country was resolved on war, yielded, dishonestly, to what he believed to be a mistaken policy for the sake of keeping office. War with Spain was declared in July 1739. The Colonial quarrel with France arose in another way—and one more honourable to us. The trade of her colonies was less worth striving for than the Spanish, and she was too strong to be hectored. The aggression came from her. In America her agents endeavoured to unite her possessions, in Canada and Louisiana, by annexing the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi, which were first explored by her brilliant and daring adventurers. The result would have been to confine the growing British colonies between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic. In India the French Company was bankrupt. It endeavoured to gain the means of expelling its prosperous English rival, by acquiring political power among the native princes. For a time the Colonial conflict with France was postponed by the great European war arising over the scramble for the heritage of the house of Austria on the death of Charles VI. It was our exceeding good fortune that, when the decisive struggle for trade colonies and supremacy at sea had to be fought out, the attention and the resources of France were mainly employed on an attempt to acquire a predominant position in Central Europe. This was the happier for us because years were to pass before we could afford to dispense with any of the help fortune gave us. Never was the Government of England less able than during the fag end of Walpole’s rule and the administration of the so-called Patriots. Never, save during the last ignoble days of Charles II., was the navy less fit to meet the calls of a great war. Its paper strength was indeed imposing. There were 124 ships of the line—of from 100 to 50 guns each, and 104 of lesser rates—that is, of 40 guns each or less. The total was 228, and it exceeded the united navies of France and Spain in everything except the quality of the individual ships. But it was suffering from the moral and intellectual diseases spoken of in the previous chapter. The long peace had afforded no opportunity of testing the quality of officers. In the earlier years its chiefs were worn-out and commonplace, or brutal and noisy. All those years did for us was to bring forward the men who were to lead gloriously in after times. From the point of view of the navy, the struggle waged under various names, the Spanish War, the War of the Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years’ War from 1739 to 1763 with an eight years’ truce in the middle, was one and the same war. Fortunately for us, if we were bad, our enemies were worse. Spain was languid, brainless, and could only fight on the defensive. France was overtaxed, distracted by a multiplicity of aims, drifting to bankruptcy, corrupt at heart and frivolous. Great Britain was a mighty force, healthy, though afflicted by bad habits, but capable of reform, and even at its worst advancing on sound lines.