most adroit of military artists. Soldiers of British or kindred blood, their native courage edged and made dour by hunger, are very apt, in such straits, to turn on their tormentors, and, in violation of all the rules of war, tumble them into ruin. As Carlyle puts it, '40,000 enraged people of English and other PlattTeutsch type would have been very difficult to pin up into captivity or death, instead of breakfast. . . The hungry Baresarks, their blood fairly up, would find or make a way through somehow." And the story of the battle of Dettingen is the tale of how those 16,000 hungry and angry British soldiers-for they did most of the fighting-with all generalship and all the advantages of ground against them, by sheer, dogged, unscientific, and what their enemies complained was mere "stupid" fighting-the fighting of the rank and file, the actual push of reddened bayonets, and the blast of volleys delivered so close that they seemed to scorch the very flesh of their enemies-burst through De Noailles' toils, tumbled that ingenious general in mere ruin across the Maine, and turned starvation into victory.

The unhistorical reader may wonder how it came to pass that in 1743 a British army, with a British monarch at its head, was running the risk of capture in Central Germany, and under the shadow of the Bavarian hills. Carlyle somewhat unkindly pictures the typical modern Englishman demanding of the universe in mere amazement, "Battle of Dettingen, Battle of Fontenoy-what in the devil's name were we doing there?" He adds that the only answer is, "Fit of insanity, delirium tremens, perhaps furens.

Don't think of it!" An educated man is expected to know "who commanded at Aigos-Potamoi, and wrecked the Peloponnesian War. But of Dettingen and Fontenoy, where is the living Englishman that has the least notion, or seeks for any?" With one consent we have tumbled the Austrian succession war into the dustbin, and are cheerfully content that it should lie there. It belongs to those wars which may be described as "mere futile transitory dust whirlwinds, stilled in blood;" spasms of pure distracted lunacy on a national scale. "The poor human memory," Carlyle adds, "has an alchemy against such horrors. It forgets them!"

But this is only an example of Carlyle's too energetic rhetoric, and his own more sober judgment may be quoted against his swift and sword-edged epithets. In the war with Spain, picturesquely labelled from “Jenkins's ear," the statesmanship of England was on one side; the dim, inarticulate instinct of its common people was on the other. And the people were wiser than the statesmen! Walpole was forced into war against his will; and, as he listened to the bells of St. Paul's ringing in exultation when war broke out, he said, bitterly, "They may ring their bells now; before long they will be wringing their hands!" Yet, if ever war was justifiable, that against Spain in 1739 was.

Spain claimed to be mistress, by decree of the Pope, of all the seas and continents covered by the vague title of "the Spanish main"; and so for two centuries, whatever was the case in Europe, perpetual war raged in the Tropics. South of the line the British trader was driven by stress of necessity to become a buccaneer, and from the days of Drake the unfortunate Pope's

decree had been slashed with cutlasses and rent with sea-cannon till it became a thing of rags. The claim of Spain to keep half the world locked up, from the common life of the race, under an ecclesiastical seal, was a menace to civilisation. "To lie like a dog in the manger over South America," reflects Carlyle, and say, snarling, 'None of you shall trade here, though I cannot,' what Pope, or body of Popes, can sanction such a procedure? . Dogs have doors for their hutches, but to pretend barring the Tropic of Cancer— that is too big a door for any dog!"

By the Assiento treaty the British were allowed to despatch one ship, not exceeding 600 tons, to the Spanish main each year; but what parchment skin of treaties could keep the volume of the world's trade flowing through such a petty squirt! Illegal traders in the Spanish main abounded, and Spanish guarda costas were not gentle in their method of suppressing them. Captain Jenkins, with his vessel the Rebecca, sailing from Jamaica to London, was stopped and searched off the coast of Havanna, by a Spanish revenue cutter. Jenkins was slashed over the head with a cutlass, and his left ear half chopped off. A Spanish officer then tore off the bleeding ear, flung it in its owner's face, and bade him "carry it home to his king, and tell him what had been done." The story of how that little morsel of brown, withered human flesh turned out a spark which kindled the inarticulate slow-burning wrath of the English nation into a flame, and swept England itself into war, is told in the following chapter. Carlyle himself says:—

"The 'Jenkins's ear' question, which once looked so

mad, was sane enough, and covered tremendous issues. Half the world lay hidden in embryo under it. 'Colonial Empire'-whose is it to be? Shall half the world be England's for industrial purposes, which is innocent, laudable, conformable to the multiplication table, at least, and other plain laws? Or shall it be Spain's, for arrogant, torpid, sham-devotional purposes, contradictory to every law? The incalculable Yankee nation' itself, biggest phenomenon (once thought beautifullest) of these ages,—this, too, little as careless readers on either side of the sea now know it, lay involved. Shall there be a Yankee nation, shall there not be? Shall the new world be of Spanish type, shall it be of English? Issues which we may call immense! Among the then extant sons of Adam, where was he who could in the faintest degree surmise what issues lay in the Jenkins's ear question? And it is curious to consider now, with what fierce, deep-breathed doggedness, the poor English nation, drawn by their instincts, held fast upon it, and would take no denial, as if they had surmised and seen. For the instincts of simple, guileless persons (liable to be counted stupid by the unwary) are sometimes of prophetic nature, and spring from the deep places of this universe."

But to the "Jenkins's ear" question was added yet another, of scale almost as huge. In 1733 the Bourbon houses of Paris and Madrid framed betwixt themselves the famous "Family Compact," one of a series of such compacts which Burke has described as "the most odious and formidable of all conspiracies against the liberties of Europe that have ever been framed." By this "Compact" the foreign policy of two great nations,

it was agreed, should be "guided exclusively by the interests of the House." France was to aid Spain with all her forces by land and sea, whenever Spain chose to warn England absolutely off the Spanish main. The two branches of the Bourbons, in a word, were secretly pledged as allies in a policy which threatened the freedom of Europe in general; and England, as the chief Protestant and freedom-loving Power, was specially menaced. Its maritime supremacy was to be ruined. The attack on the Austrian succession was but an attempt to carry out the hateful principles of the "Family Compact." Frederick of Prussia, bribed by the hope of Silesia, had joined France and Spain. France claimed the Netherlands, Spain half Italy, and Gibraltar was to be wrested from Great Britain. In wise self-defence England was aiding with purse and musket the gallant fight Maria Theresa was making for the patrimony of her child. Yet nominally there was no war betwixt England and France when the battle of Dettingen was fought; and this explains Horace Walpole's famous epigram, "We had the name of war with Spain without the thing, and war with France without the name."

On June 19, 1743, George II., with his son the Duke of Cumberland, who won an evil fame afterwards as "the butcher of Culloden," rode into Lord Stair's camp at Aschaffenburg. Royal father and son, betwixt them, had not military intelligence enough to make up a twentieth-rate general; but both had an abundant stock of that primary element in a soldier, mere fighting courage. George II. Carlyle describes grimly enough as "a mere courageous Wooden Pole with cocked hat