Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.[335]

Pitt and his colleagues were under no illusion as to the weakness of the
first Coalition against France. They well knew the incurable jealousies
of the Houses of Hapsburg and Hohenzollern, the utter weakness of the
Holy Roman Empire, the poverty or torpor of Spain, Sardinia, and
Naples, the potent distractions produced by the recent partition of
Poland, and the Machiavellian scheme of the Empress Catharine II to busy
the Central Powers in French affairs so that she might have a free hand
at Warsaw. All this and much more stood revealed to them. But they
grounded their hopes of success on two important considerations; first,
that the finances of France were exhausted; secondly, that the rule of
the Jacobins, fertile in forced loans, forced service, and guillotining,
must speedily collapse. On the subject of French finance there are many
notes in the Pitt Papers, which show that Pitt believed an utter
breakdown to be imminent. Grenville, too, at the close of October 1793,
stated that France had lost at least 200,000 soldiers, while more than
50,000 were in hospital. The repugnance to military service was
universal, and the deficit for the month of August alone was close on
L17,000,000.[336]

Above all, Pitt and Grenville believed the French Government to be
incompetent as well as exasperatingly cruel. In their eyes Jacobins were
sworn foes to all that made government possible. The mistake was
natural. The English Ministers knew little of what was going on in
France, and therefore failed to understand that the desperadoes now in
power at Paris were wielding a centralized despotism, compared with
which that of Louis XIV was child's play. As to the Phoenix-like
survival of French credit, it is inexplicable even to those who have
witnessed the wonders wrought by Thiers in 1870-3. All that can be said
is that the Jacobins killed the goose that laid the golden egg, and yet
the golden eggs were laid. Let him who understands the miracle of
revolutionary finance cast the first stone at Pitt.

The Prime Minister also erred when he believed the French social
structure to be breaking up. Here again the miscalculation was perfectly
natural in an age which regarded kings, nobles, and bishops as the fixed
stars of a universe otherwise diversified only by a dim Milky Way. The
French were the first to dispel these notions. In truth the strength of
the young giant bore witness