intervention or non-intervention of France would determine the result of the present struggle. If America were cordially united in her resistance to England, it would be impossible to subdue her; but it was quite evident to serious men that America was not united; that outside New England there was scarcely an approach to unanimity; that powerful minorities in almost every province were ardently attached to England; and that, of the remainder of the population, a very large proportion were vacillating, selfish, or indifferent, ready, if the occasion could be found, to be reconciled with England, and altogether unprepared to make any long or strenuous sacrifices in the cause. Under these circumstances the revolutionary leaders had much to fear.

There was a party in the Congress, among whom Patrick Henry was conspicuous, who desired to purchase French assistance by large territorial cessions in America; but this view found little favour. Apart from all considerations of territorial aggrandisement, it was the evident interest of France to promote the independence of America. She could thus obtain for herself a share in that vast field of commerce from which she had hitherto been excluded by the Navigation Act. The humiliation of the loss of Canada would be amply avenged if the thirteen old colonies were separated from England. A formidable if not fatal blow would be given to that maritime supremacy against which France had so long and so vainly struggled; and the French West India islands, which were now in time of war completely at the mercy of England, would become comparatively secure if the harbours of the neighbour ing continent were held by a neutral or a friendly Power. Ever since the Peace of Paris, a feeling of deep humilia

'Adams' Life, Works, i. 201.

THE FRENCH ALLIANCE.

239

tion and discontent had brooded over French society; and even in Europe the influence of France appeared to have diminished. The recent appearance of Russia as an active and formidable agent in the European system, and the recent growth of Prussia into the dimensions of a first-class Power, had profoundly altered the European equilibrium. Both of these Powers lay in a great degree beyond the influence of France; and although one school of French politicians maintained that the rise of Prussia was beneficial, as establishing a balance of power in Germany, and checking the preponderance of Austria, another school looked upon it as seriously affecting both French ascendency and French security. Great indignation was felt in Paris at the passive attitude of the Government at the time of the first partition of Poland in 1772, and during the war that ended in the treaty of Kainardji in 1774, when Russia succeeded in extending her territory southwards, in separating the Crimea from the Turkish Empire, and in acquiring a right of protectorate over Christians in Constantinople. As long as the old King lived, there seemed little chance of a more active policy; but in May 1774 Lewis XV. died, and a new and more adventurous spirit was ruling at the Tuileries.

Under such circumstances it appeared to Johr Adams, and to the more sagacious of his supporters that it would be possible to obtain from France such a measure of assistance as would insure the independence of America without involving her future in European complications. But the first condition of this policy was a declaration by the colonies that they were finally and for ever detached from Great Britain. France had no possible interest in their constitutional liberties. She had a vital interest in their independence. It was idle to suppose that she would risk a war with England for rebels who might at any time be converted by con

stitutional concessions into loyal subjects, and enemies of the enemies of England.

The questions of a French alliance and of a declaration of independence were thus indissolubly connected. In the autumn of 1775 a motion was made in Congress, and strongly supported by John Adams, to send ambas sadors to France. But Congress still shrank from so formidable a step, though it agreed, after long debates and hesitation, to form a secret committee to correspond with friends in Great Britain, Ireland, and other parts of the world." But the conduct of England herself soon dispelled the hesitation of America. England found herself at this time confronted with a military problem which she was utterly unable by her own unassisted efforts to solve. The same pressure of financial distress, the same reluctance to increase the army estimates, which had made the English ministers so anxious to throw upon America the burden of supporting her own army, had prevented the maintenance of any considerable army at home. Public opinion had never yet fully accepted the fact that the forces which were very adequate under Walpole were wholly insufficient after the Peace of Paris. The King, indeed, had for many years steadily maintained that military economy in England had been carried to a fatal point, and that the army was much below what the security of the Empire required; but his warnings had been disregarded. The feeling of the country, the feeling of

INADEQUACY OF THE ENGLISH ARMY.

241 the House of Commons, against large standing armies was so strong that it was impossible to resist it. As late as December 1774, the seamen had been reduced from 20,000 to 16,000, and the land forces had been fixed at 17,547 effective men. In the following year, when the war became inevitable, Parliament voted 28,000 seamen and 55,000 land forces, but even this was utterly inadequate for the conquest of America, and as yet it only existed upon paper. Most of the troops that could be safely spared had been already sent, and the result had been the formation of two armies, one of which was not more than sufficient for the protection of Canada, while the other had been for months confined within the town of Boston.

It was evident that much larger forces were required if America was to be subdued, and Howe strongly urged that he could make no aggressive movement with any prospect of success unless he had at least 20,000 men. To raise the required troops at short notice was very difficult. In January 1776, Lord Barrington warned the King that Scotland had never yet been so bare of troops, and that those in England were too few for the security of the country. The land tax for 1776 was raised to four shillings in the pound. New duties were imposed; new bounties were offered. Recruiting agents traversed the Highlands of Scotland, and the most remote districts of Ireland, and the poor Catholics of

·

we are very unable to draw the word.'-British Museum. Eg. MSS. 982.

On August 26, 1775, he wrote to Lord North: The misfortune is, that at the beginning of this American business there has been an unwillingness to augment the army and navy. I proposed early In the summer the sending beat

ing orders to Ireland; this was objected to in the Cabinet; if it had then been adopted, the army would have been at least 2,000 or 3,000 men stronger at this hour.'-Correspondence of George III. with Lord North, i. 265, 266. Adolphus, ii. 159.

The Political Life of Lord Barrington, pp. 162–164.

Munster and Connaught, who had been so long excluded from the English army, were gladly welcomed. Recruits, however, came in very slowly. There was ne enthusiasm for a war with English settlers. The pressgangs met with an unusual resistance. No measure short of a conscription could raise at once the necessary army in England, and to propose a conscription would be fatal to any Government.

The difficulties of subduing America by land operations, even under the most favourable circumstances, were enormous. Except on the sea-coast there were no fixed points, no fortified places of such importance that their possession could give a permanent command of any large tract of territory; the vast distances and the difficulties of transport made it easy for insurgents to avoid decisive combats; and in a hostile and very thinly populated country, the army must derive its supplies almost exclusively from England. The magnitude, the ruinous expense of such an enterprise, and the almost absolute impossibility of carrying the war into distant inland quarters, ought to have been manifest to all, and no less a person than Lord Barrington, the Secretary for War, held from the beginning that it would be impossible for England to subdue America by an army, though he thought it might be subdued by a fleet which

1 General Lloyd, who was one of the best English writers on the art of war, maintained that England, in consequence of her possession of Canada, might have completely crushed the four provinces of New England by operating vigorously on the line of Country (about 150 miles) extending from Boston to Albany, or to some other point on the Hudson River; and he thought

that, in the existing condition of opinion in America, if New England were subdued, the rest of the colonies would all submit. The impossibility, however, of subduing them by land measures, if they did not, he clearly showed. See a remarkable chapter on the American war in his 'Reflections on the Principles of War,' ap pended to his History of the Seven Years' War.