But that this attitude was that of the English people as a whole was incredible to the French enthusiasts. Conscious as no Englishman could be conscious of the great evils they had overthrown, of the great benefits they had won for their country, they saw in the attitude of England only the sympathy of an aristocracy with the aristocracy they had struck down. The cries for a parliamentary reform which reached them across the Channel became in their ears cries of a people as powerless and oppressed as the people of France had been. They still clung to the hope of England's aid in the emancipation of Europe from despotism and superstition, but they came now to believe that England must itself be emancipated before such an aid could be given. Their first work therefore they held to be the bringing about a revolution in England which might free the people from the aristocracy and the aristocratic government which held it down. But this was far from being all the work they looked to accomplishing. The aristocracy which oppressed the people at home oppressed, as they believed, great peoples beyond the bounds of England itself. It was subjecting to its sway nation after nation in India. Its rule over Ireland was a masterpiece of tyranny. To rouse India, to rouse Ireland to a struggle which should shake off the English yoke, became necessary steps to the establishment of freedom in England itself. From the moment therefore that the opposition between the two countries declared itself, French agents were busy "sowing the revolution" in each quarter. In Ireland they entered into communication with the United Irishmen. In India they appeared at the courts of the native princes, and above all at the court of Mysore. Meanwhile in England itself they strove through a number of associations, which had formed themselves under the name of Constitutional Clubs, to rouse the same spirit which they had roused in France; and the French envoy, Chauvelin, protested warmly against a proclamation which denounced this correspondence as seditious.
The Coalition attacks France.
Such a course could only knit men of all parties together in a common resentment; and the effect of these revolutionary efforts on the friends of the Revolution was seen in a declaration which they wrested from Fox, that at such a moment even the discussion of parliamentary reform was inexpedient. A far worse result was the new strength they gave to its foes. Burke was still working hard in writings whose extravagance of style was forgotten in their intensity of feeling to spread alarm throughout Europe. He had from the first encouraged the emigrant princes to take arms, and sent his son to join them at Coblentz. "Be alarmists," he wrote to them; "diffuse terror!" But the royalist terror which he sowed would have been of little moment had it not roused a revolutionary terror in France itself. At the threat of war against the Emperor the two German Courts had drawn together, and reluctantly abandoning all hope of peace with France, gathered eighty thousand men under the Duke of Brunswick, and advanced slowly in August 1792 on the Meuse. France, though she had forced on the struggle, was really almost defenceless; her forces in Belgium broke at the first shock of arms into shameful rout; and the panic, as it spread from the soldiery to the nation at large, took violent and horrible forms. At the first news of Brunswick's advance the mob of Paris broke into the Tuileries on the 10th of August; and at its demand Lewis, who had taken refuge in the Assembly, was suspended from his office and imprisoned in the Temple. In the following September, while General Dumouriez by boldness and adroit negotiations was arresting the progress of the Allies in the defiles of the Argonne, bodies of paid murderers butchered the royalist prisoners who crowded the gaols of Paris, with a view of influencing the elections to a new Convention which met to proclaim the abolition of royalty. The retreat of the Prussian army, whose numbers had been reduced by disease till an advance on Paris became impossible, and a brilliant victory won by Dumouriez at Jemappes which laid the Netherlands at his feet, turned the panic of the French into a wild self-confidence. In November the Convention decreed that France offered the aid of her soldiers to all nations who would strive for freedom. "All governments are our enemies," cried its President; "all peoples are our allies." In the teeth of treaties signed only two years before, and of the stipulation made by England when it pledged itself to neutrality, the French Government resolved to attack Holland, and ordered its generals to enforce by arms the opening of the Scheldt.
France declares war with England.
To do this was to force England into war. Public opinion was already pressing every day harder upon Pitt. The horror of the massacres of September, the hideous despotism of the Parisian mob, did more to estrange England from the Revolution than all the eloquence of Burke. But even while withdrawing our Minister from Paris on the imprisonment of the king, to whose Court he had been commissioned, Pitt clung stubbornly to a policy of peace. His hope was to bring the war to an end through English mediation, and to "leave France, which I believe is the best way, to arrange its own internal affairs as it can." No hour of Pitt's life is so great as the hour when he stood lonely and passionless before the growth of national passion, and refused to bow to the gathering cry for war. Even the news of the September massacres could only force from him a hope that France might abstain from any war of conquest and might escape from its social anarchy. In October the French agent in England reported that Pitt was about to recognize the Republic. At the opening of November he still pressed on Holland a steady neutrality. It was France, and not England, which at last wrenched peace from his grasp. The decree of the Convention and the attack on the Dutch left him no choice but war, for it was impossible for England to endure a French fleet at Antwerp, or to desert allies like the United Provinces. But even in December the news of the approaching partition of Poland nerved him to a last struggle for peace; he offered to aid Austria in acquiring Bavaria if she would make terms with France, and pledged himself to France to abstain from war if that power would cease from violating the independence of her neighbour states. But desperately as Pitt struggled for peace, his struggle was in vain. Across the Channel his moderation was only taken for fear, while in England the general mourning which followed on the news of the French king's execution showed the growing ardour for the contest. The rejection of his last offers indeed made a contest inevitable. Both sides ceased from diplomatic communications, and in February 1793 France issued her Declaration of War.
The Panic.
