Abercromby restored England's control over the lesser Antilles, except Guadeloupe, and added to her possessions Trinidad and the Dutch colonies on the mainland. Although unable to retain Haïti, whose ports were for some time occupied, the British navy ensured its loss to France and the final success of the negro revolt; and commercial relations were established with the new government. During the same period the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, and other Dutch and French possessions in India were reduced by similar expeditions. These not only extended the sphere of British commerce; they contributed yet more to its enlargement by the security resulting from the conversion of hostile to friendly ports, and the consequent diminution of enemy's cruisers.
It is a singular fact 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 denunciation 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. Yet no factors in the war were so important. The one sustained Great Britain, on whose shoulders was upborne the whole resistance of Europe; the other crushed France by a process of constriction which, but for Bonaparte, would have reduced her at an early period, and to free her from which Napoleon himself was driven to measures that ruined him. These important results were obtained by lengthening the cords and strengthening the stakes of British commerce, by colonial expansion and safe-guarding the seas, and by the growth of the navy,—none of which objects could have been accomplished without the hearty support of the Prime Minister. From the co-operation of these causes, and the restrictions placed on neutral trade, the commerce of Great Britain increased by 65 [477] per cent between 1792 and 1800, while the loss by capture was less than 2½ per cent on the annual volume of trade.
The directly offensive use of Great Britain's maritime power made by the ministry, in order to repress the French system of aggression, consisted in throwing back France upon herself, while at the same time cutting off her resources. The continental armies which begirt her on the land side were supported by subsidies; and also when practicable, as in the Mediterranean, by the co-operation of the British fleets, to whose influence upon his Italian campaign in 1796 Bonaparte continually alludes. To seaward the colonial system of France was ruined, raw material cut off from her manufactures, her merchant shipping swept from the sea. In 1797 the chief of the Bureau of Commerce in France wrote: "The former sources of our prosperity are either lost or dried up. Our agricultural, manufacturing, and industrial power is almost extinct." [478] At the same time, while not denying the right of neutrals to trade with ports not blockaded, every restriction that could be placed upon such trade by stringent, and even forced, interpretations of international law was rigorously imposed by a navy whose power was irresistible. Even provisions (and it will be well for Great Britain of the present day to recall the fact) were claimed to be contraband of war, on the ground that, in the then condition of France, when there was a reasonable hope of starving her into peace, to supply them contributed to prolong hostilities.
So severe was the suffering and poverty caused by this isolation, that in the moment of his greatest triumph, immediately after signing the peace of Campo Formio, which left Great Britain without an ally, in October, 1797, Bonaparte wrote: "Either our government must destroy the English monarchy, or must expect to be itself destroyed by the corruption and intrigue of those active islanders. Let us concentrate all our activity upon the navy and destroy England." The Directory, conscious that its navy was paralyzed and that its guerre de course, pursued since 1795 against British commerce, had not seriously affected the latter, although 1797 was the year of its lowest depression, could see no further means of injuring England except by attacking the neutral carriers of her wares. Affecting to regard them as accomplices in Great Britain's crimes against humanity, it procured from the Convention, in January, 1798, a decree that "every vessel found at sea, having on board English merchandise as her cargo, in whole or in part, shall be declared lawful prize, whosoever shall be the proprietor of the merchandise, which shall be reputed contraband for this cause alone, that it comes from England or her possessions." At the same time orders were issued to confiscate property of British origin wherever found on shore, and domiciliary visits were authorized to insure its discovery. Napoleon was therefore perfectly justified in declaring in later years that the Directory outlined the policy of his Continental System, embodied in his Berlin and Milan decrees of 1806 and 1807.
To the Directory the attempt thus to destroy British prosperity worked disaster. To Napoleon it brought ruin, owing to the greater vigor, wider scope, and longer duration which he was able to impart to the process. The aim of his Berlin and Milan decrees, like that of the Directory, was to undermine British trade by depriving it of the necessary concurrence of neutral carriers. As this alone would not be enough, he determined to support the decrees by excluding Great Britain from her principal market, to close the entire Continent to all goods coming from her or her colonies, or even passing through her ports. For this purpose—to carry out this gigantic project—edict after edict was issued to France and her allied countries; for this purpose annexation after annexation to the empire was made; for this purpose a double cordon of French troops lined the shores of the Continent from France to the Baltic; for this purpose British goods were not only seized but publicly burned throughout his dominions; for this purpose demands were made upon all neutral states to exclude British manufactures and colonial produce; for this purpose the calamitous Spanish war was incurred; [479] and finally, for this purpose reiterated and imperious complaints were addressed to the czar on his failure to enforce the exclusion, and, upon his persistence, the fatal invasion of Russia followed.
