semi-barbarous nations who formed the bulk of the popula tion was not somewhere heard. The restraints on commerce provoked murmurs and frauds.

Moreover, all the world was becoming impatient that so large a portion of the globe should be monopolized by a decrepit dynasty. The Dutch and the British and the French sought opportunities of illicit trade. The British cut down forest-trees, useful in the workshop and the dye-house, and carried them off as unappropriated products of nature.

To these dangers Charles III. had added another by making war to the death on the so called company of Jesus. Of the prelates of Spain, seven archbishops and twenty-eight bishops, two thirds of them all approved the exile of the order from his dominions, and recommended its total dissolution; while only one bishop desired to preserve it without reform. With their concurrence, and the support of France and Portugal, he extorted the assent of the pope to the abolition of the order. On the second of April 1767, at one and the same hour in Spain, in the north and south of Africa, in Asia, in America, in all the islands of the monarchy, the royal decree was opened by officials of the crown, enjoining them immediately to take possession of its houses, to chase its members from their convents, and within twenty-four hours to transport them as prisoners to some appointed harbor. In Spain the Jesuit priests, without regard to their birth, education, or age, were sent on board ships to land where they could. The commands were executed less perfectly in Mexico and California, and still less so along the South Pacific coast and the waters of the La Plata.

But the power of Spain in America had rested in a great measure on the unwearied activity of the Jesuits as missionaries and teachers and organizers of the native population. Their banishment weakened her authority over Spanish emigrants, and confused the minds of the rude progeny of the aborigines. In Paraguay, where Spanish supremacy had rested alone on Jesuits who had held in their hands all the attributes of Cæsar and pope, of state and church, the revolution made a fracture that never could be healed. The independence of the United States threatened a very real danger in

all the boundless vice-royalties of Spain. As they had been won by adventurous leaders, so a priest, an aboriginal chief, a descendant of an Inca, might waken any of them to defy the Spanish rule. Jesuits might find shelter among their neophytes, and reappear as the guides of rebellion. One of their order has written: "When Spain tore evangelical laborers away from the colonies, the breath of independence agitated the New World, and God permitted it to detach itself from the Old."*

The United States did not merely threaten to hold the left bank of the Mississippi; but, as epidemic disease leaps mysteriously over mountains and across oceans, spores of discontent might be unaccountably borne to the many-tongued peoples of South America. Alluring promises of weakening Britain could soothe Florida Blanca no more; and, from the time when the court of France resolved to treat with the Americans, his prophetic fears were never allayed.

Early in the year 1778 Juan de Miralez, a Spanish emissary, appeared in Philadelphia. Not accredited to congress, for Spain would not recognise that body, he looked upon the rising republic as a natural enemy to his country; and through the French minister, with whom he had as yet no authorized connection, he sought to raise up obstacles to its progress. He came as a spy and an intriguer; nevertheless, congress, with unsuspecting confidence, welcomed him as the representative of an intended ally.

Count Montmorin, the French ambassador at Madrid, had in his childhood been a playmate of the king of France, whose friendship he retained. As a man of honor, he desired to deal fairly with the United States, and he watched with impartiality the politics of the Spanish court. On learning from him the separate determination of France to support the United States, Florida Blanca quivered in every limb and could hardly utter a reply. Ever haunted by the spectres of contraband trade, and of territorial encroachments, he was appalled at the example of the Americans as insurgents, and the colossal great

* Charles III. et les Jésuites de ses états d'Europe et d'Amérique en 1767. Documents inédits, publiés par le p. Auguste Carayon de la compagnie de Jésus, lxxxvi. et lxxxvii.

ness which their independence foretold. With these apprehensions he combined a subtle jealousy of the good faith of the French, who, as a colonial power, were reduced to the lowest rank among the nations of western Europe, and who could recover their share in commerce only through the ruin of colonial monopoly.

