th desired peace, so that their empires might expand and
consolidate. Above all, France was weary of war; and by peace the
average Frenchman meant, not respite from Continental strifes that
yielded a surfeit of barren glories, but peace with England. The words
of Lucchesini, the former Prussian ambassador in Paris, on this
subject are worth quoting:

"The war with England was at bottom the only one in which the
French public took much interest, since the evils it inflicted on
France were felt every moment: nothing was spoken of so decidedly
among all classes of the people as the wish to have done with that
war; and when one spoke of peace at Paris, one always meant peace
with England: peace with the others was as indifferent to the
public as the victories or the conquests of Bonaparte."[158]

If the French middle classes longed for a maritime peace so that
coffee and sugar might become reasonably cheap, how much more would
their ruler, whose heart was set on colonies and a realm in the
Orient? In Poland he had cheered his troops with the thought that they
were winning back the French colonial empire; and, as we have seen, he
was even then preparing the ground in Persia for a future invasion of
India. These plans could only be carried out after a time of peace
that should rehabilitate the French navy. Humanitarian sentiment,
patriotism, and even the promptings of a wider ambition, therefore
bade him strive for a general pacification, such as he seemed to have
assured at Tilsit.

But the means which he adopted were just those that were destined to
defeat this aim. Where he sought to intimidate, he only aroused a more
stubborn resistance: where he should have allayed national fears, he
redoubled them. He did not understand our people: he saw not that,
behind our official sluggishness and muddling, there was a quenchless
national vitality, which, if directed by a genius, could defy a
world-wide combination. If, instead of making secret compacts with the
Czar and trampling on Prussia; if, instead of intriguing with the
Sultan and the Shah, and thus reawakening our fears respecting Egypt
and India, he had called a Congress and submitted all the present
disputes to general discussion, there is reason to think that Great
Britain would have received his overtures. George III.'s Ministers had
favoured the proposal of a Congress when put forward by Austria in the
spring;[159] and they would doubtless