The justice or wisdom of this course is not here in question. It is enough to say that it nearly ruined Great Britain, but entirely ruined Napoleon. The noticeable point, bearing upon the wisdom of Pitt's military policy, is that Napoleon was forced into it by that policy, because England was destroying him and he had no other means of injuring her. Great Britain's success not only followed, but was consequent upon steady adherence to the main features of Pitt's policy. Military writers say that success on a battle-field is of slight avail if the strategic line of operations is ill-chosen, and that even a great defeat may be redeemed if the position has been taken in accordance with the strategic conditions of the campaign. This amounts to saying, in non-military language, that hard blows are useless if not struck on the right spot. Numerous reverses attended the coalitions against France, although few fell upon Great Britain herself; but none was fatal because the general policy, begun by Pitt and continued by his successors, was strategically sound with reference to the object in view,—namely, "the repression of that system of aggression" which was the very spirit of the French Revolution, formulated by the Convention, adopted by the Directory, inherited and given its full logical development by Napoleon.
It is the fashion with the political heirs of Fox, Pitt's greatest opponent, to draw a marked contrast between the war which preceded and that which followed the Peace of Amiens. In the former it is Great Britain which, in a frenzy of hatred or panic fear toward the French Revolution, becomes the wanton aggressor, and turns a movement that, despite some excesses, was on the whole beneficent, into the stormy torrent of blood that poured over Europe. In the second war, Napoleon is the great culprit, the incarnate spirit of aggression, violence, faithlessness, and insolence; with whom peace was impossible. It is, however, notorious, and conceded by French writers, that the French leaders in 1791 and 1792 wanted war on the Continent; [480] the impartial conduct of the British Cabinet was admitted by the French Government when acknowledging the recall of the British ambassador six months before war broke out; [481] the decrees of November 19 and December 15 are before the reader, as is the refusal of the Convention to give the former a construction conciliatory to Great Britain; the treaty rights of Holland had been set aside by the high hand without an attempt at negotiation, and there can be little doubt that the purpose was already formed to invade her territory shortly. Despite all this, not Great Britain, but the Republic, declared war. The treatment, by the Convention and the Directory, of the lesser states that fell under their power, [482] their dealings with Great Britain, their aggressiveness, insolence, and bad faith were identical in spirit with the worst that can be said of Napoleon; the sole difference being that for a weak, incompetent, and many-headed government was substituted the iron rule of a single man of incomparable genius. Scruples were known to neither. The Berlin and Milan decrees, in which was embodied the Continental System that led Napoleon to his ruin, were, as he himself said, but the logical development of the Directory's decree of January, 1798, [483] against which even the long-suffering United States of America rebelled. Both measures struck at Great Britain through the hearts of allies and of neutrals, for whose rights and welfare, when conflicting with the course France wished to take, they showed equal disregard; both were framed in the very spirit of the first National (Constituent) Assembly, which set aside institutions and conventions that did not square with its own ideas of right; which sought justice, as it saw it, by overleaping law.
It is, however, far more important to note, and clearly to apprehend, that both measures were forced upon the rulers of France by the strategic lines of policy laid down by the ministry of Pitt. The decree of January, 1798, followed close upon the rupture of the peace conferences of Lille, initiated by Pitt in 1797; a rupture brought on by a display of arrogance and insolence on the part of the Directory, similar to that shown by it towards the United States at the same period, that can only be realized by reading the correspondence, [484] and which is now known to have been due, in part at least, to the hope of a bribe from the British ministry. [485] The Berlin decree, which formally began the Continental System, was issued in November, 1806, when Pitt had not been a year in his grave. Both were forced upon the French leaders by the evident hopelessness of reaching Great Britain in any other way, and because her policy of war was hurting France terribly, while sustaining her own strength. In other words, Great Britain, by the strategic direction she gave to her efforts in this war, forced the French spirit of aggression into a line of action which could not but result fatally. [486] But for Bonaparte, the result, nearly attained in 1795 and again in 1799, would have followed then; not even his genius could avert it finally.
It is related that a leader of antiquity once cried to his opponent, "If you are the great general you claim to be, why do you not come down and fight me?" and received the pertinent reply, "If you are the great general you say, why do you not make me come down and fight you?" This was precisely what Great Britain effected. By the mastery of the sea, by the destruction of the French colonial system and commerce, by her persistent enmity to the spirit of aggression which was incarnate in the French Revolution and personified in Napoleon, by her own sustained and unshaken strength, she drove the enemy into the battle-field of the Continental System, where his final ruin was certain. Under the feeble rule of the Directory that ruin came on apace; within a year it was evident that the only gainer by the system was the foe whom it sought to overthrow, that France herself and her allies, as well as neutral Powers, were but being broken down to the profit of Great Britain. Despite the first failure, there was a plausible attraction about the measure which led Napoleon, confident in his strength and genius, to apply it again with the relentless thoroughness characteristic of his reign. For a time it succeeded, owing not only to the vigor with which it was used, but also to Great Britain being exasperated into retaliatory steps which, by forbidding the trade of neutrals to and between all the ports thus closed to British commerce, stopped at its source the contraband trade, which eluded Napoleon's blockade and kept open the way for British exports to the Continent.