s own special friends to
similiar risks in Egypt and Syria. He never hesitated to sacrifice
thousands of lives when a great object was at stake; and the
restoration of the French West Indian Colonies might well seem worth
an army, especially as St. Domingo was not only of immense instrinsic
value to France in days when beetroot sugar was unknown, but was of
strategic importance as a base of operations for the vast colonial
empire which the First Consul proposed to rebuild in the basin of the
Mississippi.

* * * * *

The history of the French possessions on the North American continent
could scarcely be recalled by ardent patriots without pangs of
remorse. The name Louisiana, applied to a vast territory stretching up
the banks of the Mississippi and the Missouri, recalled the glorious
days of Louis XIV., when the French flag was borne by stout
_voyageurs_ up the foaming rivers of Canada and the placid reaches of
the father of rivers. It had been the ambition of Montcalm to connect
the French stations on Lake Erie with the forts of Louisiana; but that
warrior-statesman in the West, as his kindred spirit, Dupleix, in the
East, had fallen on the evil days of Louis XV., when valour and merit
in the French colonies were sacrificed to the pleasures and parasites
of Versailles. The natural result followed. Louisiana was yielded up
to Spain in 1763, in order to reconcile the Court of Madrid to
cessions required by that same Peace of Paris. Twenty years later
Spain recovered from England the provinces of eastern and western
Florida; and thus, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, the red and
yellow flag waved over all the lands between California, New Orleans,
and the southern tip of Florida.[198]

Many efforts were made by France to regain her old Mississippi
province; and in 1795, at the break up of the First Coalition, the
victorious Republic pressed Spain to yield up this territory, where
the settlers were still French at heart. Doubtless the weak King of
Spain would have yielded; but his chief Minister, Godoy, clung
tenaciously to Louisiana, and consented to cede only the Spanish part
of St. Domingo--a diplomatic success which helped to earn him the
title of the Prince of the Peace. So matters remained until
Talleyrand, as Foreign Minister, sought to gain Louisiana from Spain
before it slipped into the horny fists of the Anglo-Saxons.

That there was every prospect of this last event was