If the bugles of Bonaparte raised the living populace of the passing hour, she could blow that yet more revolutionary trumpet that shall raise all the democracy of the dead.
But if we concede that collision was inevitable between the new Republic on the one hand and Holy Russia and the Holy Roman Empire on the other, there remain two great European forces which, in different attitudes and from very different motives, determined the ultimate combination.
Neither of them had any tincture of Catholic mysticism.

Neither of them had any tincture of Jacobin idealism.

Neither of them, therefore, had any real moral reason for being in the war at all.

The first was England, and the second was Prussia.
It is very arguable that England must, in any case, have fought to keep her influence on the ports of the North Sea.

It is quite equally arguable that if she had been as heartily on the side of the French Revolution as she was at last against it, she could have claimed the same concessions from the other side.