er the
Convention decreed that France offered the aid of her soldiers to all
nations who would strive for freedom. "All governments are our enemies,"
cried its President; "all peoples are our allies." In the teeth of
treaties signed only two years before, and of the stipulation made by
England when it pledged itself to neutrality, the French Government
resolved to attack Holland, and ordered its generals to enforce by arms
the opening of the Scheldt.

[Sidenote: France declares war with England.]

To do this was to force England into war. Public opinion was already
pressing every day harder upon Pitt. The horror of the massacres of
September, the hideous despotism of the Parisian mob, did more to
estrange England from the Revolution than all the eloquence of Burke.
But even while withdrawing our Minister from Paris on the imprisonment
of the king, to whose Court he had been commissioned, Pitt clung
stubbornly to a policy of peace. His hope was to bring the war to an end
through English mediation, and to "leave France, which I believe is the
best way, to arrange its own internal affairs as it can." No hour of
Pitt's life is so great as the hour when he stood lonely and passionless
before the growth of national passion, and refused to bow to the
gathering cry for war. Even the news of the September massacres could
only force from him a hope that France might abstain from any war of
conquest and might escape from its social anarchy. In October the French
agent in England reported that Pitt was about to recognize the Republic.
At the opening of November he still pressed on Holland a steady
neutrality. It was France, and not England, which at last wrenched peace
from his grasp. The decree of the Convention and the attack on the Dutch
left him no choice but war, for it was impossible for England to endure
a French fleet at Antwerp, or to desert allies like the United
Provinces. But even in December the news of the approaching partition of
Poland nerved him to a last struggle for peace; he offered to aid
Austria in acquiring Bavaria if she would make terms with France, and
pledged himself to France to abstain from war if that power would cease
from violating the independence of her neighbour states. But desperately
as Pitt struggled for peace, his struggle was in vain. Across the
Channel his moderation was only taken for fear, while in England the
general mourning which followed on the news of the French king's
execution sho