The year 1797, the year of this narrative, belongs to a period which, as
every thinker now feels, involved a crisis for Christendom, not exceeded
in its undetermined momentousness at the time by any other era whereof
there is record. The opening proposition made by the Spirit of that
Age,[1] involved a rectification of the Old World’s hereditary wrongs.
In France, to some extent, this was bloodily effected. But what then?
Straightway the Revolution itself became a wrongdoer, one more
oppressive than the kings. Under Napoleon it enthroned upstart kings,
and initiated that prolonged agony of continual war whose final throe
was Waterloo. During those years not the wisest could have foreseen that
the outcome of all would be what to some thinkers apparently it has
since turned out to be, a political advance along nearly the whole line
for Europeans.
Now, as elsewhere hinted, it was something caught from the Revolutionary
Spirit that at Spithead emboldened the man-of-war’s men to rise against
real abuses, long-standing ones, and afterwards at the Nore to make
inordinate and aggressive demands, successful resistance to which was
confirmed only when the ringleaders were hung for an admonitory
spectacle to the anchored fleet. Yet in a way analogous to the operation
of the Revolution at large, the Great Mutiny, though by Englishmen
naturally deemed monstrous at the time, doubtless gave the first latent
prompting to most important reforms in the British Navy.
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Footnote 1:
Crossed out:
Was one hailed by the noblest men of it.
Even the dry tinder of Wordsworth took fire.
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