vre which he was the
first to introduce broke his opponent's line, and drove the French fleet
shattered from the Atlantic. With Rodney's last victory the struggle of
the Bourbons was really over, for no means remained of attacking their
enemy save at Gibraltar, and here a last attack of the joint force
gathered against it was repulsed by the heroism of Elliott. Nor would
America wait any longer for the satisfaction of her allies. In November
her commissioners signed the preliminaries of a peace in which Britain
reserved to herself on the American continent only Canada and the island
of Newfoundland; and acknowledged without reserve the independence of
the United States.

[Sidenote: England and the United States.]

The action of America ended the war; and the treaty of peace with the
United States was a prelude to treaties of peace with the Bourbon
powers. Their actual gains were insignificant. France indeed won nothing
in the treaties with which the war ended; Spain gained only Florida and
Minorca. Nor could they feel even in this hour of their triumph that the
end at which they aimed had been fully reached. In half their great
effort against the world-power of Britain they had utterly failed. She
had even won ground in India. In America itself she still retained the
northern dominion of Canada. Her West Indian islands remained intact.
Above all, she had asserted more nobly than ever her command of the sea,
and with it the possibility of building up a fresh power in such lands
as Cook had called her to. But at the close of the war there was less
thought of what she had retained than of what she had lost. She was
parted from her American Colonies; and at the moment such a parting
seemed to be the knell of her greatness. In wealth, in population, the
American Colonies far surpassed all that remained of her Empire; and the
American Colonies were irrecoverably gone. It is no wonder that in the
first shock of such a loss England looked on herself as on the verge of
ruin, or that the Bourbon Courts believed her position as a world-power
to be practically at an end. How utterly groundless such a conception
was the coming years were to show. The energies of England were in fact
spurred to new efforts by the crisis in her fortunes. The industrial
developement which followed the war gave her a material supremacy such
as she had never known before, and the rapid growth of wealth which this
industry brought with it raised her agai