Meantime the First Consul gave every evidence that his only warfare was to be a diplomatic one; his chief interest was clearly the improvement of French industries, the extension of beneficent public works, and the consolidation of his colonial empire. Louisiana had been ceded to France by Spain in exchange for the kingdom of Etruria, and an expedition was being fitted out to go and take possession of it. Efforts were directed also to the eastward, Sebastiani, a skilful diplomat, being despatched in September, under the guise of a commercial agent, carefully to examine Persian affairs and report on the situation in the Levant. As a countercheck to the outcry which Bonaparte believed would be raised over the annexation of Piedmont, he filled Ireland with secret agents whose duty it was to foment and organize the spirit of insurrection, while carefully studying the country. Ostensibly they too were commercial agents, and even when some of their instructions were seized by English officials, nothing to the contrary could be proved. In their case, as in that of Sebastiani, it does not appear that Bonaparte was aiming at anything but to secure an alternative in case of extremity. That he had eventually to take the alternative in Ireland is no proof to the contrary. Similarly there was no overt hostility in the fact, considered from any point of view, that Ney's fine army of thirty thousand men, sent to Switzerland ostensibly in the interest of good order, served likewise to check both Prussia and Austria, should they prove restive under the new reorganization of Europe. When England remonstrated, Bonaparte declared in a note of October twenty-third, 1802, to his ambassador in England, that his resolution was taken. If war was threatened, it must needs be a continental war, the consequence of which could only be to force him to conquer Europe. He was about thirty-three years old. Hitherto he had destroyed only second-class states. "Who knew how long he would take to change the face of Europe again, and resuscitate the empire of the West?" This paper Otto, the ambassador, virtually suppressed, knowing how far the threat would jeopardize the peace.