han the
conception.

In the matter of developing the navy, however, fifteen years of peace
and steady work showed good results. When war openly broke out in
1778, France had eighty ships-of-the-line in good condition, and
sixty-seven thousand seamen were borne on the rolls of the maritime
conscription. Spain, when she entered the war in 1779 as the ally of
France, had in her ports nearly sixty ships-of-the-line. To this
combination England opposed a total number of two hundred and
twenty-eight ships of all classes, of which about one hundred and
fifty were of the line. The apparent equality in material which would
result from these numbers was affected, to the disadvantage of
England, by the superior size and artillery of the French and
Spaniards; but on the other hand her strength was increased by the
unity of aim imparted by belonging to one nation. The allies were
destined to feel the proverbial weakness of naval coalitions, as well
as the degenerate administration of Spain, and the lack of habit--may
it not even be said without injustice, of aptitude for the sea--of
both nations. The naval policy with which Louis XVI. began his reign
was kept up to the end; in 1791, two years after the assembly of the
States-General, the French navy numbered eighty-six ships-of-the-line,
generally superior, both in dimensions and model, to English ships of
the same class.

We have come, therefore, to the beginning of a truly maritime war;
which, as will be granted by those who have followed this narrative,
had not been seen since the days of De Ruyter and Tourville. The
magnificence of sea power and its value had perhaps been more clearly
shown by the uncontrolled sway, and consequent exaltation, of one
belligerent; but the lesson thus given, if more striking, is less
vividly interesting than the spectacle of that sea power meeting a foe
worthy of its steel, and excited to exertion by a strife which
endangered, not only its most valuable colonies, but even its own
shores. Waged, from the extended character of the British Empire, in
all quarters of the world at once, the attention of the student is
called now to the East Indies and now to the West; now to the shores
of the United States and thence to those of England; from New York and
Chesapeake Bay to Gibraltar and Minorca, to the Cape Verde Islands,
the Cape of Good Hope, and Ceylon. Fleets now meet fleets of equal
size, and the general chase and the _melee_, which marked the a