and distress would tend to drive them out soon.  Thirty thousand able-bodied men are a heavy additional load on the markets of a small city, blockaded by sea, and with primitive communications by land.  Upon this rested Nelson’s principal hope of obliging them to come forth, if Napoleon himself did not compel them.  Their position, he wrote the Secretary for War soon after he joined the fleet, seemed to favor an attack by rockets; “but I think we have a better chance of forcing them out by want of provisions:  it is said hunger will break through stone walls,—­ours is only a wall of wood.”  “It is said that there is a great scarcity of provisions in Cadiz.”  He then mentioned that the allies were endeavoring to meet this difficulty by sending neutral vessels, loaded with food-stuffs, from French ports to all the small harbors on either side of Cadiz, whence the stores carried by them could be transferred by coasting-boats,—­a process which ships were powerless to stop.  Collingwood, therefore, had seized the neutrals, and sent them into Gibraltar, a step which Nelson had approved and continued.  For it he then demanded the authority of his government.  “Should it be thought proper to allow the enemy’s fleet to be victualled, I request that I may be informed as soon as possible.”

In connection with this subject Nelson made an allusion to a policy with which Castlereagh, the minister he was addressing, was afterwards identified,—­that of the celebrated Orders in Council of 1807, and the license system connected with it.  This is one of the few intimations we have of the wide range of subjects upon which he conversed with members of the Cabinet while in England; and it is interesting, not only as showing how far back those measures originated, but also as illustrating his own prophetic intuition of the construction which would be placed upon such proceedings.  “I can have nothing, as an Admiral, to say upon the propriety of granting licences; but from what your Lordship told me of the intention of Ministers respecting the neutral trade, it strikes me, some day it may be urged that it was not for the sake of blockade, but for the purpose of taking all the trade into her own hands, that Great Britain excluded the Neutrals.  Your Lordship’s wisdom will readily conceive all that Neutral Courts may urge at this apparent injustice, and of might overcoming right."[117] This shrewdly accurate forecast of a contention which was not to arise till after his death is but one instance among many of Nelson’s clearness of judgment, in political as well as in military matters.

Nelson’s services, upon this, his final departure from England, were rather requested by the Government than by him volunteered—­in the ordinary sense of the word.  He went willingly enough, doubtless, but in obedience, proud and glad, to the summons, not only of the popular cry, but of the Cabinet’s wish.  “I own I want much more rest,” he wrote to Elliot, immediately after joining the