When England was dragged into the war already raging between France and the German powers, against the wish of her rulers, and by the deliberate action of the revolutionary authorities in Paris on the 1st February 1793, she came in as the ally of all Central and Western Europe. By the spring of 1795 she was left to fight single-handed on the sea. The French armies had overrun Holland in January of that year. Prussia, hampered by an empty treasury and distracted by her anxiety to secure a share in the third partition of Poland, made peace at Bâle on the 5th April. Spain, weak, exhausted, and ill governed, was eager for peace. France, which had no cause to fear her and was anxious to withdraw the troops serving on the Pyrenean frontier, to reinforce the armies in Italy, on the Rhine, and in the Low Countries, gave her favourable terms. A treaty of peace, which was the preliminary to a treaty of alliance, was signed, also at Bâle, on the 22nd July. From the 1st February 1793 to the Franco-Spanish treaty of Bâle, 22nd July 1795, makes the first period of a war which was destined to last, with two brief intervals, for another twenty years. It was on both sides a struggle for existence. Revolutionary France fought to secure her new social order. To protect the gains of the Revolution, she strove to secure her “natural limits”—the Pyrenees, the Alps, the line of the Rhine. To guard herself against the hostility which this increase of power was sure to arouse in her neighbours, she had to gain possession of advanced guards and outlying fortresses to cover her new frontier, to subjugate Holland, and keep Spain in a dependence which must also include Portugal. But with the coast of Europe and its resources, from the Texel to the Maritime Alps, in the possession of France, the position of England would have been one of extreme danger. Therefore, in order that she herself might be safe, she had to endeavour to force France back into her old limits, and since France was resolved to secure her “natural limits” for her own security, she was committed to an endeavour to subjugate England. The fight could not end till one side was fairly beaten, and France was not vanquished, and shut once more within her frontier of 1790, till the Peace of Paris of the 20th November 1815 was signed. All Europe had to combine to bind her; for the causes which drove her to dominate Holland and Spain, as a defence against England, operated to compel her to seek other outworks and subdue other possible assailants beyond the Rhine and the Maritime Alps. In this mighty struggle of forces and principles it was the part of England to dominate the sea. Her strength on the sea made her the one power whom the French armies could not strike to the heart. Therefore she was the permanent enemy of France, the constant ally of her foes, and in the end the controlling member of the European Coalition which dictated the Treaty of Paris.