspended from his office and imprisoned in the Temple. In the following September, while General Dumouriez by boldness and adroit negotiations was arresting the progress of the Allies in the defiles of the Argonne, bodies of paid murderers butchered the royalist prisoners who crowded the gaols of Paris, with a view of influencing the elections to a new Convention which met to proclaim the abolition of royalty. The retreat of the Prussian army, whose numbers had been reduced by disease till an advance on Paris became impossible, and a brilliant victory won by Dumouriez at Jemappes which laid the Netherlands at his feet, turned the panic of the French into a wild self-confidence. In November the Convention decreed that France offered the aid of her soldiers to all nations who would strive for freedom. "All governments are our enemies," cried its President; "all peoples are our allies." In the teeth of treaties signed only two years before, and of the stipulation made by England when it pledged itself to neutrality, the French Government resolved to attack Holland, and ordered its generals to enforce by arms the opening of the Scheldt.

[Sidenote: France declares war with England.]

To do this was to force England into war. Public opinion was already pressing every day harder upon Pitt. The horror of the massacres of September, the hideous despotism of the Parisian mob, did more to estrange England from the Revolution than all the eloquence of Burke. But even while withdrawing our Minister from Paris on the imprisonment of the king, to whose Court he had been commissioned, Pitt clung stubbornly to a policy of peace. His hope was to bring the war to an end through English mediation, and to "leave France, which I believe is the best way, to arrange its own internal affairs as it can." No hour of Pitt's life is so great as the hour when he stood lonely and passionless before the growth of national passion, and refused to bow to the gathering cry for war. Even the news of the September massacres could only force from him a hope that France might abstain from any war of conquest and might escape from its social anarchy. In October the French agent in England reported that Pitt was about to recognize the Republic. At the opening of November he still pressed on Holland a steady neutrality. It was France, and not England, which at last wrenched peace from his grasp. The decree of the Convention and the attack on the Dutch left him no choice but war, for it was impossible for England to endure a French fleet at Antwerp, or to desert allies like the United Provinces. But even in December the news of the approaching partition of Poland nerved him to a last struggle for peace; he offered to aid Austria in acquiring Bavaria if she would make terms with France, and pledged himself to France to abstain from war if that power would cease from violating the independence of her neighbour states. But desperately as Pitt struggled for peace, his struggle was in vain. Across the Channel his moderation was only taken for fear, while in England the general mourning which followed on the news of the French king's execution showed the growing ardour for the contest. The rejection of his last offers indeed made a contest inevitable. Both sides ceased from diplomatic communications, and in February 1793 France issued her Declaration of War.

[Sidenote: The Panic.]

From that moment Pitt's power was at an end. His pride, his immoveable firmness, and the general confidence of the nation, still kept him at the head of affairs; but he could do little save drift along with a tide of popular feeling which he never fully understood. Around him the country broke out in a fit of passion and panic which rivalled the passion and panic over sea. The confidence of France in its illusions as to opinion in England deluded for the moment even Englishmen themselves. The partisans of Republicanism were in reality but a few handfuls of men who played at gathering Conventions, and at calling themselves citizens and patriots, in childish imitation of what was going on across the Channel. But in the mass of Englishmen the dread of these revolutionists passed for the hour into sheer panic. Even the bulk of the Whig party believed property and the constitution to be in peril, and forsook Fox when he still proclaimed his faith in France and the Revolution. The "Old Whigs," as they called themselves, with the Duke of Portland, Earls Spencer and Fitzwilliam, and Mr. Windham at their head, followed Burke in giving their adhesion to the Government. Pitt himself, though little touched by the political reaction which was to constitute the creed of those who represented themselves as "Pittites," was shaken by the dream of social danger, which was turning the wisest heads about him. For a moment at least his cool good sense bent to believe in the existence of "thousands of bandits" who were ready to rise against the throne, to plunder every landlord, and to sack London. "Paine is no fool," he said to his niece, who quoted to him a passage from the Rights of Man, in which that author had vindicated the principles of the Revolution. "He is perhaps right; but if I did what he wants I should have thousands of bandits on my hands to-morrow and London burnt." It was this sense of social danger which alone reconciled him to the war. It would have been impossible indeed for Pitt, or for any other English statesman, to have stood idly by while France annexed the Netherlands and marched to annex Holland. He must in any case have fought even had France not forced him to fight by her declaration of war. But bitter as the need of such a struggle was to him, he accepted it with the less reluctance that war, as he trusted, would check the progress of "French principles" in England itself.

