India. And the concentration of England's whole foreign policy upon that point undoubtedly accelerated the expansion of her dominion in that direction, because in her anxiety about the only vulnerable side of her land frontier, she naturally pushed forward to secure it. No sooner, in fact, had the spectre of French troop-ships hovering about her seacoast been finally laid under the waters of Trafalgar, than the apparition of European armies marching from the Caspian to the Oxus began to trouble the prophetic imagination of English statesmen.
From the day when the Emperors of France and Russia exchanged pledges of immutable personal friendship at Tilsit, Napoleon incessantly pressed upon Alexander his grand scheme of a joint expedition through Turkey and Persia against the English in India, with the object of subverting their dominion and destroying the sources of their commercial prosperity. In 1807 the pre-eminence of France on the European Continent had reached its climax. Napoleon had defeated every army that had successively met him in the field; he had dissolved every league that had been made against him; and he had forced every leading state to join in a coalition for the rigid exclusion of English commerce from all their seaports. When, however, it became clear that these roundabout methods of attacking England were futile, and that nothing short of a direct home-thrust would disable his indefatigable enemy, the French emperor naturally turned his eyes toward the only important English possession whose
