ble for the Court of Madrid to
alienate any of its colonies to France, as at that very time was being
arranged with respect to Louisiana.

The second omission was equally remarkable. No mention was made of any
renewal of commercial intercourse between England and France.
Doubtless a complete settlement of this question would have been
difficult. British merchants would have looked for a renewal of that
enlightened treaty of commerce of 1786-7, which had aroused the bitter
opposition of French manufacturers. But the question might have been
broached at London, and its omission from the preliminaries served as
a reason for shelving it in the definitive treaty--a piece of folly
which at once provoked the severest censure from British
manufacturers, who thereby lost the markets of France, and her subject
States, Holland, Spain, Switzerland, Genoa, and Etruria.

And, finally, the terms of peace provided no compensation either for
the French royal House or for the dispossessed House of Orange. Here
again, it would have been very difficult to find a recompense such as
the Bourbons could with dignity have accepted; and the suggestion made
by one of the royalist exiles to Lord Hawkesbury, that Great Britain
should seize Crete and hand it over to them, will show how desperate
was their case.[183] Nevertheless, some effort should have been made
by a Government which had so often proclaimed its championship of the
legitimist cause. Still more glaring was the omission of any
stipulation for an indemnity for the House of Orange, now exiled from
the Batavian Republic. That claim, though urged at the outset, found
no place in the preliminaries; and the mingled surprise and contempt
felt in the _salons_ of Paris at the conduct of the British Government
is shown in a semiofficial report sent thence by one of its secret
agents:

"I cannot get it into my head that the British Ministry has acted
in good faith in subscribing to preliminaries of peace, which,
considering the respective position of the parties, would be
harmful to the English people.... People are persuaded in France
that the moderation of England is only a snare put in Bonaparte's
way, and it is mainly in order to dispel it that our journals have
received the order to make much of the advantages which must accrue
to England from the conquests retained by her; but the journalists
have convinced nobody, and it is said openly that