The worst issue of this panic was the series of legislative measures in which it found expression. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, a bill against seditious assemblies restricted the liberty of public meeting, and a wider scope was given to the Statute of Treasons. Prosecution after prosecution was directed against the Press; the sermons of some dissenting ministers were indicted as seditious; and the conventions of sympathizers with France were roughly broken up. The worst excesses of this panic were witnessed in Scotland, where young Whigs, whose only offence was an advocacy of parliamentary reform, were sentenced to transportation, and where a brutal Judge openly expressed his regret that the practice of torture in seditious cases should have fallen into disuse. But the panic soon passed away for sheer want of material to feed on. The bloodshed and anarchy of the Jacobin rule disgusted the last sympathizers with France. To staunch Whigs like Romilly, the French, after the massacres of October, seemed a mere "nation of tigers." The good sense of the nation discovered the unreality of the dangers which had driven it to its short-lived frenzy; and when the leaders of the Corresponding Society, a body which expressed sympathy with France, were brought to trial in 1794 on a charge of high treason, their acquittal told that all active terror was over. So far indeed was the nation from any danger of social overthrow that, save for occasional riots to which the poor were goaded by sheer want of bread, no social disturbance troubled England during the twenty years of struggle which lay before it. But though the public terror passed, it left a terrible legacy behind. The blind reaction against all reform which had sprung from the panic lasted on when the panic was forgotten. For nearly a quarter of a century it was hard to get a hearing for any measure which threatened change to an existing institution, beneficial though the change might be. Even the philanthropic movement which so nobly characterized the time found itself checked and hampered by the dread of revolution.

Easy however as Pitt found it to deal with "French principles" at home, he found it less easy to deal with French armies abroad. The very excellences of his character indeed unfitted him for the conduct of a war. He was at heart a Peace Minister; he was forced into war by a panic and enthusiasm which he shared in a very small degree; and he was utterly destitute of his father's gift of entering instinctively into the sympathies and passions around him, and of rousing passions and sympathies in return. At first indeed all seemed to go ill for France. When the campaign of 1793 opened she was girt in along her whole frontier by a ring of foes. The forces of the House of Austria, of the Empire, and of the King of Prussia, pressed her to the north and the east; those of Spain and Sardinia attacked her in the south; and the accession of England to this league threatened to close the sea against her. The efforts of these foreign foes were seconded too by civil war. The peasants of Poitou and Brittany, estranged from the revolution by its attack on the clergy, rose in revolt against the government at Paris; while Marseilles and Lyons were driven into insurrection by the violent leaders who now seized on power in the capital. The campaign opened therefore with a series of terrible reverses. In spite of the efforts of General Dumouriez the French were foiled in their attack on Holland and driven, after a disastrous defeat at Neerwinden, from the Netherlands. At the moment when the Duke of York with ten thousand English troops joined the Austrian army on the northern border of France, a march upon Paris would have crushed the revolution. But the chance was lost. At this moment indeed the two German powers were far from wishing honestly for the suppression of the Republic and the re-establishment of a strong monarchy in France. Such a restoration would have foiled their projects of aggrandizement in Eastern Europe. The strife on the Rhine had set Russia free, as Pitt had foreseen, to carry out her schemes of aggression; and Austria and Prussia saw themselves forced, in the interest of a balance of power, to share in her annexations at the cost of Poland. But this new division of Poland would have become impossible had France been enabled by a restoration of its monarchy to take up again its natural position in Europe, and to accept the alliance which Pitt would in such a case have offered her. The policy of the German courts therefore was to prolong an anarchy which left them free for the moment to crush Poland, and which they counted on crushing in its turn at a more convenient time; and the allied armies which might have marched upon Paris were purposely frittered away in sieges in the Netherlands and the Rhine.

[Sidenote: The revival of France.]

Such a policy gave France all that she needed to recover from the shock of her past disasters: it gave her time. Whatever were the crimes and tyranny of her leaders, the country felt in spite of them the value of the Revolution, and rallied enthusiastically to its support. The strength of the revolt in La Vendee was broken. The insurrection in the south was drowned in blood. The Spanish invaders were held at bay at the foot of the Pyrenees, and the Piedmontese were driven from Nice and Savoy. At the close of the year a fresh blow fell upon the struggling country in the revolt of Toulon, the naval station of its Mediterranean fleet. The town called for foreign aid against the government at Paris; and Lord Hood entered the port with an English squadron, while a force of 11,000 men, gathered hastily from every quarter, was despatched under General O'Hara as a garrison. But the successes against Spain and Savoy freed the hands of France at this critical moment: the town was at once invested, and the seizure of a promontory which commanded the harbour, a step counselled by a young artillery officer, Napoleon Buonaparte, brought about the withdrawal of the garrison and the surrender of Toulon. The success was a prelude of what was to come. At the opening of 1794 a victory at Fleurus, which again made the French masters of the Netherlands, showed that the tide had turned. France was united within by the cessation of the Terror and of the tyranny of the Jacobins, while on every border victory followed the gigantic efforts with which she met the coalition against her. The coalition indeed was fast breaking up. Spain sued for peace. Prussia, more intent on her gains in the east than on any battle with the revolution on the west, prepared to follow Spain's example by the withdrawal of her armies from the Rhine. It was only by English subsidies that Austria and Sardinia were still kept in the field; and the Rhine provinces were wrested from the first, while the forces of Sardinia were driven back from the Riviera and the Maritime Alps into the plain of Piedmont. Before the year ended Holland was lost. Pichegru crossed the Waal in midwinter with an overwhelming force, and the wretched remnant of ten thousand men who had followed the Duke of York to the Netherlands, thinned by disease and by the hardships of retreat, re-embarked for England.

[Sidenote: Howe's victory.]

