at this time.
While the city and citadel of Messina were being besieged by the
Austrians, English, and Sardinians, a dispute arose as to the
possession of the Spanish men-of-war within the mole. Byng,
"reflecting within himself that possibly the garrison might capitulate
for the safe return of those ships into Spain, which he was determined
not to suffer; that on the other hand the right of possession might
breed an inconvenient dispute at a critical juncture among the princes
concerned, and if it should at length be determined that they did not
belong to England it were better they belonged to no one else,
proposed to Count de Merci, the Austrian general, to erect a battery
and destroy them as they lay."[82] After some demur on the part of the
other leaders, this was done. If constant care and watchfulness
deserve success, England certainly deserved her sea power; but what
shall be said of the folly of France at this time and in this
connection?

The steady stream of reverses, and the hopelessness of contending for
distant maritime possessions when without a navy, broke down the
resistance of Spain. England and France insisted upon the dismissal of
Alberoni, and Philip yielded to the terms of the Quadruple Alliance.
The Austrian power, necessarily friendly to England, was thus firmly
settled in the central Mediterranean, in Naples and Sicily, as England
herself was in Gibraltar and Port Mahon. Sir Robert Walpole, the
minister now coming into power in England, failed at a later day to
support this favorable conjunction, and so far betrayed the
traditional policy of his country. The dominion of the House of Savoy
in Sardinia, which then began, has lasted; it is only within our own
day that the title King of Sardinia has merged in the broader one of
King of Italy.

Contemporaneously with and for some time after the short episode of
Alberoni's ministry and Spain's ambition, a struggle was going on
around the shores of the Baltic which must be mentioned, because it
gave rise to another effectual illustration of the sea power of
England, manifested alike in the north and south with a slightness of
exertion which calls to mind the stories of the tap of a tiger's paw.
The long contest between Sweden and Russia was for a moment
interrupted in 1718, by negotiations looking to peace and to an
alliance between the two for the settlement of the succession in
Poland and the restoration of the Stuarts in England. This project, on