BOOKS.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE SEA-POWER UPON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.*

"IF," says Captain Mahan, "as may fairly be claimed, it is to the maritime power of Great Britain that Europe owes the arrest of a subversive revolution, if to that maritime power is due that a great, irresistible, and beneficent movement towards the liberty and welfare of the masses survived a convulsion that threatened its destruction, then to Pitt" (not only to the soldiers and the seamen), "as the master-spirit who directed the movements of the British nation the gratitude of Europe is also due."

Nearly a century of controversy has been needed to give to the younger Pitt his true place in history. When once the generation which had witnessed the great struggle had died out, his memory became the prey of party historians, and in the view of the party which led the great Liberal movement— the reaction against the war-policy—the National Debt was the most obvious result of the life-and-death struggle closed by Waterloo. To Lord Rosebery, among recent writers, it has fallen, curiously enough, to vindicate Pitt's Irish policy, as well as to appreciate fairly his labours as a War Minister ; but it has of necessity been reserved for a writer, at once a philosophic historian and a specialist in naval warfare, to discern that it is in this latter capacity that Pitt will live in history. "It is a singular fact," he observes, "that neither the extraordinary commercial prosperity secured by these successes, nor the immense development of the Navy during Pitt's administration, is mentioned in the celebrated denun- ciation of his drivelling' war policy by Macaulay Of naval administration, the latter speaks in order to assign the credit to another ; on commercial and naval expansion he is

silent Pitt was not a General or an Admiral, nor does he appear so to have considered himself, but he realised perfectly where Great Britain's strength lay and where the sphere of her efforts." Both Lord Rosebery and Captain Mahan brilliantly contrast the careers of the two Pitts ; but while the former, taking the more conventional view, declares that "Chatham could not have filled Pitt's place during the ten years which followed 1783, but from the time the war was declared, the guidance of Chatham would have been worth an army," Captain Mahan lays stress on the fact that the "difference between the actual careers run by the two states- men is that the son had to meet far greater obstacles than the father, and that, so far as the part of Great Britain herself was concerned, he achieved equal, if not greater, successes."

It is, however, not with statesmen but with seamen that this masterly and comprehensive work deals. It is not a little dis- creditable to ofirselves that so great a subject should have pro- duced no adequate English historian, for the history of the Sea- Power in modern times is in one sense the history of England. Englishmen can nevertheless congratulate themselves that one of their own race and language should have undertaken the task ; and if anything could add to the value of what will henceforth take rank as a standard history of this war in its naval aspect, it is the fact that it is characterised by the judicial tone and impartial spirit which an author of British nationality could perhaps hardly have attained.

The drama of the great war unfolds itself in these pages in a manner at once novel and engrossing, but it is difficult to select any particular portion for special comment, and hope- less to show by quotation the chief characteristic of the book, which, unlike other naval histories, carefully traces out the interdependence of the naval and military operations, and never describes a naval battle without pointing out its ulterior and political (or commercial) effects, and giving it its proper place in the general sequence of events. On such points as the relative strength of the rival Navies in men and ships, information is full and detailed; and it is interesting to see how Great Britain's extraordinary unpreparedness for war was balanced by the demoralising effect of the new political doctrines on the dis- cipline of the French fleet. The effect of the disappearance of the old corps of efficient (but noble) officers, and of false views of the value of professional training, is seen in the fact that in June, 1794, the Commander-in-Chief, Villaret Joyeuse, * Tie Ihfluenoe of .the Sea Power upon the Frenoh Rev:1104m and Empire- 1793-15111. By Captain A, T. N Khan, U.S N., President United States Naval War College. 2 vola London Sampson Low, Marston, and Co. 1 2,

was a lieutenant ; the two other flag-officers, one a lieutenant, the other a sub-lieutenant ; that of the captains, three were lieutenants and eleven sub-lieutenants, nine captains or =tee of merchant vessels, one a seaman in the Navy, and one a boatswain ! The doctrine that it savoured of aristocracy that any body of men should have the exclusive right to fight at sea, produced a corresponding and inevitable deterioration in the crews.