In one quarter only had the fortune of war gone against the French republic. The victories of Rodney at the close of the strife with America had concentrated English interest on the fleet. Even during the peace, while the army was sacrificed to financial distress, great efforts were made to preserve the efficiency of the navy; and the recent alarms of war with Russia and Spain had ended in raising it to a strength which it had never reached before. But France was as eager as England herself to dispute the sovereignty of the seas, and almost equal attention had been bestowed on the navy which crowded the great harbours of Toulon and Brest. In force as in number of ships it was equal in effective strength to that of England; and both nations looked with hope to the issue of a contest at sea. No battle marked the first year of the war; but, as it ended, the revolt of Toulon gave a fatal wound to the naval strength of France in the almost total destruction of her Mediterranean fleet. That of the Channel however remained unhurt; and it was this which Lord Howe at last encountered, off Brest in 1794, in the battle which is known by the name of the day on which it was fought—The "First of June." The number of ships on either side was nearly the same, and the battle was one of sheer hard fighting, unmarked by any display of naval skill. But the result was a decisive victory for England, and the French admiral, weakened by a loss of seven vessels and three thousand men, again took refuge in Brest.

[Sidenote: Break-up of the Coalition.]

The success of Lord Howe did somewhat to counteract the discouragement which sprang from the general aspect of the war. At the opening of 1795 the coalition finally gave way. Holland had been detached from it by Pichegru's conquest, and the Batavian republic which he set up there was now an ally of France. In the spring Prussia bought peace at Basle by the cession of her possessions west of the Rhine. Peace with Spain followed in the summer, while Sweden and the Protestant cantons of Switzerland recognized the republic. These terrible blows were hardly met by the success of the Austrian army in relieving Maintz, or by the colonial acquisitions of England. The latter indeed were far from being inconsiderable. Most of the West-Indian Islands which had been held by France now fell into British hands; and the alliance of Holland with the French threw open to English attack the far more valuable settlements of the Dutch. The surrender of Cape Town in September gave England the colony of the Cape of Good Hope, the nucleus of what has since grown into a vast southern settlement which is destined to play a great part in the history of Africa. At the close of the year the Island of Ceylon was added to our Indian dependencies. Both of these acquisitions were destined to remain permanently attached to England, though at the moment their value was eclipsed by the conquest of the Dutch colonies in the Pacific, the more famous Spice Islands of the Malaccas and Java. But, important as these gains were in their after issues, they had no immediate influence on the war. The French armies prepared for the invasion of Italy; while in France itself discord came well-nigh to an end. A descent by a force of French emigrants on the coast of Brittany ended in their massacre at Quiberon and in the final cessation of the war in La Vendee; while the royalist party in Paris was crushed as soon as it rose against the Convention by the genius of Napoleon Buonaparte.

[Sidenote: Pitt's effort for peace.]

But the fresh severities against the ultra-republicans which followed on the establishment of a Directory after this success indicated the moderate character of the new government, and Pitt seized on this change in the temper of the French Government as giving an opening for peace. The dread of a Jacobin propagandism was now all but at an end. In spite of an outbreak of the London mob, whose cries meant chiefly impatience of dear bread, but which brought about a fresh suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act and the introduction of a Bill "for the prosecution of seditious meetings," the fear of any social disturbance or of the spread of "French principles" in England was fast passing away from men's minds. The new constitution which France accepted in 1795 showed that the tendencies of the French themselves were now rather to order than to freedom. The old grounds for the struggle therefore had ceased to exist; while the pressure of it grew hourly more intolerable. Pitt himself was sick of the strife. The war indeed had hardly begun when he found himself without the means of carrying it on. The English navy was in a high state of efficiency; but the financial distress which followed the American war had brought with it a neglect of the army. The army was not only small, but without proper equipment; and the want of military experience among its soldiers was only equalled by the incapacity of their leaders. "We have no general," Lord Grenville wrote bitterly, "but some old woman in a red riband." Wretched, too, as had been the conduct of the war, its cost was already terrible; for if England was without soldiers she had wealth, and in default of nobler means of combating the revolution Pitt had been forced to use wealth as an engine of war. He became the paymaster of the coalition, and his subsidies kept the allied armies in the field. But the immense loans which these called for, and the quick growth of expenditure, undid all the financial reforms on which the young minister prided himself. Taxation, which had reached its lowest point at the outbreak of the contest, mounted ere a few years were past to a height undreamed of before. The debt rose by leaps and bounds. In three years nearly eighty millions had been added to it, a sum greater than that piled up by the whole war with America, and in the opening of 1796 votes were taken for loans which amounted to twenty-five millions more.

[Sidenote: The dogged temper of England.]

