A few prudent friends of liberty in France began to feel uneasy at this unheard-of aggrandizement of power without a curb. To the fear which France in anarchy had caused in Europe already succeeded the disquietude inspired by an absolute master, little careful of rights or engagements, led by the arbitrary instincts of his own mind, susceptible by nature or by policy, and always disposed to use his advantages imperiously. Peace was already beginning to be irksome to him; he cherished hopes of new conquests; his temper became every day more exacting, and the feebleness of the English minister furnished him with occasions of quarrel. A stranger to the liberal spirit of the English constitution, a systematic enemy to the freedom of the press, Bonaparte required from Addington and Lord Hawkesbury that they should expel from England the revolutionary libellers, whose daily insults in the journals irritated him, and the emigrant Chouans, whose criminal enterprises he dreaded. To the demands of the French minister at London was added the official violence of the _Moniteur_, edited and inspired by Barère. "What result," said the journal of the First Consul, "what result can the English Government expect by fomenting the troubles of the Church, by harboring, and re-vomiting on our territory, the scoundrels of the Côtes-du-Nord and Morbihan, covered with the blood of the most important and richest proprietors of those unfortunate departments? Does it not know that the French Government is now more firmly established than the English Government? Does it imagine that for the French Government reciprocity will be difficult? What might be the effect of an exchange of such insults--of this protection and this encouragement accorded to assassins?"