"I have incurred no real danger," wrote Bonaparte to Melzi on March sixth, 1804, "for the police had their eyes on all these machinations." The verdict of history implicates that ubiquitous agency in fostering by its spies and agents many of those same machinations, but leaves no doubt of the desperate character of the ringleaders in them. What England really, and the Bourbons ostensibly, wanted was a Jacobin insurrection; many of their infuriated agents would certainly not have hesitated at assassination. The general opinion in France was not wrong in condemning the extreme measures taken by the Bourbons to gain their ends, and for the moment royalists of all three factions were silent, feeling that their cause had received a blow from which it might never recover. As to the moderate republican party, it was temporarily extinguished by the fate of Moreau. Skilful as a general and sincere as a democrat, his career had been short-sighted and contradictory. Friendship had led him to conceal his knowledge of Pichegru's dealings with the royalists of 1797. Ambition led him to assist at Brumaire, but he would not accept the consequences. Indecision led him into a trap, but even then he might have escaped, but for the letter he wrote by the advice of a proud and foolish wife. The closing scenes of this drama of plot and counterplot, of assassination and murder, of falsehood, treachery, and execution, formed a fitting dénouement to the piece. That age had seen and condoned acts of revenge which in quieter times would have been considered unpardonable. Nelson had sanctioned the judicial assassination of Caraccioli, the Neapolitan admiral, whose crime was that in the interest of the Parthenopean Republic he had fought the English fleet. Austria's skirts were not clean of the murders perpetrated at Rastadt. A little later the Bourbons, with the assent of the allied sovereigns, ordered the execution of Ney for deserting them to support his former chief at Waterloo. Bonaparte, relying on a conviction that every one regarded him as a harried and innocent man acting in self-defense, and apparently unconscious of how utterly the royalist agitation had been discredited by Cadoudal, determined so to stun the already prostrate Bourbons as to render them harmless for years to come.