Nor was this wreck of his financial hopes Pitt's only ground for desiring a close of the war. From the first, as we have seen, he had been keenly sensitive to the European dangers which the contest involved; nor had he shown, even in his moment of social panic, the fanatical blindness of men like Burke to the evils which had produced the revolution, or to the good which it had wrought. But he could only listen in silence while the Marquis of Lansdowne, the Lord Shelburne of earlier days and the successor of Chatham as the advocate of a more liberal policy, met the rhetoric of Burke by a cool demonstration of the benefit which the recent change had brought to the mass of the French people, and by pointing to the profit which Russia was drawing from the struggle in the west. In their wide-reaching view of European affairs, in their justice to the revolution, Shelburne and Pitt stood alone. Around them men were hardened and blinded by passion. The old hatred between nation and nation, which Pitt had branded as irrational, woke up fiercer than ever at the clash of arms, for with it was blended a resentment that had smouldered in English breasts ever since the war with America at the blow which France had dealt England in that hour of her weakness, and a disgust which only slowly grew fainter at her overthrow of every social and political institution that Englishmen held dear. On the dogged temper of the nation at large the failure of the coalition produced little effect. It had no fear of fighting France single-handed, nor could it understand Pitt's suggestion that a time had come for opening negotiations with a view to peace. Public opinion indeed went hotly with Burke in his denunciation of all purpose of relaxing England's hostility against the revolution, a denunciation which was embodied in his "Letters on a Regicide Peace," the last outcry of that fanaticism which had done so much to plunge the world in blood.

[Sidenote: The Irish danger.]

But though Pitt stood all but alone, he was firm in his purpose to bring the war, if he could, to a close. What specially moved him was not the danger on the Continent, whether that danger sprang from French victories or from aggression in the east. It was a danger in the west. Vain as the expectations of the French revolutionists had proved in the case of England, they had better ground for their hopes elsewhere. Even before the outbreak of the war Pitt had shown how keen was his sense of a possible danger from Ireland. In that wretched country the terrible fruits of a century of oppression and wrong were still to reap. From the close of the American war, when her armed Volunteers had wrung legislative independence from the Rockingham ministry, Ireland had continued to be England's difficulty. She was now "independent"; but her independence was a mere name for the uncontrolled rule of a few noble families. The victory of the Volunteers had been won simply to the profit of "undertakers," who returned a majority of members in the Irish House of Commons, while they themselves formed the Irish House of Lords. The suspension of any effective control or interference from England left Ireland at these men's mercy, and they soon showed that they meant to keep it for themselves. When the Catholics claimed admission to the franchise or to equal civil rights as a reward for their aid in the late struggle, their claim was rejected. A similar demand of the Presbyterians, who had formed a good half of the Volunteers, for the removal of their disabilities was equally set aside. Even Grattan, when he pleaded for a reform which would make the Parliament at least a fair representative of the Protestant Englishry, utterly failed. The ruling class found government too profitable to share it with other possessors. It was only by hard bribery that the English viceroys could secure their co-operation in the simplest measures of administration. "If ever there was a country unfit to govern itself," said Lord Hutchinson, "it is Ireland. A corrupt aristocracy, a ferocious commonalty, a distracted Government, a divided people!"

[Sidenote: Irish Emancipation.]

The real character of this Parliamentary rule was seen in the rejection of Pitt's offer of free trade. In Pitt's eyes the danger of Ireland lay above all in the misery of its people. Although the Irish Catholics were held down by the brute force of their Protestant rulers, he saw that their discontent was growing fast into rebellion, and that one secret at any rate of their discontent lay in Irish poverty, a poverty increased if not originally brought about by the jealous exclusion of Irish products from their natural markets in England itself. One of his first commercial measures therefore, as we have seen, aimed at putting an end to this exclusion by a bill which established freedom of trade between the two islands. But though he met successfully the fears and jealousies of the English farmers and manufacturers he was foiled by the factious ignorance of the Irish landowners, and his bill was rejected by the Irish Parliament. So utterly was he discouraged that for the moment he ceased from all further attempts to improve the condition of Ireland. But the efforts which the French revolutionists made to excite rebellion amongst the Irish roused him to fresh measures of conciliation and good government. The hopes of some reform of the Irish Parliament had been fanned by the eloquence of Grattan and by the pressure of the United Irishmen, an association which had sprung up in Ulster, where Protestant dissenters, who were equally excluded with Catholics from any share in political power, formed the strongest part of the population. These hopes however were growing every day fainter. To the Irish aristocracy parliamentary reform meant the close of a corrupt rule which had gone on unchecked since the American war. But to the Irish Catholic it meant far more; it meant his admission, not only to the electoral franchise, but in the end to all the common privileges of citizenship from which he was excluded, his "emancipation," to use the word which now became common, from the yoke of slavery which had pressed on him ever since the Battle of the Boyne.

[Sidenote: The United Irishmen.]

