It is well to recall that if the great Egyptian expedition was intended by Bonaparte and his friends in the Directory to mystify the French, the naval preparations, made as if both to meet England on her own undisputed element, and likewise to invade her soil, may well have been made with similar intention regarding the English. The one hypothesis requires no greater credulity than the other. Having driven the Addington ministry from power, Pitt said, on May twenty-third, 1803, that France would base her hope of success either on the expectation that she could "break the spirit and shake the determination of the country by harassing us with perpetual apprehension of descent upon our coasts," or on the supposition that she could "impair our resources and undermine our credit by the effects of an expensive and protracted contest." There is no reason to regard this as other than a prophetic utterance, except that the preparations of Napoleon for invasion assumed such dimensions as to give the whole scheme for "harassing" England the appearance of a real purpose. But it must be remembered that no other course would have deceived a people so astute as the English, and this fact, taken in connection with the Emperor's ever-increasing determination that no power within the sphere of his influence should remain neutral, but that all should close their doors to English commerce, is very strong proof that Napoleon was fighting England in both the ways indicated by Pitt. It is also pertinent to inquire what would have happened had Napoleon been successful in landing an army on English shores. In the first place, his mastery of the seas would have been quickly ended by the combined efforts of the English war-vessels then afloat, and he would have been left without base of supplies or communication. In the second place, he would have met a resistance from a proud, free, enlightened, and desperate people which would have paralyzed all his tactics, and would have worn out any force he could have kept together. Napoleon had said before that an army which cannot be regularly recruited is a doomed army. He knew very well that with the fleets and flotillas at his disposal a permanent control of the seas was out of the question. The impression which Metternich received in 1810, that the Emperor's intention had been a continental war from the first, and the lavishness with which Napoleon, throughout his public career, made use of any form of ruse, even the costliest, in order to mislead his foes, are complementary pieces of evidence which furnish the strongest corroboration. CHAPTER XXX THE CORONATION OF NAPOLEON I[31]