conceive doubt as to yours, mine is gone."

Few persons in England now cherished any doubts as to the First
Consul's hatred of the nation which stood between him and his oriental
designs. Ministers alone knew the extent of those plans: but every
ploughboy could feel the malice of an act which cooped up innocent
travellers on the flimsiest of pretexts. National ardour, and, alas,
national hatred were deeply stirred.[258] The Whigs, who had paraded the
clemency of Napoleon, were at once helpless, and found themselves
reduced to impotence for wellnigh a generation; and the Tories, who
seemed the exponents of a national policy, were left in power until the
stream of democracy, dammed up by war in 1793 and again in 1803,
asserted its full force in the later movement for reform.

Yet the opinion often expressed by pamphleteers, that the war of 1803
was undertaken to compel France to abandon her republican principles,
is devoid of a shred of evidence in its favour. After 1802 there were
no French republican principles to be combated; they had already been
jettisoned; and, since Bonaparte had crushed the Jacobins, his
personal claims were favourably regarded at Whitehall, Addington even
assuring the French envoy that he would welcome the establishment of
hereditary succession in the First Consul's family.[259] But while
Bonaparte's own conduct served to refute the notion that the war of
1803 was a war of principles, his masterful policy in Europe and the
Levant convinced every well-informed man that peace was impossible;
and the rupture was accompanied by acts and insults to the "nation of
shopkeepers" that could be avenged only by torrents of blood.
Diatribes against perfidious Albion filled the French Press and
overflowed into splenetic pamphlets, one of which bade odious England
tremble under the consciousness of her bad faith and the expectation
of swift and condign chastisement. Such was the spirit in which these
nations rushed to arms; and the conflict was scarcely to cease until
Napoleon was flung out into the solitudes of the southern Atlantic.

The importance of the rupture of the Peace of Amiens will be realized if
we briefly survey Bonaparte's position after that treaty was signed. He
had regained for his adopted country a colonial empire and had given
away not a single French island. France was raised to a position of
assured strength far preferable to the perilous heights attained later
on at Tilsit. In Australi