To such an emancipation Pitt was already looking forward. In 1792, a year before the outbreak of war with France, he forced on the Irish Parliament measures for the admission of Catholics to the electoral franchise and to civil and military office within the island, which promised a new era of religious liberty. But the promise came too late. The hope of conciliation was lost in the fast rising tide of religious and social passion. As the dream of obtaining Parliamentary reform died away the United Irishmen of the North drifted into projects of insurrection and a correspondence with France. The news of the French Revolution fell with a yet more terrible effect on the Catholic peasantry, brooding over their misery and their wrongs. Their discontent broke out in social disorder, in the outrages of secret societies of "Defenders" and "Peep o' Day Boys," which spread panic among the ruling classes. It was only by sheer terror and bloodshed that the Protestant landowners, who banded together in "Orange" societies to meet the secret societies about them, could hold the country down. Outrages on the one side, tyranny on the other, deepened the disorder and panic every day, and the hopes of the reformers grew fainter as the terror rose fast around them. The maddened Protestants scouted all notions of further concessions to men whom they looked upon as on the verge of revolt; and Grattan's motions for reform were defeated by increasing majorities. On the other hand the entry of the anti-revolutionary Whigs into Pitt's ministry revived Grattan's hopes, for Burke and his followers were pledged to a liberal policy towards Ireland, and Lord Fitzwilliam, who came over as viceroy in 1794, encouraged Grattan to bring in a bill for the entire emancipation of the Catholics at the opening of the next year. Such a step can hardly have been taken without Pitt's assent; but the minister was now swept along by a tide of feeling which he could not control. The Orangemen threatened revolt, the Tories in Pitt's own Cabinet recoiled from the notion of reform, and Lord Fitzwilliam was not only recalled, but replaced by Lord Camden, an avowed enemy of all change or concession to the Catholics. From that moment the United Irishmen became a revolutionary society; and one of their leaders, Wolfe Tone, made his way to France, in the spring of 1796, to seek aid in a national rising.

[Sidenote: France and Ireland.]

It is probable that Tone's errand was known to Pitt; it is certain that Lord Edward Fitzgerald, another of the patriot leaders, who had been summoned to carry on more definite negotiations in Basle, revealed inadvertently as he returned the secret of his hopes to an agent of the English Cabinet. Vague as were the offers of the United Irishmen, they had been warmly welcomed by the French Government. Masters at home, the Directory were anxious to draw off the revolutionary enthusiasm which the French party of order dreaded as much as Burke himself to the channels of foreign conquest. They were already planning that descent of their army in the Alps upon Lombardy which was to give a fatal blow to one of their enemies, Austria; and they welcomed the notion of a French descent upon Ireland and an Irish revolt, which would give as fatal a blow to their other enemy, England. An army of 25,000 men under General Hoche was promised, a fleet was manned, and preparations were being made for the expedition during the summer. But the secret was ill kept, and the news of such an attempt was, we can hardly doubt, the ground of the obstinacy with which Pitt persisted in the teeth of the national feeling and of Burke's invectives in clinging to his purpose of concluding a peace. In October 1796 Lord Malmesbury was despatched to Paris and negotiations were finally opened for that purpose. The terms which Pitt offered were terms of mutual restitution. France was to evacuate Holland and to restore Belgium to the Emperor. England on the other hand was to restore the colonies she had won to France, Holland, and Spain. As the English Minister had no power of dealing with the territories already ceded by Prussia and other states, such a treaty would have left France, as her eastern border, the line of the Rhine. But even had they desired peace at all, the Directors would have scorned it on terms such as these. While Malmesbury was negotiating indeed France was roused to new dreams of conquest by the victories of Napoleon Buonaparte. The genius of Carnot, the French Minister of War, had planned a joint advance upon Vienna by the French armies of Italy and the Rhine, the one under Buonaparte, the other under Moreau. The plan was only partly successful. Moreau, though he pushed forward through every obstacle to Bavaria, was compelled to fall back by the defeat of a lieutenant; and was only enabled by a masterly retreat through the Black Forest to reach the Rhine. But the disaster of Moreau was more than redeemed by the victories of Buonaparte. With the army which occupied the Riviera and the Maritime Alps the young general marched on Piedmont at the opening of the summer, separated its army from the Austrian troops, and forced the king of Sardinia to conclude a humiliating peace. A brilliant victory at the bridge of Lodi brought him to Milan, and drove the Austrians into the Tyrol. Lombardy was in the hands of the French, the Duchies south of the Po pillaged, and the Pope driven to purchase an armistice at enormous cost, before the Austrian armies, raised to a force of 50,000 men, again descended from the Tyrol for the relief of Mantua. But a fatal division of their forces by the Lake of Garda enabled Buonaparte to hurl them back broken upon Trent, and to shut up their general, Wurmser, in Mantua with the remnant of his men; while fresh victories at the bridge of Arcola and at Bassano drove back two new Austrian armies who advanced to Wurmser's rescue.

[Sidenote: The Terror of Ireland.]

