and yet they were obliged to wait off the coast of Spain for the Spaniards. After a loss of two months in the best season of the year, a junction was effected with more than twenty ships-of-war under the separate command of Count Gaston; and the combined fleet, the largest force that had ever been afloat, sailed for the British channel. King George longed to hear that Sir Charles Hardy, with scarcely more than forty ships of the line, had brought the new armada to battle. "Everything," wrote Marie Antoinette, "depends on the present moment. Our united fleets have a great superiority; they are in the channel; and I cannot think without a shudder that, from one moment to the next, our destiny will be decided."

The united fleet rode unmolested by the British; Sir Charles Hardy either did not or would not see them. On the sixteenth of August they appeared off Plymouth, but did not attack the town. After two idle days, a strong wind drove them to the west. When the gale had abated, the allies rallied, returned up the channel, and the British retreated before them. No harmony existed between the French and Spanish officers. A deadly malady ravaged the French ships and infected the Spanish. The combined fleet never had one chief. The French returned to port and remained there; the Spaniards sailed for Cadiz, execrating their allies. The two powers had not even harmed British merchant vessels on their homeward voyages. The troops that were to have landed in England wasted by disease in Normandy and Brittany. "The doing of nothing at all will have cost us a great deal of money," wrote Marie Antoinette to her mother. There was nothing but the capture of the little island of Grenada for which a Te Deum could be chanted in Paris. "We shall feel it very sensibly if any offer of mediation should be preferred to ours," wrote Maria Theresa to her daughter, who answered: "The nothingness of the campaign removes every idea of peace."

During the attempt at an invasion of England the allied belligerents considered the condition of Ireland. "To form Ireland into an independent government like that of America," wrote Vergennes, "I would not count upon the Catholics. They form the largest and the most oppressed part of the nation; but the principle of their religion attaches them spe

cially to the monarchical system." An American was sent as the agent of France to form close relations with the principal Presbyterians, especially with the ministers; but confidence was not established between France and the protestant Irish.

The emissary from Spain to the Irish Catholics was a Catholic priest, who was promised a bishopric if he should succeed. He could have no success. After the first shedding of American blood in 1775, one hundred and twenty-one Irish Catholics, professing to speak "for all the Roman Catholic Irish," had made to the British secretary in Ireland "a tender of two millions of men in defence of the government of the king in any part of the world." The Irish association aimed only to extort for Ireland the free trade with other nations which had been granted to Scotland at the union.

As soon as the existence of war between Spain and Great Britain was known at New Orleans, Galvez, the governor of Louisiana, drew together all the troops under his command to drive the British from the Mississippi. Their posts were protected by less than five hundred men; Lieutenant-Colonel Dickson, abandoning Manchac as untenable, sustained a siege of nine days at Baton Rouge, and on the twenty-first of September made an honorable capitulation. The Spaniards planned the recovery of east Florida, Pensacola, and Mobile. They expelled from Honduras the British logwood cutters. Europe, their first act was the siege of Gibraltar.

In

More important were the consequences of the imperious manner in which Great Britain, substituting its own will alike for its treaties and the law of nations, violated the rights of neutrals on the high seas.

The immunity of neutral flags is unknown to barbarous powers. The usages of the middle ages condemned as lawful booty the property of an enemy, though under the flag of a friend; but spared the property of a friend, though under the flag of an enemy. Ships, except they belonged to the enemy, were never confiscated. When the Dutch republic took its place among the powers of the earth, crowned with the honors of martyrdom in the fight against superstition, this daughter of the sea, with a carrying trade exceeding that of any other nation, became the champion of the maritime code, which pro

tected the neutral flag everywhere on the great deep. In the year 1646 these principles were imbodied in a commercial treaty between the republic and France. When Cromwell was protector, when Milton was Latin secretary, the rights of neutrals found their just place in the treaties of England, in 1654 with Portugal, in 1655 with France, in 1656 with Sweden. After the return of the Stuarts, they were recognised, in 1674, in their fullest extent by the commercial convention between England and the Netherlands.

In 1689, after the stadholder of the United Provinces had been elected king of England, his overpowering influence drew the Netherlands into an acquiescence in a declaration that all ships going to or coming from a French port were good prizes; but it was recalled upon the remonstrance of neutral states. The rights of neutral flags were confirmed by France and England in the peace of Utrecht. The benefits of the agreement extended to Denmark, as entitled to all favors granted to other powers. Between 1604 and 1713 the principle had been accepted in nearly twenty treaties. When, in 1745, Prussian ships, laden with wood and corn, were captured on the high seas and condemned in English courts, Frederic, without a treaty, resting only on the law of nations, indemnified his subjects for their losses by retaliations on England. The neutral flag found protection in the commercial treaty negotiated in 1766 by the Rockingham ministry with Russia, whose interests as the producer of hemp required the strictest definition of contraband. Of thirty-seven European treaties made between 1745 and 1780, but two have been found which contain conditions contravening neutral rights.

