of the army. The army was not
only small, but without proper equipment; and the want of military
experience among its soldiers was only equalled by the incapacity of
their leaders. "We have no general," Lord Grenville wrote bitterly, "but
some old woman in a red riband." Wretched, too, as had been the conduct
of the war, its cost was already terrible; for if England was without
soldiers she had wealth, and in default of nobler means of combating the
revolution Pitt had been forced to use wealth as an engine of war. He
became the paymaster of the coalition, and his subsidies kept the allied
armies in the field. But the immense loans which these called for, and
the quick growth of expenditure, undid all the financial reforms on
which the young minister prided himself. Taxation, which had reached its
lowest point at the outbreak of the contest, mounted ere a few years
were past to a height undreamed of before. The debt rose by leaps and
bounds. In three years nearly eighty millions had been added to it, a
sum greater than that piled up by the whole war with America, and in the
opening of 1796 votes were taken for loans which amounted to twenty-five
millions more.

[Sidenote: The dogged temper of England.]

Nor was this wreck of his financial hopes Pitt's only ground for
desiring a close of the war. From the first, as we have seen, he had
been keenly sensitive to the European dangers which the contest
involved; nor had he shown, even in his moment of social panic, the
fanatical blindness of men like Burke to the evils which had produced
the revolution, or to the good which it had wrought. But he could only
listen in silence while the Marquis of Lansdowne, the Lord Shelburne of
earlier days and the successor of Chatham as the advocate of a more
liberal policy, met the rhetoric of Burke by a cool demonstration of the
benefit which the recent change had brought to the mass of the French
people, and by pointing to the profit which Russia was drawing from the
struggle in the west. In their wide-reaching view of European affairs,
in their justice to the revolution, Shelburne and Pitt stood alone.
Around them men were hardened and blinded by passion. The old hatred
between nation and nation, which Pitt had branded as irrational, woke up
fiercer than ever at the clash of arms, for with it was blended a
resentment that had smouldered in English breasts ever since the war
with America at the blow which France had dealt England in th