The proposal for peace which he made to England before his departure for the Niemen is another circumstance where his object seems to have been misrepresented. It was called a device to reconcile the French to the Russian war; but they were as eager for that war as he could wish them to be, and it is more probable that it sprung from a secret misgiving, a prophetic sentiment of the consequent power of Russia, lifted, as she then would be towards universal tyranny, by the very arm which he had raised to restrain her. The ostensible ground of his quarrel with the emperor Alexander was the continental system; yet, in this proposal for peace, he offered to acknowledge the house of Braganza in Portugal, the house of Bourbon in Sicily, and to withdraw his army from the Peninsula, if England would join him in guaranteeing the crown of Spain to Joseph, together with a constitution to be arranged by a national Cortes. This was a virtual renunciation of the continental system for the sake of peace with England; and a proposal which obviated the charge of aiming at universal dominion, seeing that Austria, Spain, Portugal, and England would have retained their full strength, and the limits of his empire would have been fixed. The offer was made also at a time when the emperor was certainly more powerful than he had ever yet been, when Portugal was, by the avowal of Wellington himself, far from secure, and Spain quite exhausted. At peace with England, Napoleon could easily have restored the Polish nation, and Russia would have been repressed. Now, Poland has fallen, and Russia stalks in the plenitude of her barbarous tyranny.