e offensive and defensive alliance
offered him in the previous December, and with the additional
humiliation of being compelled to close his ports to English ships. He
vainly strove to conceal this shameful bargain, and was, as will be
seen, punished by the destruction of Prussian commerce. After all, he
found himself overreached by Napoleon in duplicity, and was at last
provoked into risking a single-handed contest with his imperious ally.
He declared war on October 1, and within a fortnight the army of
Prussia, inheriting the system and traditions of the great Frederick,
was all but annihilated in the twin battles of Jena and Auerstaedt fought
on October 14.

[Pageheading: _SMALL EXPEDITIONS._]

The British government, though not unwilling to forgive the perfidy of
its former confederate, was powerless to strike a blow on his behalf
until it was too late. Indeed, the only warlike operation undertaken by
Great Britain in Europe during the year was in the extreme south of
Italy. Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies, had been driven out of his
capital to make way for Joseph Bonaparte, who entered Naples on February
15, and the exiled monarch took refuge in the island of Sicily. In
accordance with the shortsighted policy of small expeditions, a British
force under Sir John Stuart was landed in Calabria to raise the
peasantry, and on July 4, defeated the French at the point of the
bayonet in the battle of Maida. This action shook the confidence of
Europe in the superiority of the French infantry, and saved Sicily from
France, but the French troops remained in possession of the Italian
mainland. The prestige of Great Britain was raised by the conquest of
the Dutch colony of the Cape of Good Hope in January by a naval and
military force sent out by Pitt under the command of Sir Home Popham and
General, now Sir David, Baird, but was damaged by a futile expedition to
South America, undertaken by Popham without orders from the home
government. The city of Buenos Ayres was taken, indeed, in June by
General Beresford, but it was retaken by the Spaniards in August, and
soldiers who could ill be spared from the European conflict now
impending were lavished on a chimerical project on the other side of the
Atlantic.

The short administration of Grenville, so inactive in its foreign
policy, is memorable only for one redeeming measure of home-policy--the
abolition of the slave trade. Before Fox's death, the attention of
parliament h