It was the success of Buonaparte which told on the resolve of the Directory to reject all terms of peace. After months of dilatory negotiations the offers of Lord Malmesbury were definitely declined, and the English envoy returned home at the end of the year. Every hour of his stay in Paris had raised higher hopes of success against England in the minds of the Directory. At the moment of his arrival Spain had been driven to declare war as their ally against Britain; and the Spanish and Dutch fleets were now at the French service for a struggle at sea. The merciless exactions of Buonaparte poured gold into the exhausted treasury; and the energy of Hoche rapidly availed itself of this supply to equip a force for operations in Ireland. At the opening of December he was ready to put to sea with a fleet of more than forty sail and 25,000 men; and the return of Lord Malmesbury was the signal for the despatch of his expedition from Brest. The fleet at Toulon, which was intended to co-operate with that at Brest, and which had sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar for that purpose, was driven into Port l'Orient by an English squadron: but contrary winds baffled the fleet which was watching Hoche, and his armament slipped away with little hindrance towards the Irish coast. Had it reached Ireland unbroken and under such a general, the island might well have been lost to the English Crown. But the winds fought against France, as they had fought against the Armada of Spain; and the ships were parted from one another by a gale which burst on them as they put to sea. Seventeen reached Bantry Bay, but hearing nothing of their leader or of the rest, they sailed back again to Brest, in spite of the entreaties of the soldiers to be suffered to land. Another division reached the Shannon to be scattered and driven home again by a second storm. Twelve vessels were wrecked or captured, and the frigate in which Hoche had embarked returned to port without having seen any of its companions. The invasion had failed, but the panic which it roused woke passions of cruelty and tyranny which turned Ireland into a hell. Soldiers and yeomanry marched over the country torturing and scourging the "croppies," as the Irish peasantry were termed from their short-cut hair; robbing, ravishing, and murdering at their will. The lightest suspicion, the most unfounded charges, were taken as warrants for bloodshed. So hideous were these outrages that the news of them as it reached England woke a thrill of horror in the minds of even the blindest Tories; but by the landowners who formed the Irish Parliament they were sanctioned in a Bill of Indemnity and protected for the future by an Insurrection Act. The terror however only woke a universal spirit of revolt. Ireland drank in greedily that hatred of England and of English rule which all the justice and moderation of later government has failed to destroy; and the United Irishmen looked with more passionate longing than ever to France.

[Sidenote: The struggle for the Sea.]

Nor had France abandoned the design of invasion; while her victories made such a design every day more formidable. The war was going steadily in her favour. A fresh victory at Rivoli, the surrender of Mantua, and an advance through Styria on Vienna, enabled Buonaparte to wring a peace from England's one ally, Austria. The armistice was concluded in April 1797, and the final treaty which was signed at Campo Formio in October not only gave France the Ionian Islands, a part of the old territory of Venice (whose Italian possessions passed to the Emperor), as well as the Netherlands and the whole left bank of the Rhine, but united Lombardy with the Duchies south of the Po and the Papal States as far as the Rubicon into a "Cisalpine Republic," which was absolutely beneath her control. The withdrawal of Austria left France without an enemy on the Continent, and England without an ally. The stress of the war was pressing more heavily on her every day. A mutiny in the fleet was suppressed with difficulty. The news of Hoche's expedition brought about a run for gold which forced on the Bank a suspension of specie payments. It was in this darkest hour of the struggle that Burke passed away, protesting to the last against the peace which, in spite of his previous failure, Pitt was again striving to bring about by fresh negotiations at Lille. Peace seemed more needful than ever to him now that France was free to attack her enemy with the soldiers who had fought at Arcola and Rivoli. Their way, indeed, lay across the sea, and at sea Britain was supreme. But her supremacy was threatened by a coalition of naval forces such as had all but crushed her in the American war. Again the Dutch and Spanish fleets were allied with the fleets of France; and it was necessary to watch Cadiz and the Scheldt as well as Brest and Toulon. A single victory of the three confederates, or even such a command of the Channel as they had held for months during the war with America, would enable the Directory to throw overwhelming armies not only on the shores of England, but on the shores of Ireland, and whatever might be the fate of the one enterprise, there could be little doubt of the success of the other. The danger was real; but it had hardly threatened England when it was dispelled by two great victories. The Spanish fleet, which put out to sea with twenty-seven sail of the line, was met on the fourteenth of February 1797 by Admiral Jervis off Cape St. Vincent with a force of but fifteen; and driven back to Cadiz with a loss of four of its finest vessels. Disheartened as they were, however, their numbers still exceeded that of the force which blockaded them; and France counted with confidence on the fleet of Holland, which was ordered to join its own fleet at Brest. The aim of this union was to protect a fresh force in its descent upon Ireland, where the United Irishmen now declared themselves ready for revolt. But a yet sterner fortune awaited the Dutch than that which had fallen on the Spaniards. Their admiral, De Winter, who had quitted the Texel during a storm with eleven sail of the line and four frigates, fell in on the eleventh of October with a far larger fleet under Admiral Duncan off Camperdown. The Hollanders fought with a stubborn courage worthy of their old renown, and it was only when their ships were riddled with shot into mere wrecks that they fell into the hands of the English.

[Sidenote: The Irish Rising.]

