almost impassable with mud. The difficulties of providing the German armies with food in a hostile country had become very great. Their communications were in danger, and dysentery was raging fiercely in their camp. On the evening of September 30 they began their retreat. The blockade of Thionville was raised; Verdun and Longwy were retaken without a blow, and before the end of October the whole invading army of the Coalition had recrossed the Rhine.

There had seldom been a more complete, a more unexpected failure, and it occurred in one of those great crises of human affairs in which men are peculiarly susceptible to moral influences of encouragement or the reverse. A wild thrill of martial exultation and enthusiasm now swept through France, and a few weeks were sufficient to change the face of Europe. In the Convention which had now been assembled, all parties were in favour of a war which might lead to a universal Republic under the guidance and hegemony of France. The war raged in the most various quarters, but everywhere to the advantage of the French. From Flanders the Duke Albert, availing himself of the removal of a great part of the French army to support Dumouriez, had endeavoured to effect a diversion by besieging and bombarding Lille, but the town resisted heroically and the Austrians were compelled ignominiously to retreat. The King of Sardinia, without taking an active part in the invasion of France, had openly identified himself with the Coalition. On September 10, France declared war against him. Before the end of the month one French army, under General Montesquieu, had invaded and conquered Savoy, while another, under General Anselme, had annexed nearly the whole of the country of Nice. The Piedmontese fled beyond the Alps, and the chief towns received the French with enthusiasm.

Still more striking and still more significant were the proceedings of Custine in Germany. If France had been governed by any of the ordinary rules or calculations of policy, she would have carefully shrunk from multiplying enemies at a time of such disorganisation and bankruptcy, and when a formidable coalition was in arms against her. The German Empire had hitherto remained neutral, and in the changed conditions of the 1 1 Sybel, ii. 19-22.

war it was not likely to depart from this policy. A great part of it, however, and especially the part along the Rhine, was ruled by ecclesiastical princes, whose governments, mild and pacific, but full of abuses and wholly wanting in energy, were very incapable of defence. Custine, at the head of the army which had been placed for the protection of Alsace, marched into Germany on September 28 at the head of only 1,800 men. On the 30th he surprised and captured Spires, which contained vast war magazines collected for the army of the Coalition. On October 4 he entered Worms without resistance, alleging the assistance which that town had given to the emigrants. The wildest panic now spread through the Palatinate and along the whole border of the Rhine, and it extended through the whole German Empire when the news arrived that on October 21 the French had entered without resistance the great fortified city of Mayence, one of the chief bulwarks of Germany against France. It was believed that Coblentz would fall next, in spite of the great fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, and the Elector of Treves, who then lived there, hastily took flight; but Custine saw a richer and easier prey in the free town of Frankfort. That great commercial city had remained scrupulously neutral, but was now occupied without a blow, and it contributed largely to the expenses of the war.

The war had already a clearly defined character. It was self-supporting, for the French general everywhere raised enormous sums from the conquered territory. These sums, however, were chiefly obtained by vast confiscations of Church and Government property, and by crushing taxation imposed on the rich, while the French made every effort to flatter the poor. They came, their general said, to proclaim war to the palaces. but peace to the cottages; to overthrow all tyrants; to give liberty to all peoples, and he invited the conquered towns to reorganise themselves as free democracies. The Rhenish towns were full of societies of Freemasons or Illuminati imbued with revolutionary doctrines, and prepared to receive the French as liberators. Between fear and sympathy all resistance seemed to have disappeared. Coblentz, at the end of September, sent a deputation to the French general, inviting him to take possession of the town, and imploring his indulgence. At Bonn and

Cologne the authorities prepared to take flight. The family of the Landgrave of Cassel had already done so. Wurtemburg and Baden loudly declared their neutrality.'

While the little army of Custine had thus established a complete ascendency in the richest part of Germany, the menace of invasion disquieted other countries. A dispute with the aristocratic government of Geneva had nearly produced a war, but it was for the present deferred by a treaty made by the General Montesquieu. The treaty, however, was not confirmed by the Convention, and the General was obliged to save his life by flight. On another side Genoa was already threatened, and preparations were made for the invasion of Italy. The French ambassador at Madrid haughtily remonstrated at the large Spanish force which had been collected in Catalonia, and Aranda not only withdrew it but also consented to pay an indemnity to France for the expense she had incurred in watching the Spanish frontier. Both in Switzerland and Italy democratic societies were multiplying, and French agents were actively preparing the way for the invaders. Lord Malmesbury, who traversed a great part of Europe in the summer of 1792, declared that there was scarcely a State through which he passed from Naples to Ostend in which there were not emissaries employed by the French in propagating the doctrines of the Revolution.3