From that moment Pitt's power was at an end. His pride, his immoveable firmness, and the general confidence of the nation, still kept him at the head of affairs; but he could do little save drift along with a tide of popular feeling which he never fully understood. Around him the country broke out in a fit of passion and panic which rivalled the passion and panic over sea. The confidence of France in its illusions as to opinion in England deluded for the moment even Englishmen themselves. The partisans of Republicanism were in reality but a few handfuls of men who played at gathering Conventions, and at calling themselves citizens and patriots, in childish imitation of what was going on across the Channel. But in the mass of Englishmen the dread of these revolutionists passed for the hour into sheer panic. Even the bulk of the Whig party believed property and the constitution to be in peril, and forsook Fox when he still proclaimed his faith in France and the Revolution. The "Old Whigs," as they called themselves, with the Duke of Portland, Earls Spencer and Fitzwilliam, and Mr. Windham at their head, followed Burke in giving their adhesion to the Government. Pitt himself, though little touched by the political reaction which was to constitute the creed of those who represented themselves as "Pittites," was shaken by the dream of social danger, which was turning the wisest heads about him. For a moment at least his cool good sense bent to believe in the existence of "thousands of bandits" who were ready to rise against the throne, to plunder every landlord, and to sack London. "Paine is no fool," he said to his niece, who quoted to him a passage from the Rights of Man, in which that author had vindicated the principles of the Revolution. "He is perhaps right; but if I did what he wants I should have thousands of bandits on my hands to-morrow and London burnt." It was this sense of social danger which alone reconciled him to the war. It would have been impossible indeed for Pitt, or for any other English statesman, to have stood idly by while France annexed the Netherlands and marched to annex Holland. He must in any case have fought even had France not forced him to fight by her declaration of war. But bitter as the need of such a struggle was to him, he accepted it with the less reluctance that war, as he trusted, would check the progress of "French principles" in England itself.
The worst issue of this panic was the series of legislative measures in which it found expression. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, a bill against seditious assemblies restricted the liberty of public meeting, and a wider scope was given to the Statute of Treasons. Prosecution after prosecution was directed against the Press; the sermons of some dissenting ministers were indicted as seditious; and the conventions of sympathizers with France were roughly broken up. The worst excesses of this panic were witnessed in Scotland, where young Whigs, whose only offence was an advocacy of parliamentary reform, were sentenced to transportation, and where a brutal Judge openly expressed his regret that the practice of torture in seditious cases should have fallen into disuse. But the panic soon passed away for sheer want of material to feed on. The bloodshed and anarchy of the Jacobin rule disgusted the last sympathizers with France. To staunch Whigs like Romilly, the French, after the massacres of October, seemed a mere "nation of tigers." The good sense of the nation discovered the unreality of the dangers which had driven it to its short-lived frenzy; and when the leaders of the Corresponding Society, a body which expressed sympathy with France, were brought to trial in 1794 on a charge of high treason, their acquittal told that all active terror was over. So far indeed was the nation from any danger of social overthrow that, save for occasional riots to which the poor were goaded by sheer want of bread, no social disturbance troubled England during the twenty years of struggle which lay before it. But though the public terror passed, it left a terrible legacy behind. The blind reaction against all reform which had sprung from the panic lasted on when the panic was forgotten. For nearly a quarter of a century it was hard to get a hearing for any measure which threatened change to an existing institution, beneficial though the change might be. Even the philanthropic movement which so nobly characterized the time found itself checked and hampered by the dread of revolution.
Easy however as Pitt found it to deal with "French principles" at home, he found it less easy to deal with French armies abroad. The very excellences of his character indeed unfitted him for the conduct of a war. He was at heart a Peace Minister; he was forced into war by a panic and enthusiasm which he shared in a very small degree; and he was utterly destitute of his father's gift of entering instinctively into the sympathies and passions around him, and of rousing passions and sympathies in return. At first indeed all seemed to go ill for France. When the campaign of 1793 opened she was girt in along her whole frontier by a ring of foes. The forces of the House of Austria, of the Empire, and of the King of Prussia, pressed her to the north and the east; those of Spain and Sardinia attacked her in the south; and the accession of England to this league threatened to close the sea against her. The efforts of these foreign foes were seconded too by civil war. The peasants of Poitou and Brittany, estranged from the revolution by its attack on the clergy, rose in revolt against the government at Paris; while Marseilles and Lyons were driven into insurrection by the violent leaders who now seized on power in the capital. The campaign opened therefore with a series of terrible reverses. In spite of the efforts of General Dumouriez the French were foiled in their attack on Holland and driven, after a disastrous defeat at Neerwinden, from the Netherlands. At the moment when the Duke of York with ten thousand English troops joined the Austrian army on the northern border of France, a march upon Paris would have crushed the revolution. But the chance was lost. At this moment indeed the two German powers were far from wishing honestly for the suppression of the Republic and the re-establishment of a strong monarchy in France. Such a restoration would have foiled their projects of aggrandizement in Eastern Europe. The strife on the Rhine had set Russia free, as Pitt had foreseen, to carry out her schemes of aggression; and Austria and Prussia saw themselves forced, in the interest of a balance of power, to share in her annexations at the cost of Poland. But this new division of Poland would have become impossible had France been enabled by a restoration of its monarchy to take up again its natural position in Europe, and to accept the alliance which Pitt would in such a case have offered her. The policy of the German courts therefore was to prolong an anarchy which left them free for the moment to crush Poland, and which they counted on crushing in its turn at a more convenient time; and the allied armies which might have marched upon Paris were purposely frittered away in sieges in the Netherlands and the Rhine.
The revival of France.