repulse inflicted on the Irish Squadron by a superior force of
French, Italian, and Spanish warships had settled the question of the
command of the Atlantic in favour of the League. The immediate result
of this was that food supplies from the West practically stopped.

Now and then a fleet Atlantic greyhound ran the blockade and brought
her priceless cargo into a British port; but as the weeks went by
these occurrences became fewer and further between, till the time
news was received in London of the investment of the fortresses of
the Quadrilateral by the innumerable hosts of the League, brought
together by the junction of the French and Russian Armies of the
North and the conquerors of Vienna and Constantinople, who had
returned on their tracks after garrisoning their conquests in the
East.

Food in Britain, already at war prices, now began to rise still
further, and soon touched famine prices. Wheat, which in the last
decade of the nineteenth century had averaged about L9 a ton, rose to
over L31 a ton, its price two years before the Battle of Waterloo.
Other imported food-stuffs, of course, rose in proportion with the
staple commodity, and the people of Britain saw, at first dimly, then
more and more clearly, the real issue that had been involved in the
depopulation of the rural districts to swell the populations of the
towns, and the consequent lapse of enormous areas of land either into
pasturage or unused wilderness.

In other words, Britain began to see approaching her doors an enemy
before whose assault all human strength is impotent and all valour
unavailing. Like Imperial Rome, she had depended for her food supply
upon external sources, and now these sources were one by one being
cut off.

The loss of the command of the Atlantic, the breaking of the Baltic
blockade, and the consequent closing of all the continental ports
save Hamburg, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Antwerp, had left her
entirely dependent upon her own miserably insufficient internal
resources and the Mediterranean route to India and the East.

More than this, too, only Hamburg, Antwerp, and the fortresses of the
Quadrilateral now stood between her and actual invasion,--that
supreme calamity which, until the raid upon Aberdeen, had been for
centuries believed to be impossible.

Once let the League triumph in the Netherlands, as it had done in
Central and South-Eastern Europe, and its legions would descend like
an avalanche upon the shores of