ith as little mercy as a
mercantile corporation shows to incompetent employees. It is often
claimed that the armies of republican France and of Napoleon were,
after all, the armies of the Bourbons. Not so. The conscription law,
though very imperfect in itself, was supplemented by the general
enthusiasm; a nation was now in the ranks instead of hirelings; the
reorganization had remodeled the whole structure, and between January
first, 1792, and January twentieth, 1795, one hundred and ten division
commanders, two hundred and sixty-three generals of brigade, and one
hundred and thirty-eight adjutant-generals either resigned, were
suspended from duty, or dismissed from the service. The republic had
new leaders and new men in its armies.

The nation had apparently determined that the natural boundary of
France and of its own revolutionary system was the Rhine. Nice and
Savoy would round out their territory to the south. This much the new
government, it was understood, would conquer, administer, and keep;
the Revolution in other lands, impelled but not guided by French
influence, must manage its own affairs. This was, of course, an
entirely new diplomatic situation. Under its pressure Holland, by the
aid of Pichegru's army, became the Batavian Republic, and ceded Dutch
Flanders to France; while Prussia abandoned the coalition, and in the
treaty of Basel, signed on April fifth, 1795, agreed to the neutrality
of all north Germany. In return for the possessions of the
ecclesiastical princes in central Germany, which were eventually to be
secularized, she yielded to France undisputed possession of the left
bank of the Rhine. Spain, Portugal, and the little states both of
south Germany and of Italy were all alike weary of the contest, the
more so as they were honeycombed with liberal ideas. They were already
preparing to desert England and Austria, the great powers which still
stood firm. With the exception of Portugal, they acceded within a few
weeks to the terms made at Basel. Rome, as the instigator of the
unyielding ecclesiastics of Vendee, was, of course, on the side of
Great Britain and the Empire.

At home the military success of the republic was for a little while
equally marked. Before the close of 1794 the Breton peasants who,
under the name of Chouans, had become lawless highwaymen were entirely
crushed; and the English expedition sent to Quiberon in the following
year to revive the disorders was a complete, almost r