sting for
revenge. So when they saw a vile creature like Lord George Germain
bungling through a war Pitt never would have made; when they saw
British generals half-hearted because belonging to the party that
opposed the King's; when they saw how steadfastly Washington fought;
and, most of all, when they saw how much the Royal Navy was weakened by
the Opposition in Parliament, who stopped a great deal of money from
being voted for the Army and Navy lest the King should be too strong
against the Americans; when foreigners whose own navies had been beaten
by the British saw such a chance, they came in with navies which they
had meanwhile been strengthening on purpose to get their revenge.

France, Spain, and Holland all fought on the side of the Revolution,
their big navies joining the little one formed by Paul Jones; while
Russia, Sweden, Denmark (which then included Norway), Prussia, and the
Hansa Towns, all formed the Armed Neutrality of the North against the
weakened British Navy. The King's Party Government thus had nine
navies against it--four in arms and five in armed neutrality; and this
checked the British command of the Atlantic just long enough to make
Independence safe for the American Revolutionists.

It did, not, however, stop the Navy from saving the rest of the Empire;
for Pitt and the Opposition in the Mother Country, who would not
strengthen the Navy against the Americans, were eager to strengthen it
against foreign attack. In 1782 Rodney beat the French in the
Atlantic, and Hughes beat them in the Indian Ocean; while Gibraltar was
held triumphantly against all that France and Spain could do by land
and sea together.

CHAPTER XVIII

NELSON

(1798-1805)

Nelson and Napoleon never met; and Wellington the soldier beat Napoleon
ten years after Nelson was killed at Trafalgar. Yet it was Nelson's
victories that made Napoleon's null and void, thus stopping the third
attempt in modern times to win the overlordship of the world. As Drake
stopped Philip of Spain by defeating the Armada, as Russell stopped Louis
XIV by the battle of La Hogue, as Jellicoe in our own day stopped the
Kaiser off the Jutland Bank, so Nelson stopped Napoleon by making British
sea-power quite supreme. Century by century the four mightiest warlords
of the land have carried all before them until their towering empires
reached the sea. But there, where they were strangers, they all met the
same Royal Navy, manned by sailo