with a population which, when the war began, was not much more than half that of France.  And then, France had increased by leaps and bounds, reaching out to the north into Belgium and Holland, and to the south into Italy, whilst we were weakened by deep-lying disaffection among both Catholics and Presbyterians in Ireland.  The danger was imminent and plain to the least thoughtful.  One could not walk the Kent coast without seeing the beacons heaped up to tell the country of the enemy’s landing, and if the sun were shining on the uplands near Boulogne, one might catch the flash of its gleam upon the bayonets of manoeuvring veterans.  No wonder that a fear of the French power lay deeply in the hearts of the most gallant men, and that fear should, as it always does, beget a bitter and rancorous hatred.

The seamen did not speak kindly then of their recent enemies.  Their hearts loathed them, and in the fashion of our country their lips said what the heart felt.  Of the French officers they could not have spoken with more chivalry, as of worthy foemen, but the nation was an abomination to them.  The older men had fought against them in the American War, they had fought again for the last ten years, and the dearest wish of their hearts seemed to be that they might be called upon to do the same for the remainder of their days.  Yet if I was surprised by the virulence of their animosity against the French, I was even more so to hear how highly they rated them as antagonists.  The long succession of British victories which had finally made the French take to their ports and resign the struggle in despair had given all of us the idea that for some reason a Briton on the water must, in the nature of things, always have the best of it against a Frenchman.  But these men who had done the fighting did not think so.  They were loud in their praise of their foemen’s gallantry, and precise in their reasons for his defeat.  They showed how the officers of the old French Navy had nearly all been aristocrats.  How the Revolution had swept them out of their ships, and the force been left with insubordinate seamen and no competent leaders.  This ill-directed fleet had been hustled into port by the pressure of the well-manned and well-commanded British, who had pinned them there ever since, so that they had never had an opportunity of learning seamanship.  Their harbour drill and their harbour gunnery had been of no service when sails had to be trimmed and broadsides fired on the heave of an Atlantic swell.  Let one of their frigates get to sea and have a couple of years’ free run in which the crew might learn their duties, and then it would be a feather in the cap of a British officer if with a ship of equal force he could bring down her colours.