For the moment Great Britain might be well content. India was safer for the overthrow of Tippoo, Ceylon was conquered, Egypt blockaded, and supremacy regained in the West Indies as well. Malta was in her hands, the Dutch fleet had been destroyed, the French and Spanish fleets were imprisoned at Brest. It is true the liberal agitations inaugurated and kept alive by the discontent of her middle and lower classes were hard to repress; but they were mercilessly crushed as they came to the surface, and on the whole, public opinion supported the policy. That Grenville was subsidizing Georges Cadoudal with half a million francs to reorganize the Chouannerie of western France, and strike the "essential blow," was barely suspected. The proof has only come to light a century later. Assassination is an ugly word: it was not used, but it was contemplated. If this were the temper of Great Britain, that of Austria, her ally, was even more irreconcilable. Expansion in Italy was the focal concept of her policy. There was no expense of money and men she would refuse to consider for erasing the blot of Campo Formio. She had recruited her treasury and her army by British aid, and was defiant. The letter to her Emperor from the First Consul, as of equal to equal, was a crowning insult. The first four months of the Consulate had not left the First Consul without enemies at home both numerous and bitter; moreover, many narrow minds--men who, like Talleyrand, were ignorant of how impossible the permanent return of the Bourbons had become--considered Bonaparte's tenure of power only as a transition to the old order. But at the critical instant, in April of the last year of the eighteenth century, France as a whole, including even the factions which had hoped to use him as a tool, felt that her doctrines, her aspirations, and her fate were personified in the great Corsican. His own motives may properly be stigmatized as those of personal ambition; but they were much more. Half educated and half barbarous as he was in his disdain of human limitations, there was in his heart a clear conception that good can come only of good, and therefore he had a definite purpose to do the most possible in order to illuminate his own rise by the regeneration of society. Himself a man without a country,--for all his patriotic aspirations perished in Corsica's desperate failure,--he cared little for territorial limits, and utterly failed to comprehend the strength of national ties. Without sincere ecclesiastical feeling or an earnest faith, he partly understood the value of religious sentiment in the individual, but underrated utterly its moral preponderance in the social organism. The church to him was little more than a "white" police force. A consummate actor, he estimated at its full the influence of the dramatic word and situation on the common mind, but was often self-deceived while believing others misled or beguiled by his acting.