The French project for an expedition to Ireland hung on the junction of the Dutch fleet with that of Brest, and the command of the Channel which this junction would have given them. Such a command became impossible after the defeat of Camperdown. But the disappointment of their hopes of foreign aid only drove the adherents of revolt in Ireland to a rising of despair. The union of the national party, which had lasted to some extent from the American war, was now broken up. The Protestants of Ulster still looked for aid to France. The Catholics, on the other hand, were alienated from the French by their attack on religion and the priesthood; and the failure of the French expedition, while it damped the hopes of the Ulstermen, gave force to the demands of the Catholic party for a purely national rising. So fierce was this demand that the leaders of the United Irishmen were forced to fix on the spring of 1798 for the outbreak of an insurrection, in which Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who had some small military experience, was to take the command. But while yielding on this point to the Catholic section of their party they conciliated the Protestants by renewed appeals for aid to the Directory. In spite of its previous failures France again promised help; and a division was prepared during the winter for service in Ireland. But the passion of the nation was too intense to wait for its arrival. The government too acted with a prompt decision in face of the danger, and an arrest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald with three of their chief leaders in February 1798 broke the plans of the insurgents. On the 23rd of May, however, the day fixed for the opening of the revolt, the Catholic peasantry of the south rose in arms. Elsewhere their disorderly gatherings were easily dispersed by the yeomanry; but Wexford surrendered to 14,000 insurgents who marched on it, headed by a village priest, and the town at once became the centre of a formidable revolt.

[Sidenote: Its failure.]

Fortunately for the English rule the old religious hatred which had so often wrecked the hopes of Ireland broke out in the instant of this triumph. The Protestant inhabitants of Wexford were driven into the river or flung into prison. Another body of insurgents, frenzied by the cruelties of the royal troops, massacred a hundred Protestants in cool blood. The atrocities of the soldiers and the yeomanry were avenged with a fiendish ruthlessness. Loyalists were lashed and tortured in their turn, and every soldier taken was butchered without mercy. The result of these outrages was fatal to the insurrection. The Ulster Protestants, who formed the strength of the United Irishmen, stood sullenly aloof from rebels who murdered Protestants. The Catholic gentry threw themselves on the side of the government against a rising which threatened the country with massacre and anarchy. Few in fact had joined the insurgents in Wexford when Lord Lake appeared before their camp upon Vinegar Hill with a strong force of English troops on the 21st of May. The camp was stormed, and with the dispersion of its defenders the revolt came suddenly to an end. But its suppression came only just in time to prevent greater disasters; for a few weeks after the close of the rebellion the long-expected aid arrived from France. The news of the outbreak had forced the armament which was being equipped in the French ports to put to sea with forces utterly inadequate to the task it had set itself, but fresh aid was promised to follow, and the nine hundred soldiers who landed in August under General Humbert on the coast of Mayo showed by their first successes how formidable a centre they would have given to the revolt had the revolt held its ground. But in the two months which had passed since Vinegar Hill all trace of resistance to the English rule had been trodden out in blood, and Humbert found himself alone in a country exhausted and panic-stricken. He marched however boldly on Castlebar, broke a force of yeomanry and volunteers three times his number, and only surrendered when Lord Cornwallis, who had succeeded to the Lord-Lieutenancy, faced him with thirty thousand men.

[Sidenote: French designs on India.]

Of the threefold attack on which the Directory had relied for the ruin of England two parts had now broken down. Humbert's surrender and the failure of the native insurrection left little hope for future attack on the side of Ireland. The naval confederacy which was to rob England of the command of the seas had been foiled by the utter wreck of the Dutch fleet, and the imprisonment of the Spanish fleet in Cadiz. But the genius of Buonaparte had seized on the schemes for a rising against the English rule in Hindostan, and widened them into a project of all but world-wide conquest. At this time the strongest and most vigorous of the Indian powers was that of Mysore, at the southern extremity of the peninsula, where a Mussulman state had been built up by the genius of an adventurer, Hyder Ali. In the days when the English were winning their supremacy over the Carnatic, Hyder had been their chief difficulty; and his attack had once brought them to the verge of ruin. The hostility of his son Tippoo was even more bitter; but the victories of Lord Cornwallis had taught the Sultan of Mysore that he was no match for the British power single-handed; and his hopes, like those of the United Irishmen, were fixed upon France. He was striving to get aid from the Afghans and from the Nizam, but what he most counted on for the expulsion of the English from the Carnatic was a force of thirty thousand French soldiers. Letters requesting such a force were despatched by him to France in 1797. Buonaparte had already fixed on Mysore as a basis of operations against the British rule in Hindostan; and after dismissing as impracticable a project suggested to him on his return from Italy after the treaty of Campo Formio for a descent upon England itself, he laid before the Directory a plan for the conquest and occupation of Egypt as a preliminary to a campaign in Southern India. Utterly as this plan was foiled in the future, it was far from being the wild dream which it has often been considered. Both the Ministry and East Indian Directors were roused into anxiety by the first news of Buonaparte's expedition. The Earl of Mornington, Governor-General of British India, was warned of a possible attack from the Red Sea. Four thousand soldiers were hurried off to reinforce his army; while the English fleet watched anxiously in the Mediterranean. But so perfect was the secrecy with which the French plans were combined that Buonaparte was able to put to sea in May 1798 with a force of 30,000 veterans drawn from the army of Italy, and making himself master of Malta as he passed to land near Alexandria at the close of June.

[Sidenote: The battle of the Nile.]

