Sweden, and so maintained a balance of power in that sea, from which
she drew not only a great trade but the chief part of her naval
stores, and which the Czar aimed to make a Russian lake. Denmark
endeavored to establish an East India company aided by foreign
capital; England and Holland not only forbade their subjects to join
it, but threatened Denmark, and thus stopped an enterprise they
thought adverse to their sea interests. In the Netherlands, which by
the Utrecht Treaty had passed to Austria, a similar East India
company, having Ostend for its port, was formed, with the emperor's
sanction. This step, meant to restore to the Low Countries the trade
lost to them through their normal outlet of the Scheldt, was opposed
by the sea powers England and Holland; and their greediness for the
monopoly of trade, helped in this instance by France, stilled this
company also after a few years of struggling life. In the
Mediterranean, the Utrecht settlement was disturbed by the emperor of
Austria, England's natural ally in the then existing state of European
politics. Backed by England, he, having already Naples, claimed also
Sicily in exchange for Sardinia. Spain resisted; and her navy, just
beginning to revive under a vigorous minister, Alberoni, was crushed
and annihilated by the English fleet off Cape Passaro in 1718; while
the following year a French army, at the bidding of England, crossed
the Pyrenees and completed the work by destroying the Spanish
dock-yards. Thus England, in addition to Gibraltar and Mahon in her
own hands, saw Naples and Sicily in those of a friend, while an enemy
was struck down. In Spanish America, the limited privileges to English
trade, wrung from the necessities of Spain, were abused by an
extensive and scarcely disguised smuggling system; and when the
exasperated Spanish government gave way to excesses in the mode of
suppression, both the minister who counselled peace and the opposition
which urged war defended their opinions by alleging the effects of