It is unnecessary to enter upon the subject of the preliminaries of Leoben, until we notice the treaty of Campo Formio, under which they were finally modified, and by which they were adjusted and controlled. It may be, however, the moment to state, that Buonaparte was considerably blamed, by the Directory and others, for stopping short in the career of conquest, and allowing the House of Austria terms which left her still formidable to France, when, said the censors, it would have cost him but another victory to blot the most constant and powerful enemy of the French Republic out of the map of Europe; or, at least, to confine her to her hereditary states in Germany. To such criticism he replied, in a despatch to the Directory from Leoben, during the progress of the treaty: "If, at the commencement of these Italian campaigns, I had made a point of going to Turin, I should never have passed the Po--had I insisted prematurely on advancing to Rome, I could never have secured Milan--and now, had I made an indispensable object of reaching Vienna, I might have destroyed the Republic."[277] Such was his able and judicious defence of a conduct, which, by stopping short of some ultimate and extreme point apparently within his grasp, extracted every advantage from fear, which despair perhaps might not have yielded him, if the enemy had been driven to extremity. And it is remarkable, that the catastrophe of Napoleon himself was a corollary of the doctrine which he now laid down; for, had he not insisted upon penetrating to Moscow, there is no judging how much longer he might have held the empire of France. The contents of the treaty of Leoben, so far as they were announced to the representatives of the French nation by the Directory, only made known, as part of the preliminaries, that the cession of the Belgic provinces, and of such a boundary as France might choose to demand upon the Rhine, had been admitted by Austria; and that she had consented to recognise a single republic in Italy, to be composed out of those which had been provisionally established. But shortly afterwards it transpired, that Mantua, the subject of so much and such bloody contest, and the very citadel of Italy, as had appeared from the events of these sanguinary campaigns, was to be resigned to Austria, from whose tenacious grasp it had been wrenched with so much difficulty. This measure was unpopular; and it will be found that Buonaparte had the ingenuity, in the definitive treaty of peace, to substitute an indemnification, which he ought not to have given, and which was certainly the last which the Austrians should have accepted. [Sidenote: VENICE.] [Sidenote: April 9]