Dumouriez, meanwhile, was at Paris preparing the master object of his ambition-the conquest of the Belgic provinces. The folly of the dismantlement of the barrier fortresses by Joseph, and of the invasion of old local privileges by both Joseph and Leopold, was now clearly seen, and Dumouriez lost no opportunity of winning the Flemish democracy to his side. A large body of refugees from Belgium and from Liége accompanied his army, and as he entered the country he published a proclamation in French and Flemish assuring the inhabitants that the French came as brethren and deliverers; that they only asked them to establish the sovereignty of the people, and to abjure all despots; that, freed from Austrian tyranny, the Belgic provinces should now resume their sovereignty and elect their magistrates and their legislators; and that the French Republic did not intend in any way to infringe their 'Sybel, i. 582. 2 Ibid. ii. 23. Lady Minto's Life of Sir G. Elliot, ii. 52.

rights or prescribe their government.' Dumouriez achieved his task with a rapidity and completeness that filled Europe with astonishment and dismay. On November 6 the Austrians under Duke Albert were totally defeated in the great battle of Jemmapes. Next day the French entered Mons. On the 14th they entered Brussels in triumph, amid the acclamations of the people. Liége and Aix-la-Chapelle were successively evacuated by the Imperial troops; the citadel of Antwerp capitulated on November 28, and the citadel of Namur on December 2, and Luxemburg alone remained in the hands of the Emperor.

Nearly at the same time the Republic gave another signal illustration of the tremendous energy that inspired it, and of the reckless disregard for consequences with which it multiplied its enemies. From the correspondence that was seized at the Tuileries on August 10 it was discovered that the Neapolitan ambassador at Constantinople had used his influence, in conjunction with the ambassadors of Prussia and Austria, to prevent the Porte from receiving the French ambassador. It was wholly unnecessary to take any official cognisance of a matter thus discovered; but a large French fleet was lying unemployed. On December 16 it appeared in the Bay of Naples. A single grenadier was sent on shore to the palace of the King, where he demanded, on pain of instant bombardment, that the French minister should be recognised as representative of the French Republic, that the Neapolitan minister at Constantinople should be recalled and disavowed, and that a Neapolitan minister should be sent to Paris to renew this disavowal and to negotiate a commercial treaty with the French Republic. There was no possibility of resisting, and the King, who was a descendant of Lewis XIV. and brother-in-law of Marie Antoinette, was compelled to submit.

The aspect of affairs had changed with the suddenness of the transformation scene in a theatre. It was difficult to realise that only three months before, nearly all the statesmen and soldiers in Europe had agreed that the Revolution had reduced France to a long period of hopeless debility and insignificance, and had predicted that an army of 100,000 Austrians and

Bourgoing, Hist. Dipl. de la Révolution Française, i. deuxième partie,

254, 255.

Prussians was amply sufficient to seize her capital and to overturn her Government. Yet within that time a country whose Government, finances, and armies seemed all in hopeless disorder, had annexed Savoy and Nice, penetrated to the heart of Germany, conquered the whole of Belgium, and intimidated Naples and Spain. Lewis XIV. in his greatest days had scarcely been so powerful or so arrogant, and, as Burke alone had predicted, the Revolution was everywhere finding its most powerful instruments in the democratic principles which it propagated, and in the numerous allies which those principles secured for it in every country which it invaded. The confidence of the Revolutionists was unbounded. 'We must break with all the Cabinets in Europe,' said Brissot. 'What are the boasted schemes of Alberoni or Richelieu compared with the great revolutions we are called upon to make? . . . Novus rerum nascitur ordo.'

It was impossible that neutral Powers should not look with alarm on the terrible phenomenon which was unfolding itself, and should not find a serious and menacing significance in correspondences with Paris that were established by societies within their borders. In order to form a just judgment of the conduct of the English Government in this great crisis, we must follow its proceedings very closely.

We may first examine the situation as it is disclosed in the secret correspondence of the French agents with their Government. Chauvelin, as we have seen, strongly urged, at the time of the recall of Lord Gower, that this should not be regarded as in any way a measure of hostility to France, and that it should not be followed by his own recall. To anyone, he wrote, who considers the conduct of England since the beginning of the Revolution, it will appear evident that she can have no real ill-will to France. Her constant refusal to accede to the Pillnitz Convention, the neutral attitude assumed by the King, as Elector of Hanover, in the German Diet when the German feudatory rights were first mentioned, and the neutrality which England openly declared at a time when the French troops were entering the Low Countries, abundantly shows it, and she will never accept the position of a secondary Power by placing herself at the service of a league which she cannot direct. England only asks