government could hardly fail to notice these suspicious circumstances, revealing as they did but too plainly the object of these pseudo-commercial agents. Lord Hawkesbury consequently made a verbal representation to the French ambassador of the facts; but his reply was so flimsy and unsatisfactory, that the French agents were detained in London, with a further intimation that if they left it they would at once receive orders to quit the country.
Aggrandisement of Bonaparte.
Irritation in England.
It is unnecessary to recapitulate at length the
various acts by which Bonaparte, during a presumed
period of peace, endeavoured to aggrandise his power.
Suffice it to say that he despatched an enormous military
force to the island of San Domingo with a view
of placing the colonial power of France in the West
Indies on a level with that of Great Britain: an
expedition which, however, proved most disastrous,
many thousands of his soldiers finding their graves
in a climate singularly dangerous to European constitutions.[1]
But when Bonaparte sent Ney with
thirty thousand men "to give," in the phraseology
of the day, "a constitution" to Switzerland, the
war party in England roused the entire nation to
energetic action, and, though the public language
of ministers still breathed a spirit of peace, it was
resolved that effectual steps should be taken to curb
Napoleon's further progress.
Italy, Holland, and Liguria (as the Genoese republic was called at that time) had fallen under his iron rule. Spain he had likewise overawed,
- ↑ It is said that of thirty-five thousand men (including reinforcements) scarcely seven thousand reached France again (Alison, v. p. 43).