When, in April, the French ambassador pressed Florida Blanca to declare at what epoch Spain would engage in the war, the minister, beside himself with passion, exclaimed: "I will take the opinion of the king. Since April of last year France has gone counter to our advice. The king of Spain seems to be looked upon as a viceroy, to whom you put questions as if for his opinion, and then send orders. The American deputies are treated like the Roman consuls, to whom the kings of the East came to beg support. The announcement of your treaty with them is worthy of Don Quixote." The first wish of Spain was to prevent the self-existence of the United States, and, as mediator, to dictate the terms of their accommodation with their mother country; if this was no longer possible, she hoped to be able to concert in advance with England how, in the negotiation for peace, to narrow their domain and erect barriers against their ambition. No sooner had Louis XVI. and his council resolved to brave England than they made it their paramount object to reconcile the Spanish king to their measures. His need of protection, his respect for the elder branch of his family, and some remnants of rancor against England, concurred to bind him to the alliance with France. Moreover, Florida Blanca, who from the drudgery of a provincial attorney had risen to be the chief minister of a world-wide empire, had a passion to be famous in his own time and in history, and was therefore willing to join France in the war, if he could but secure Spain against the United States. Avoiding an immediate choice between peace and war, he demanded the postponement of active hostilities in European waters that he might gain free scope for treating with England. Britain was unprepared. The French were ready for action; yet they consented to wait for Spain.

To ascertain the strength of the fleet at Brest, a British fleet of twenty ships of the line put to sea under Admiral

Keppel, so well known to posterity by the pencil of Reynolds and the words of Burke. On the seventeenth of June, meeting two French frigates near the island of Ouessant, Keppel gave orders that they should bring to. They refused. One of them, being fired into, discharged its broadside and then lowered its flag; the other escaped. The French government, no longer able to remain inactive, authorized the capture of British merchantmen; and early in July its great fleet sailed out of Brest. Keppel put to sea once more. On the twentyseventh the two admirals, each having thirty men-of-war in three divisions and each professing the determination to fight a decisive battle, met off Ouessant. D'Orvilliers was better fitted for a monastery than for the quarter-deck; and the British admiral wanted ability for so great a command. After an insignificant action, in which neither party lost a ship, the French returned to Brest, the British to Portsmouth. The French army encamped in Normandy under the Count de Broglie, as if to invade England, and wasted the season in cabals. In India, Chandernagor on the Hoogley surrendered to the English without a blow; the governor of Pondicherry, with a feeble garrison and weak defences, maintained a siege of seventy days in the vain hope of relief. The flag of the Bourbons disappeared from the gulf and sea of Bengal, and from the coast of Malabar.

Florida Blanca proposed to the British minister at Madrid to obtain a cessation of hostilities in order to establish and perpetuate an equilibrium on the continent of America. This was an offer to secure to England the basin of the St. Lawrence, with the territory north-west of the Ohio, and to bound the United States by the Alleghanies. Lord Weymouth answered "that, while France supported the colonies in rebellion, no negotiation could be entered into;" but, as both Great Britain and Spain were interested in preserving colonial dependency, he invited Spain to an alliance.

Spain was unprepared for war; her ships were poorly armed; her arsenals ill supplied; and few of her naval officers were skilful yet Florida Blanca threw out hints to France that he would in October be ready for action, if she would undertake a descent into England. To the British proposal of

an alliance he returned a more formal offer of mediation between the two belligerents, with the avowal that the king of Spain would be forced to choose his part if the war should be continued.

Weymouth, in October, warning Spain of the fatal consequence to the Spanish monarchy of the independence of the United States, put the proposal aside. Yet Florida Blanca continued to fill the courts of Europe with the declaration that Spain would never precede England in recognising the sepa rate existence of her colonies.

In this state of the relations between the three great powers, congress, tired of the dissensions of rival commissioners, on the fourteenth of September, with the cordial approval of John Adams, abolished the joint commission and appointed Franklin their minister plenipotentiary at the court of France. In him the interests of the United States obtained a serene and wakeful guardian, who penetrated the wiles of the Spanish government, and knew how to unite fidelity to the French alliance with timely vindication of the rights of America.

"I observe with pain," so reported Count Montmorin in October, and so he was obliged continually to report of the younger branch of the house of Bourbon, "that this government singularly fears the prosperity and progress of the Americans; and will be much inclined to stipulate for such a form of independence as may leave divisions between England and her colonies." To this end Florida Blanca wished England to retain Canada and Nova Scotia, that they might prove a perennial source of quarrels between the British and the Americans. "On our side," wrote Vergennes simultaneously, "there will be no difficulty in guaranteeing to England Canada and all other American possessions which may remain to her at the peace. The king has recognised the thirteen provinces as free and independent states; for them we ask independence, but without comprehending other English possessions. We are very far from desiring that the nascent republic should remain the exclusive mistress of all that immense continent."

The French minister at Philadelphia zealously urged members of congress to renounce every ambition for an increase of