[Sidenote: The United States not disposed to allow the French to regain Canada.] Nor again were the Americans, however well disposed to France, in any way or at any time minded to enable her to regain her lost possessions in North America. A Canadian who had left Canada for France when Canada was annexed by Great Britain, wrote, before the conclusion of the Peace of Amiens, expressing the hope that Canada would be regained by France. He regarded Canada, from the French point of view, ‘as a colony essential to trade and as an outlet for merchandize and men’; and he wrote that, if restored to France, it ‘would constantly furnish the means of speculation which would improve the future of the citizens whom war and revolution have reduced to wretchedness’.[218] The words read as those of a man who had known and still sighed for the days of the old French régime in Canada, when men grew rich by illicit traffic; but, apart from the views of individuals, there is no doubt that, as the eighteenth century closed, France and the French people, after the wars of the Revolution, with their power consolidated at home, were in the stage of development favourable to colonial expansion, and mindful of possessions beyond the seas which had once been French but were French no longer. [Sidenote: Napoleon’s views as to St. Domingo and Louisiana.] [Sidenote: Abandonment of his American schemes.] Napoleon, as writers have shown, in negotiating for and concluding the Peace of Amiens which gave him respite from the sea power of Great Britain, had in view the reconquest of St. Domingo where Toussaint L’Ouverture had secured practical independence, and the recovery of Louisiana. By secret bargain with Spain in 1800, he had secured the retrocession of Louisiana; and, had the arrangement been carried out and the French power been firmly planted again at New Orleans and on the Mississippi, a new impetus and a new motive would have been given for French designs on Canada. But the losses in the St. Domingo campaigns were heavy, and in regard to Louisiana Napoleon had to reckon with the American people. Realizing that his policy, if persisted in, would draw the United States away from France and towards Great Britain, he came, with some suddenness, to the conclusion that the game was not worth the candle, and selling in 1803 to the United States the great territory on the line of the Mississippi which after all was not his to sell, he put an end for ever to French aspirations for recovering their North American dominions. [Sidenote: Danger to Canada from the United States.]