ration was still in great straits, for the Tories who
supported him were angered by his lack of success, while the Whig
opposition was correspondingly jubilant and daily growing stronger.
The navy had been able barely to preserve appearances, but that was
all. There was urgent need for reform in tactics, in administration,
and in equipment. France had made some progress in all these
directions, and, in spite of English assistance, both the Vendean and
the Chouan insurrections had, to all appearance, been utterly crushed.
Subsequently the powerful expedition under Hoche, equipped and held in
readiness to sail for Ireland, there to organize rebellion, and give
England a draught from her own cup, though destined to disaster,
wrought powerfully on the British imagination. It was clear that the
Whigs would score a triumph at the coming elections if something were
not done. Accordingly, as has been told, Pitt determined to open
negotiations for peace with the Directory. As his agent he unwisely
chose a representative aristocrat, who had distinguished himself as a
diplomatist in Holland by organizing the Orange party to sustain the
Prussian arms against the rising democracy of that country. Moreover,
the envoy was an ultra-conservative in his views of the French
Revolution, and, believing that there was no room in western Europe
for his own country and her great rival, thought there could be no
peace until France was destroyed. Burke sneered that he had gone to
Paris on his knees. He had been received with suspicion and distrust,
many believing his real errand to be the reorganization of a royalist
party in France. Then, too, Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs,
was a narrow, shallow, and conceited man, unable either to meet an
adroit and experienced negotiator on his own ground, or to prepare new
forms of diplomatic combat, as Bonaparte had done. The English
proposition, it is well to recall, was that Great Britain would give
up all the French colonial possessions she had seized during the war,
provided the French republic would abandon Belgium. It is essential to
an understanding of Bonaparte's attitude in 1797, to recall also in
this connection that the navigation of the Scheldt has ever been an
object of the highest importance to England: the establishment of a
strong, hostile maritime power in harbors like those of the
Netherlands would menace, if not destroy, the British carrying-trade
with central and northern Europe.