Sobered for the moment by contemplating a past danger which had threatened annihilation, and by the crowding responsibilities of the future, the First Consul put into practical operation many important revolutionary ideals. But in this process he took full advantage of the state of French society to make himself indispensable to the continuance of French life on its new path. By the parade of civil liberty and a restored social order he so minimized the constitutional side of his government as to erect it into a virtual tyranny. The self-styled commonwealth, with a chief magistrate claiming to hold his office as a public trust, was quite ready to be launched as a liberal empire under a ruler who in reality held the highest power as a possession. [Sidenote: 1804] The murder of the Duc d'Enghien was virtually a notification of this fact to all the dynasties of Europe as well as to the French nation. Their behavior was conclusive evidence that they understood it as such. Death was the fate destined not merely for the intestine and personal enemies of the First Citizen, but for the foreign foe, prince or peasant, who should conspire against him whom the French delighted to honor. Had the continental powers been ready for war, it is quite possible that they would have made the execution of a Bourbon, and he the most popular of his line, the ground of immediate action. But they were far from ready. When a few days later the "Moniteur" made known the high probability of what is now a certainty, that Drake and Smith, British diplomatic agents in central Europe, were compromised hopelessly in the conspiracy to kill the chief magistrate of France, the bitterness of all classes, even the aristocracy, in France was assuaged. Great Britain could do nothing officially except to knit up a coalition and strengthen her forces. The Elector of Bavaria dismissed Drake, the British envoy at his court, as a base conspirator; the Duke of Würtemberg congratulated Bonaparte on his escape from assassins; the Holy Roman Emperor at Vienna kept silence while his ministers expressed sympathy for France; the King of Prussia and Alexander of Russia exchanged letters of reciprocal regard and awaited the British subventions to complete their armaments: but they gave no offense in any official way. The Pope exhibited his grief without restraint, but uttered no remonstrance, and the court of Naples was of course indifferent. There was a general putting on of mourning garb in the high circles of Europe; Louis XVIII sent back his decoration of the Golden Fleece to Madrid because Bonaparte had received and retained its insignia, and the dethroned Gustavus of Sweden returned to Frederick William the badges of the Red Eagle for a similar reason. Pretenders may indulge their sensibilities as hard-working kings dare not. It is entirely possible that Bonaparte believed himself, and a dynasty proceeding from his loins, to be the