In 1778 England desired an offensive and defensive alliance with Russia and with the Dutch republic. To the renewed overture, Count Panin, the only Russian statesman much listened to by the empress in the discussion of foreign affairs, replied that Russia never would stipulate advantages to Great Britain in its contest with its colonies, and "never would guarantee its American dominions." After the avowal by France of its treaties with the colonies, Harris, the British minister at Petersburg asked an audience of the empress; his request was refused, and all his complaints of the "court of

Versailles drew from her only civil words and lukewarm expressions of friendship." But when, in the summer of 1778, an American privateer hovered off the North Cape and took seven or more British vessels bound for Archangel, Panin informed Harris ministerially that, so long as the British treated the Americans as rebels, the court of Petersburg would look upon them as a people not yet entitled to recognition.

Long years of peace had enriched the Dutch republic by prosperous manufactures and commerce. It was the leading neutral power; but the honor of its flag was endangered by the defects in its constitution, of which the forms of procedure tended to anarchy. Its stadholder, William V. of the house of Orange, a young and incompetent prince, without self-reliance and without nobleness of nature, was haunted by the belief that his own position could be preserved only by the influence of Great Britain; and from dynastic selfishness followed the counsels of that power. Nor was his sense of honor so nice as to save him from asking and accepting money from the British crown. His chief personal counsellor was his former guardian, Prince Louis of Brunswick. No man could be less influenced by motives of morality or fidelity to the land in whose army he served, and he was always at the beck of the British ambassador at the Hague. Fagel, the secretary, was devoted to England. The grand pensionary, Van Bleiswijck, who had been the selection of Prince Louis, was a weak politician and inclined to England, but never meant to betray his country. Thus all the principal executive officers were attached to Great Britain; Prince Louis and the secretary Fagel as obsequious vassals.

France had a controlling influence in no one of the provinces; but, in the city of Amsterdam, Van Berckel, its pensionary, was her "friend." In January 1778, before her rupture with England, the French ambassador at the Hague was instructed to suggest a convention between the states-general, France, and Spain, for liberty of navigation. As the proposal was put aside by the grand pensionary, Vergennes asked that the Netherlands in the coming contest would announce to the court of London their neutrality, and support it without concessions. "The Dutch," Vergennes observed, "will find in

their own history an apology for the French treaty with America." From the interior condition of the Netherlands, their excessive taxes, their weakness on sea and land, and the precarious condition of their possessions in the two Indies, they sought scrupulously to maintain their neutrality. As England did not disguise her aggressive intentions, the city of Amsterdam and Van Berckel sought to strengthen the Dutch navy, but were thwarted by Prince Louis, Fagel, and the stadholder. The Dutch were brave, provident, and capable of acts of magnanimity; but they were betrayed by their executive.

In April 1778, the American commissioners at ParisFranklin, Arthur Lee, and John Adams-in a letter to the grand pensionary, Van Bleiswijck, proposed a good understanding and commerce between the two nations, and promised to communicate to the states - general their commercial treaty with France. The Dutch government, through all its organs, met this only overture of the Americans by total neglect. It was neither answered nor put in deliberation. The British secretary of state could find no ground for complaint whatever. Still the merchants of Amsterdam saw in the independence of the United States a virtual repeal of the British navigation acts; and the most pleasing historical recollections of the Dutch people were revived by the rise of the new republic.

In the following July the king of France published a declaration protecting neutral ships, though carrying contraband goods to or from hostile ports, unless the contraband exceeded in value three fourths of the cargo. But the right was reserved to revoke these orders if Great Britain should not within six months grant reciprocity.

The commercial treaty between France and the United States was, about the same time, delivered to the grand pensionary and to the pensionary of Amsterdam. The grand pensionary took no notice of it whatever. Van Berckel, in the name of the regency of Amsterdam, wrote to an American correspondent at the IIague: "With the new republic, clearly raised up by the help of Providence, we desire leagues of amity and commerce which shall last to the end of time." Yet he acknowledged that these wishes were the wishes of a single city, which could not bind even the province to