execution of Louis the Sixteenth had not roused irresistible indignation in England the action of the new Republic made the prolongation of peace an impossibility. When, in the winter of 1792, the Convention made the famous offer of its aid in arms to all peoples eager to be free, it must have been plain to Pitt that, with France in that temper and England tempest-tossed between hatred of the Revolution and fear lest its theories were being insidiously fostered in her own confines, the preservation of peace was a dream. The dream was finally dissipated when France made ready to attack Holland and, rejecting all possible negotiations, declared war in the early days of 1793. [Sidenote: 1793--France declares war against Holland] At first the war went ill with France, and if the German Powers had co-operated earnestly and honestly with England it is at least within the limits of possibility that Paris might have been occupied and the Revolution for the time retarded. France seemed to be circled by foes; her enemies abroad were aided by civil war at home. La Vendee was in Royalist revolt; Marseilles and Lyons rose against the tyranny of Paris; Toulon, turning against the Republic, welcomed an English fleet. For a moment the arms of England and the aims of the Allies seemed to have triumphed. But the passionate determination of the French popular leaders and the mass of the French people to save the Revolution seemed to inspire them with a heroism that grew in proportion to the threatened danger. Her armies were swollen with enthusiastic recruits. Her internal revolts were coped with and crushed with savage severity. Loyal La Vendee was beaten. The rebellious towns of Lyons and Marseilles almost ceased to exist under the merciless repression of their conquerors. Many of the allied armies were defeated, while those of the two German Powers for their own selfish ends played the game of revolutionary France by abstaining from any serious effort to {304} advance into the country. Germany and Austria were confident that they could whenever they pleased crush revolutionary France, and they preferred to postpone the process, in order to occupy themselves in a new partition of Poland, which they could scarcely have carried out if the French monarchy had been restored. If there was nothing to justify the conduct of the two German Powers, there was much to warrant their confidence in their own strength when they judged that the time had come for them to exert it. They counted upon the known when they measured their forces with those of revolutionary France; they could not count upon the unknown quantity which was to disturb all their calculations. The unknown quantity asserted itself just at the moment when France, in spite of some successes, seemed to be deeply wounded by the loss of Toulon.