thoroughly well, published in England a memorial about them addressed to the sovereigns of Europe:

"The system of establishing colonies in various climates to create a monopoly of the peculiar product of their labor is at end. The spirit of commerce hath become predominant. A great and powerful empire, founded in nature and growing into an independent organized being, has taken its equal station with the nations upon earth. I see the sun rising in the west. The independence of America is fixed as fate; she is mistress of her own fortune; knows that she is so; and will establish her own system and constitution and change the system of Europe.

"In this New World growth is founded in the civilizing activity of the human race. We see all the inhabitants not only free, but allowing an universal naturalization. In a country like this, where every man has the full and free exertion of his powers, an unabated application and a perpetual struggle sharpen the wits and give constant training to the mind. In this wilderness of woods the settlers try experiments, and the advantages of their discoveries are their own. One sees them laboring after the plough, as though they had not an idea beyond the ground they dwell upon; yet is their mind all the while enlarging its powers, and their spirit rises as their improvements advance. This is no fancy drawing of what may be; it is an exact portrait of what actually exists. Many a real philosopher, a politician, a warrior, emerge out of this wilderness, as the seed rises out of the ground where it hath lain buried for its season.

"In agriculture, in mechanic handicrafts, the New World hath been led to many improvements of implements, tools, and machines, leading experience by the hand to many a new invention. The settlers find fragments of time in which they make most of the articles of personal wear and household use for home consumption. Here no laws frame conditions on which a man is to exercise this or that trade. Here are no oppressing, obstructing, dead-doing laws. The moment that the progress of civilization is ripe for it, manufactures will grow and increase with an astonishing exuberancy.

"The same ingenuity is exerted in ship-building; their

commerce hath been striking deep root. The nature of the coast and of the winds renders marine navigation a perpetually moving intercourse; and the nature of the rivers renders inland navigation but a further process of that communion; all which becomes, as it were, a one vital principle of life, extended through a one organized being, one nation. Will that most enterprising spirit be stopped at Cape Horn, or not pass the Cape of Good Hope? Before long they will be found trading in the South Sea, in the Spice Islands, and in China.

"This fostering happiness in North America doth produce progressive population. They have increased nearly the double in eighteen years. By constant intercommunion, America will every day approach nearer and nearer to Europe. Unless the great potentates of Europe can station cherubim at every avenue with a flaming sword that turns every way, to prevent man's quitting this Old World, multitudes of their people, many of the most useful, enterprising spirits, will emigrate to the new one. Much of the active property will go

there also.

"The new empire of America is like a giant ready to run its course. The fostering care with which the rival powers of Europe will nurse it insures its establishment beyond all doubt or danger."

So prophesied Pownall to the English world and to Europe in the first month of 1780. Since the issue of the war is to proceed in a great part from the influence of European powers, it behooves us now to study the manner of their inter

vention.

CHAPTER XXII.

AMERICA IN EUROPE. THE ARMED NEUTRALITY.

1778-1780.

FREDERIC of Prussia had raised the hope that he would follow France in recognising the independence of the United States; but the question of the Bavarian succession compelled him, in junction with Saxony, to stand forth as the champion of Germany; and in his late old age, broken as he was in everything but spirit, he stayed the aggressions of Austria on Bavarian territory, and on the liberty and the constitutions of the Germanic body. "At this moment the affairs of England with her colonies disappeared from his eyes." To William Lee, who, in July 1777, had been appointed by congress its commissioner to treat alike with the emperor of Germany and the king of Prussia, and in March 1778 importuned the Prussian minister Schulenburg for leave to reside at Berlin as an American functionary, Frederic minuted this answer: "We are so occupied with Germany that we cannot think of the Americans we should be heartily glad to recognise them; but at this present moment it could do them no good, and to us might be very detrimental." He could not receive the prizes of the Americans in Embden, because at that harbor he had no means to protect them; their merchants were admitted to his ports on the same terms as the merchants of all other countries.

The British ministry, abandoning the scheme of destroying Prussian influence at Petersburg, sought to propitiate Frederic, as the best means of gaining favor in Russia; and authorized its minister at Berlin to propose an alliance. But Frederic was

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unalterably resolved "not to contract relations with a power which, like England in the last war, had once deceived him so unworthily."

With the restoration of peace, Austria and Russia contested the honor of becoming mediators between the Bourbons and England. On the fifteenth of May 1779, Maria Theresa wrote in her own hand to Charles III. of Spain, in the hope to hold him back from war; and she sent a like letter to her son-inlaw at Versailles. Kaunitz, her great minister, followed with formal proposals of mediation to France and England. In an autograph letter, the king of Spain put aside the interference of the empress; and on the sixteenth of June his ambassador in London delivered to Lord Weymouth a declaration of war; but neither in that declaration nor in the manifesto which followed was there one word relating to the war in America.

In reply, Burke, Fox, and their friends, joined in pledging the house of commons and the nation to the support of the crown. Fifty thousand troops defended the coasts, and as many more of the militia were enrolled. The oscillation of the funds did not exceed one per cent. But opinion more and more denied to parliament the right of taxing unrepresented colonies, and prepared to accept the necessity of recognising their independence. In the commons, Lord John Cavendish, true to the idea of Chatham, moved for orders to withdraw the British forces employed in America; to the lords, the duke of Richmond proposed a total change of measures in America and Ireland; and they were supported by increasing numbers. The great land-owners were grown sick of attempting to tax America; Lord Mansfield was ready to consent to the cutting of the traces that bound the restless colonies to Britain; Lord North was frequently dropping hints that no advantage was to be gained by continuing the contest.

But on the twenty-first of June the king summoned his ministers to his library; and, seating them all at a table, expressed to them in a speech of an hour and a half "the dictates of his frequent and severe self-examination." Inviting the friends of Grenville to the support of the administration, he declared his unchanging resolution to carry on the war against America, France, and Spain. Before he would hear of any

man's readiness to come into office, he would expect to see it signed under his hand, that he was resolved to keep the empire entire. "If his ministers would act with vigor and firmness, he would support them against wind and tide." Yet, far from obtaining recruits from the friends of Grenville, the administration was about to lose its members of the Bedford connection. The chief minister, incapable of forming a plan for the conduct of the war, repeatedly offered his resignation, not in earnest, but that it might serve him as an excuse for remaining in office without assuming the proper responsibility of his station. Confiding in the ruin of the finances of the rebels and in recruiting successfully within their borders, the king was certain that, but for the intervention of Spain, the provinces would have sued to the mother country for pardon; and "he did not despair that, with the activity of Clinton and the Indians, they would even now submit." But his demands for an unconditional compliance with his American policy left him no choice of ministers but among weak men. So the office made vacant by the death of Lord Suffolk, the representative of the Grenville party, was reserved for Hillsborough. "His American sentiments," said the king, "make him acceptable to me." Yet it would have been hard to find a public man more ignorant or more narrow, more confused in judgment or faltering in action; nor was he allowed to enter on active service till Lord Weymouth had retired.

To unite the house of Bourbon in the war, France had bound herself to the invasion of England. True to her covenant, she moved troops to the coasts of Normandy and Brittany, and engaged more than sixty transport vessels of sixteen thousand tons' burden. The king of Spain would not listen to a whisper of the hazard of the undertaking, for which he was to furnish only the temporary use of twenty ships for the defence of the French in crossing the channel. Florida Blanca insisted on an immediate descent on England without regard to risk. Vergennes, on the other hand, held the landing of a French army in England to be rash until a naval victory over the British should have won the dominion of the sea.

Early in June the French fleet of thirty-one ships of the line, yielding to Spanish importunities, put to sea from Brest;