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