Napoleon's policy in Italy was permanently compromised by the abominable sale of Venice, with her two thousand years of freedom, to the empire which, as no one knew better than he did, was the pivot of European despotism. After that transaction he could never again come before the Italians with clean hands; they might for a season make him their idol, carried away by the intoxication of his fame; they could never trust him in their inmost conscience. The ruinous consequences of the Treaty of Campo Formio only; ceased in 1866. The Venetians have been severely blamed, most of all by Italian historians, for making Campo Formio possible by opening the door to the French six months before. Napoleon could not have bartered away Venice if it had not belonged to him. The reason that it belonged to him was that, on the 12th of May 1797, the Grand Council committed political suicide by dissolving the old aristocratic form of government, in compliance with a mere rumour, conveyed to them through the ignoble medium of a petty shopkeeper, that such was the wish of General Buonaparte. In extenuation of their fatal supineness, it may be urged that they felt the inherent weakness of an oligarchy out of date; and in the second place, that the victor of Lodi, the deliverer of Lombardy, then in the first flush of his scarcely tarnished glory, was a dazzling figure, calculated indeed to turn men's heads. But, after all, the only really valid excuse for them would have been that Venice lacked the means of defence, and this was not the case. She had 14,000 regular troops, 8000 marines, a good stock of guns--how well she might have resisted the French, had they, which was probable, attacked her, was to be proved in 1849. Her people, moreover, that _basso popolo_ which nowhere in the world is more free from crime, more patient in suffering, more intelligent and public-spirited than in Venice, was anxious and ready to resist; when the nobles offered themselves a sacrifice on the Gallic altar by welcoming the proposed democratic institutions, the populace, neither hoodwinked nor scared into hysterics, rose to the old cry of San Marco, and attempted a righteous reaction, which was only smothered when the treacherous introduction of French troops by night on board Venetian vessels settled the doom of Venice's independence.