bring on the Spaniards would have locked their allies in the port. The
most glaring instances of failure on the part of England to do this
were when De Grasse was permitted to get out unopposed in March, 1781;
for an English fleet of superior force had sailed from Portsmouth nine
days before him, but was delayed by the admiralty on the Irish
coast;[165] and again at the end of that year, when Kempenfeldt was
sent to intercept De Guichen with an inferior force, while ships
enough to change the odds were kept at home. Several of the ships
which were to accompany Rodney to the West Indies were ready when
Kempenfeldt sailed, yet they were not associated with an enterprise so
nearly affecting the objects of Rodney's campaign. The two forces
united would have made an end of De Guichen's seventeen ships and his
invaluable convoy.

Gibraltar was indeed a heavy weight upon the English operations, but
the national instinct which clung to it was correct. The fault of the
English policy was in attempting to hold so many other points of land,
while neglecting, by rapidity of concentration, to fall upon any of
the detachments of the allied fleets. The key of the situation was
upon the ocean; a great victory there would have solved all the other
points in dispute. But it was not possible to win a great victory
while trying to maintain a show of force everywhere.[166]

North America was a yet heavier clog, and there undoubtedly the
feeling of the nation was mistaken; pride, not wisdom, maintained that
struggle. Whatever the sympathies of individuals and classes in the
allied nations, by their governments American rebellion was valued
only as a weakening of England's arm. The operations there depended,
as has been shown, upon the control of the sea; and to maintain that,
large detachments of English ships were absorbed from the contest with
France and Spain. Could a successful war have made America again what
it once was, a warmly attached dependency of Great Britain, a firm
base for her sea power, it would have been worth much greater
sacrifices; but that had become impossible. But although she had lost,
by her own mistakes, the affection of the colonists, which would have
supported and secured her hold upon their ports and sea-coast, there
nevertheless remained to the mother-country, in Halifax, Bermuda, and
the West Indies, enough strong military stations, inferior, as naval
bases, only to those strong ports which are surrounded b