When Marbois took the treaty to the First Consul, Bonaparte listened to its provisions with lively interest; and on hearing that twenty millions were to be employed in paying claims,--a use of money which he much disliked,--he broke out: “Who authorized you to dispose of the money of the State? I want to have these twenty millions paid into the Treasury. The claimants’ rights cannot come before our own.”[48] His own _projet_ had required the Americans to assume these claims,--which was, in fact, the better plan. Marbois’s alteration turned the claims into a French job. Perhaps Bonaparte was not averse to this; for when Marbois reminded him that he had himself fixed the price at fifty millions, whereas the treaty gave him sixty, and settled the claims besides,--“It is true,” he said; “the negotiation leaves me nothing to wish. Sixty millions for an occupation that will not perhaps last a day! I want France to have the good of this unexpected capital, and to employ it in works of use to her marine.” On the spot he dictated a decree for the construction of five canals. This excellent use of the money seemed inconsistent with Lucien’s remark that it was wanted for war,--but the canals were never built or begun; and the sixty millions were spent, to the last centime, in preparations for an impracticable descent on England. Yet money was not the inducement which caused Bonaparte to sell Louisiana to the United States. The Prince of Peace would at any time have given more money, and would perhaps have been willing, as he certainly was able, to pay it from his private means rather than allow the United States to own Louisiana. In other respects, the sale needed explanation, since it contradicted the First Consul’s political theories and prejudices. He had but two rooted hatreds. The deeper and fiercer of these was directed against the republic,--the organized democracy, and what he called ideology, which Americans knew in practice as Jeffersonian theories; the second and steadier was his hatred of England as the chief barrier to his military omnipotence. The cession of Louisiana to the United States contradicted both these passions, making the ideologists supreme in the New World, and necessarily tending in the end to strengthen England in the Old. Bonaparte had been taught by Talleyrand that America and England, whatever might be their mutual jealousies, hatreds, or wars, were socially and economically one and indivisible. Barely ten years after the Revolutionary War had closed, and at a time when the wounds it made were still raw, Talleyrand remarked: “In every part of America through which I have travelled, I have not found a single Englishman who did not feel himself to be an American; not a single Frenchman who did not find himself a stranger.” Bonaparte knew that England held the monopoly of American trade, and that America held the monopoly of democratic principles; yet he did an act which was certain to extend British trade