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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was with these two phases of one and the same condition that Europe had to deal between 1793 and 1814. In the one instance a people unified by a common passion and common aims, in the other the same people concentrated into a common action by submission to the will of a sovereign, apparently resistless in the council as in the field. It is true that the affections of his subjects soon ceased to follow him, except in the armies by whose power he ruled, but the result is the same. All the energies of the nation are summed up in a single overpowering impulse,—at first spontaneous, afterwards artificial,—to which during the first half of Napoleon's career was given a guidance of matchless energy and wisdom.

Such a combination is for the time irresistible, as the continent of Europe proved during long and weary years. Absolute power, concentrated force, central position, extraordinary sagacity and energy, all united to assure to Napoleon the dazzling successes which are matters of history. The duration and the permanent results of this startling career depended, however, upon the staying power of the French nation and upon the steadfastness of the resistance. Upon the Continent, the latter in its actuality ceased. Potentially it remained,—men's hearts swelled to bursting under the tyranny they endured; but before the power and the genius of the great conqueror outward rebellion shrank away. States dared not trust each other,—they could not act together; and so men went silently in the bitterness of their spirits.

There remained one small group of islands, close on the flank of the would-be ruler of the world, with a population numbering little more than half that of his immediate dominions, whose inhabitants deeply sympathized with sufferings and oppression they were powerless directly to relieve. The resistance they had offered to the aggressive fury of the Revolution they continued to oppose to its successor and representative; but it was not by direct action in the field, but only by operations aimed to abridge the resources and endurance of France, that they could look forward to a possibility of success. For seven years went on this final silent strife, whose outlines have been traced in the preceding chapter of this work. During its continuance Great Britain herself, while escaping the political oppression and national humiliation undergone by the continental peoples, drank deep of the cup of suffering. Her strength wasted visibly; but the mere fact of her endurance and persistence compelled her enemy to efforts more exhausting, to measures more fatal, than those forced upon herself. And, while thus subjected to a greater strain, Napoleon was by Great Britain cut off from that greatest of all sources of renewing vitality—the Sea.

The true function of Great Britain in this long struggle can scarcely be recognized unless there be a clear appreciation of the fact that a really great national movement, like the French Revolution, or a really great military power under an incomparable general, like the French empire under Napoleon, is not to be brought to terms by ordinary military successes, which simply destroy the organized force opposed.

Of the latter, the protracted and not wholly hopeless resistance, which in 1813 and 1814 succeeded even the great Russian catastrophe, is a signal instance; while to subvert such a power, wielded by such a man, by any reverse less tremendous than it then underwent, is hopeless. Two Napoleons do not co-exist. In the former case, on the other hand, the tangible something, the decisive point against which military effort can be directed, is wanting. Of this the struggle between the North and South in the American Civil War affords a conspicuous example. Few, probably, would now maintain that the capture of Richmond in the first year of the war, when the enthusiasm of the Southern people was at its height, their fighting force undiminished, their hopes undimmed by the bitter disappointments of a four years' struggle, would have had any decisive effect upon the high-spirited race. Positions far more important fell without a sign of such result. No man could then have put his finger here, or there, and said, "This is the key-stone of resistance;" for in the high and stern feeling of the moment resistance was not here nor there, but everywhere.

So was it in the early flush of the French Revolution. The "On to Paris" of 1793 would probably have had no more decisive results than the "On to Richmond" of 1861, had it been successful. Not till enthusiasm has waned before sorrow, and strength failed under exhaustion, does popular impulse, when deep and universal, acquiesce in the logic of war. To such exhaustion France was brought when Bonaparte took the helm. By his organizing genius he restored her military strength, the material of which still remained, economized such resources as the wastefulness of preceding governments had left, and above all secured for her a further power of endurance by drawing upon the life-blood of surrounding nations. So exhaustion was for the time postponed; but, if the course of aggression which Bonaparte had inherited from the Revolution was to continue, there were needed, not the resources of the Continent only, but of the world. There was needed also a diminution of ultimate resistance below the stored-up aggressive strength of France; otherwise, however procrastinated, the time must come when the latter should fail.

On both these points Great Britain withstood Napoleon. She shut him off from the world, and by the same act prolonged her own powers of endurance beyond his power of aggression. This in the retrospect of history was the function of Great Britain in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period; and that the successive ministries of Pitt and his followers pursued the course best fitted, upon the whole, to discharge that function, is their justification to posterity. It is the glory of Pitt's genius that as he discovered the object, "Security," so likewise he foresaw the means, Exhaustion, by which alone the French propaganda of aggression would be brought to pause. The eloquent derision poured upon his predictions of failure from financial exhaustion, from expenditure of resources, from slackening of enthusiasm, recoils from the apprehension of the truth. He saw clearly the line of Great Britain's action, he foresaw the direction of events, he foretold the issue. How long the line would be, how the course of events would be retarded, how protracted the issue, he could not foretell, because no man could foresee the supreme genius of Napoleon Bonaparte.