he monarchical, secular, and
immemorial policy of France as the disturber of European peace;
continued by the republic, it was rendered more pernicious and
exasperating to the upholders of the balance of power. Not only was
the republic more energetic and less scrupulous than the monarchy, her
rivals were in a very low estate indeed. Great Britain had stripped
France and Holland of their colonies, but these new possessions and
the ocean highway must be protected at enormous expense. The Commons
refused to authorize a new loan, and the nation was exhausted to such
a degree that Pitt and the King, shrinking from the opprobrious
attacks of the London populace, and noting with anguish the renewal of
bloody disorder in Ireland, made a feint of peace negotiations through
the agent they employed in Switzerland to foment royalist
demonstrations against France wherever possible. Wickham asked on
March eighth, 1796, on what terms the Directory would make an
honorable peace, and in less than three weeks received a rebuff which
declared that France would under no circumstances make restitution of
its continental conquests. In a sense it was Russia's Polish policy
which kept Prussia and Austria so occupied with the partition that the
nascent republic of France was not strangled in its cradle by the
contiguous powers. Provided she had the lion's share of Poland,
Catherine was indifferent to the success of Jacobinism. But she soon
saw the danger of a general conflagration and, applying Voltaire's
epithet for ecclesiasticism to the republic, cried all abroad: Crush
the Infamous! Conscious of her old age, distrusting all the possible
successors to her throne: Paul the paranoiac, Constantine the coarse
libertine, and the super-elegant Alexander, she refused a coalition
with England and turned her activities eastward against the Cossacks
and into Persia; but she consented to be the intermediary between
Austria and Great Britain. Austria wanted the Netherlands, but only if
she could secure with them a fortified girdle wherewith to protect and
hold them. She likewise desired the Milanese and the Legations in
Italy, as well as Venetia. As the price of continued war on France,
these lands and a subsidy of three million pounds were the terms
exacted from Great Britain. With no army at his disposal and his naval
resources strained to the utmost, George III agreed to pay a hundred
and fifty thousand pounds per month until parliament would make th