The conquest of Egypt proved as easy and complete as Buonaparte had hoped. The Mamelukes were routed in the battle of the Pyramids; Cairo was occupied; and the French troops pushed rapidly up the valley of the Nile. Their general meanwhile showed his genius for government by a masterly organization of the conquered country, by the conciliation of his new subjects, and by measures for the enrolment of native soldiers which would in a short time have placed him at the head of a formidable army. Of his ultimate aim there can be little doubt; for he had hardly landed at Alexandria when he despatched the news of his arrival and promises of support to Tippoo. All chance however of success in his projects hung on the maintenance of communications with France. With Italy, with the Ionian Islands, with Alexandria in French holding, it was all but impossible to prevent supplies of men and arms from being forwarded to Egypt, so long as the French fleet remained in the waters of the Mediterranean and kept the English force concentrated by the necessity of watching its movements. But the French were hardly masters of Egypt when their fleet ceased to exist. The thirteen men-of-war which had escorted the expedition were found by Admiral Nelson in Aboukir Bay, moored close to the coast in a line guarded at either end by gunboats and batteries. Nelson resolved to thrust his ships between the French and the shore. On the morning of the 1st of August his own flag-ship led the way in this attack; and after a terrible fight of twelve hours, nine of the French vessels were captured and destroyed, two were burned, and five thousand French seamen were killed or made prisoners. "Victory," cried Nelson, "is not a name strong enough for such a scene." Few victories indeed in history have produced more effective results than the battle of the Nile. The French flag was swept from the waters of the Mediterranean. All communication between France and Buonaparte's army was cut off; and his hopes of making Egypt a starting-point for the conquest of India fell at a blow. To hold Egypt itself soon became difficult, for a desperate revolt broke out at the news of Nelson's victory in the streets of Cairo, and a Turkish army advanced from Syria to recover the valley of the Nile.

[Sidenote: France and Europe.]

Secure against invasion at home as against rebellion in Ireland, secure too against the dangers that threatened her rule in India, and mistress of the seas, England was free in her turn to attack the assailant who had so long threatened her very existence. And in such an attack she was aided at this moment by the temper of the European powers, and by the ceaseless aggressions of France. The treaties of Basle and Campo Formio were far from being accepted by the Directory as a final settlement of the relations of France with Europe. Some faint remnant of the older dreams of freeing oppressed peoples may have lingered in the aid which it gave to the rising of the subject districts of Basle and Vaud against their Bernese masters in the opening of 1798. But mere greed of gold was seen in the plunder of the treasury of Berne, a plunder which served to equip the army that sailed with Buonaparte to the shores of Egypt, and to recruit the exhausted treasury of the Directory; and an ambition, as reckless as this greed, broke out in an attack on the mountain cantons, states whose democratic institutions gave no such excuse for hostility as had been afforded by the aristocracy of Berne. A French decree abolished the Swiss Confederation, and the independence of its several states, and established in their place an Helvetic Republic modelled on a plan sent from Paris, and placed under the protection of France. The mountain cantons rose against this overthrow of a freedom compared with which the freedom of France was but of yesterday; but desperate as was their struggle they were overwhelmed by numbers, and the men of Uri, of Unterwalden and of Schwytz bowed for the first time to a foreign conqueror.

[Sidenote: Russia and France.]

The overthrow of this immemorial house of freedom opened the eyes of the blindest enthusiast to the real character of the French aggressions. Even in the group of young English poets, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, who had clung till now to the dream of the Revolution, of a Europe freed and regenerated by the arms of the new republic, all belief in such a dream passed finally away. But the France of the Directory would have cared little for this alienation of the peoples, had it not been backed by the revived hostility of their kings. What England counted on in her efforts for a revival of the coalition was the resentment of Austria at the aggressions which the Directory had ever since the peace of Campo Formio been carrying on in Italy. In the opening of 1798 a French force entered Rome, set up a Roman republic, and carried off Pius VI. a prisoner to Siena; while the king of Sardinia was driven to admit French garrisons into his fortresses. Austria however was still too weak after her defeats to listen to Pitt's advances, had Pitt stood alone. But Russia was now about to take a new part in European affairs. Under Catharine the Second this power had availed itself of the war against France in the west to carry out its own projects of conquest in eastern Europe; and, as we have seen, Pitt had watched its advance at the opening of the Revolution with far greater dread than the movements in France. It was in fact the need which the two German states felt of balancing the Russian annexations in Poland by annexations of their own which had paralysed their armies on the Rhine and saved France at the moment of her greatest danger in 1793. It is probable that the Directory still counted on the persistence of Russia in a similar policy, and believed that Catharine would see in their attack on Egypt and the Turks only a fresh opportunity for conquests on the Danube. But the sudden greatness of France had warned Russia that its policy of selfishness had been carried too far. It had allowed the Republic to tower into supremacy over the Continent, and if once such a supremacy was firmly established it would prove a fatal obstacle to the Russian advance. France would again, as under the monarchy, aim at the restoration of Poland; she would again bar the way to Constantinople; and her action would be backed by the weight of all western Europe, which had been thrown into her scale by the policy of the very state she defied. To avert such a result it was necessary to restore that balance of the Continent by which France and the German powers held one another in check; and with a view to this restoration Russia suddenly declared itself an enemy of France. Catharine's successor, the Czar Paul, set aside the overtures of the Directory. A close alliance was formed with Austria, and while an Imperial army gathered on the Bavarian frontier Russian troops hurried to the west.