y that they did not all appear
among the causes, or pretexts, avowed for engaging in hostility; but
sagacious English opinion of the day rightly noted, as embodying in a
few words the real ground of action of the united Bourbon Courts, the
following phrase in the French manifesto: "To avenge their respective
injuries, and to put an end to that tyrannical empire which England
has usurped, and claims to maintain upon the ocean." In short, as
regards the _objects_ of the war the allies were on the offensive, as
England was thrown upon the defensive.

The tyrannical empire which England was thus accused, and not
unjustly, of exercising over the seas, rested upon her great sea
power, actual or latent; upon her commerce and armed shipping, her
commercial establishments, colonies, and naval stations in all parts
of the world. Up to this time her scattered colonies had been bound to
her by ties of affectionate sentiment, and by the still stronger
motive of self-interest through the close commercial connection with
the mother-country and the protection afforded by the constant
presence of her superior navy. Now a break was made in the girdle of
strong ports upon which her naval power was based, by the revolt of
the continental colonies; while the numerous trade interests between
them and the West Indies, which were injured by the consequent
hostilities, tended to divide the sympathies of the islands also. The
struggle was not only for political possession and commercial use. It
involved a military question of the first importance,--whether a chain
of naval stations covering one of the shores of the Atlantic, linking
Canada and Halifax with the West Indies, and backed by a thriving
seafaring population, should remain in the hands of a nation which had
so far used its unprecedented sea power with consistent, resolute
aggressiveness, and with almost unbroken success.

While Great Britain was thus embarrassed by the difficulty of
maintaining her hold upon her naval bases, which were the defensive
element of her naval strength, her offensive naval power, her fleet,
was threatened by the growth of the armed shipping of France and
Spain, which now confronted her upon the field which she had claimed
as her own, with an organized military force of equal or superior
material strength. The moment was therefore favorable for attacking
the great Power whose wealth, reaped from the sea, had been a decisive
factor in the European wars of the