Passing over the earlier period of the war, and its many events the mere mention of which stirs the imagination—such

as the battle of St. Vincent, perhaps the most opportune of naval victories (" a victory," said Jervis on the morning of the engagement, "is very essential to England at this moment")-- the battle of the Nile, the Mutiny, the operations in the West Indies, the importance of which to England is explained when we remember that about one-fourth of the total British trade during the Revolutionary wars was done with them,— we come to the "intricate and stirring events" whieh led up to the battle of Trafalgar, in its result the greatest battler of the war on land or sea. "But one thing," said an able French writer, "was wanting to the victor of Austerlitz, lc. sentiment exact des diticultes de is ntarine." "He could not believe," says our author, "that the difficulties of the sea could not be vanquished by unskilled men handling the pon- derous machines entrusted to them, when confronted by a/

skilful enemy." But he realised fully that the one great obstacle in his path was England's supremacy at sea. "Let us," he wrote in 1804, " be masters of the Strait for six hours, and we shall be masters of the world." Captain Mahan proves,. to our mind, the certainty of Napoleon's intention to invade England, and we may be permitted to quote the admirable

passage in which he describes the period of waiting from May, 1803, till August, 1805, when the tangled net of naval and military movements began to unravel, leading to the great fight,—" a striking and wonderful pause in the world'a history" :— "On the heights above Boulogne and along the narrow strip of beach from Etaples to Vimereux, were encamped one hundred and thirty thousand of the most brilliant soldiery of all time

growing daily more vigorous in the bracing sea air and the hardy life laid out for them, they could on fine days, as they practised the varied manceuvres which were to perfect the vast host in embarking and disembarking with order and rapidity, see the white cliffs fringing the only country that to the last defied their arms. Far away, Cornwallis off Brest, Col- lingwood off Rochefort, Fellow off Ferrol, were battling the wild gales of the Bay of Biscay, in that tremendous and sus- tained vigilance which reached its utmost tension in the years preceding Trafalgar, concerning which Collingwood wrote that Admirals need to be made of iron, but which was forced upon them by the unquestioned and imminent danger of the country: Farther distant still, and severed apparently from all connection with the busy scenes at Boulogne, Nelson before Toulon was wearing away the last two years of his glorious but suffering life, fighting the fierce north-western of the Gulf of Lyons, and questioning, questioning continually with feverish anxiety, whether Napoleon's object was Egypt again or Great Britain

really. They were dull, weary, eventless months but they saved England, The world has never seen a xxiore impressive demonstration of the influence of the sea-power upon its history. These far-distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world. Holding the interior positions they did, before, and therefore between, the chief dockyards and detachments of the French Navy, the latter could unite only by a concurrence of successful evasions, of which the failure of any one nullified the result. Linked together as the various British fleets were by chains of smaller vessels, chance alone could secure Bonaparte's great combination, which depended upon the correct concentration of several detach- ments upon a point practically within the enemy's lines. Thus, while bodily present before Brest, Rochefort, and Toulon, stra- tegically the British squadrons lay in the Straits of Dover barring the way against the Army of Invasion."

Scarcely less interesting are the steps minutely traced in the later chapters of the book of the new struggle which arose after Trafalgar. Unable to strike directly at the British power, Napoleon was forced into the attempt, which entirely ruined him and nearly ruined Great Britain, to exclude her from her principal market, to close the entire Continent to all goods coming from her or her Colonies, or even passing through her ports. To the furtherance of this object, every succeeding event may be traced, including the calamitous Spanish war, and the fatal invasion of Russia :— "For seven years wout on this final silent strife The

strength of Great Britain wasted visibly ; but the mere fact of her endurance and persistence compelled her enemy to efforts more exhausting, to measures more fatal, than those forced upon herself. And while thus subjected to a greater strain, Napoleon

was by Great Britain cut off from that greatest of all sources of renewing vitality,—the sea."

We are often told that the vast commerce of this country, and the extent of her loosely united Colonies and possessions, make her peculiarly vulnerable, and will prove a fatal weak- ness to her in a time of struggle. Yet history shows, as Captain Mahan points out, that while the centre is strong, the heart well guarded, Great Britain may be hurt, but cannot be conquered. As she triumphantly survived the loss of the American Colonies, so, even if Bonaparte's attack on Egypt had led, as it was intended to do, to the conquest of India, she would not have been overcome; so, too, she baffled the protracted effort of the Continental system. The power of this country lies not in her commerce or her possessions ; it lies in herself ; bough after bough may be lopped away, but if the trunk be safe, it will put forth fresh branches. "To command the sea-approaches to the British Islands will be to destroy the power of the State ; as preliminary thereto, the British Navy must be neutralised by superior numbers or by superior skill." This great truth properly grasped is full of encouragement for those among us who are apt to be appalled at the vastness of the Imperial responsibilities which English- men have incurred. The growth of these responsibilities has been the inevitable result of England's command of the seas ; and, so long as she has the will and the power to maintain this vital supremacy, and guard her own shores by over- whelming naval force, she need not fear for commerce or Colonies. Generations of the security won by Pitt's policy may have lulled the sense of danger, but they have not, it is to be hoped, blunted her perception of this fact; and when the hour of trial comes, we believe that, unprepared in many respects though she may be now as in the past, it will find her with a united people, and with statesmen and seamen, now as then, able to inspire her patriotism and guide her energies.