The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire 1793-1812, Vol II

"But these are connected with others more important. They are obviously and necessarily connected with the duration of peace, the continuance of which, on a secure and durable footing, must ever be the first object of the foreign policy of this country. They are connected still more with its internal tranquillity, and with the natural effects of a free but well-regulated government.... This is the great and governing cause, the operation of which has given scope to all the other circumstances which I have enumerated. It is the union of liberty with law, which, by raising a barrier equally firm against the encroachments of power and the violence of popular commotion, affords to property its just security, produces the exertion of genius and labor, the extent and solidity of credit, the circulation and increase of capital; which forms and upholds the national character and sets in motion all the springs which actuate the great mass of the community through all its various descriptions.... On this point, therefore, let us principally fix our attention; let us preserve this first and most essential object, and every other is in our power." 476

It was perfectly consistent with this position that, when Pitt saw a neighboring state in convulsions from the struggle of a turbulent minority for liberty without law; when that state had not only proclaimed its purpose, but taken steps to promote a similar condition in other nations; when societies representing a small, but active and radical, minority in England were openly fraternizing with France; when the great leader of the English Opposition had, from his seat in Parliament, praised the French soldiery for joining the mobs,—it was perfectly consistent with his past that Pitt should oppose with all his powers a course of action which not only endangered the internal peace upon which the prosperity of England rested, but also carried into the realm of international relations the same disorganizing principles, the same disregard for law, covenant, and vested right that had reduced France to her then pitiful condition. Not only Great Britain, but the European world was threatened with subversion. That Pitt did not bewail aloud the wreck of his hopes, the frustration of his career, the diversion of his energies from the path that was dearest to him, shows the strength, not the instability, of the man. That he laid aside the reforms he had projected, and discouraged all movements towards internal change, which, by dividing the wills of the people, might weaken their power for external action, proves but that concentration of purpose which, sacrificing present gratification to future good, achieves great ends. Never does the trained seaman appear greater, has well said the naval novelist Cooper, than when, confronted with unexpected peril, he turns all his energies from the path in which they were before directed, to meet the new danger. "Never," writes Lanfrey of the critical period between Essling and Wagram, "had the maxim of sacrificing the accessory to the principal, of which Napoleon's military conceptions afford so many admirable examples, and which is true in every art, been applied with more activity and fitness.... The complications which he most feared were to him, for the moment, as though they did not exist. No secondary event had power to draw him off from the great task he had primarily assigned to himself." 477 All instinctively recognize the courage as well as the wisdom of this conduct in the dangers which the seaman and the soldier are called to meet; why deny its application to the no less urgent, and at times more momentous, issues presented to the statesman? If, as may fairly be claimed, it is to the maritime power of Great Britain that Europe owes the arrest of a subversive revolution, if to that maritime power is due that a great, irresistible, and beneficent movement toward the liberty and welfare of the masses survived a convulsion that threatened its destruction, then to Pitt, as the master spirit who directed the movements of the British nation, the gratitude of Europe is also due.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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