egard to territory, pay an indemnity of one million two
hundred thousand dollars, and furnish three ships of the line with two
frigates, while, in pursuance of the general policy of the French
republic, experts were to select twenty pictures from her galleries,
and five hundred manuscripts from her libraries. Whatever was the
understanding of those who signed these crushing conditions, the city
was never again treated by any European power as an independent state.
To this dismemberment the Directory made itself an accessory after the
fact, having issued a declaration of war on Venice which only reached
Milan to be suppressed, when already Venice was no more. Whether the
oligarchy or its assassin was the more loathsome still remains an
academic question, debatable only in an idle hour. Soon afterward a
French expedition was despatched to occupy her island possessions in
the Levant. The arrangements had been carefully prepared during the
very time when the provisional government believed itself to be paying
the price of its new liberties. And earlier still, on May
twenty-seventh, three days before the abdication of the aristocracy,
Bonaparte had already offered to Austria the entire republic in its
proposed form as an exchange for the German lands on the left bank of
the Rhine.

Writing to the Directory on that day, he declared that Venice, which
had been in a decline ever since the discovery of the Cape of Good
Hope and the rise of Triest and Ancona, could with difficulty survive
the blows just given her. "This miserable, cowardly people, unfit for
liberty, and without land or water--it seems natural to me that we
should hand them over to those who have received their mainland from
us. We shall take all their ships, we shall despoil their arsenal, we
shall remove all their cannon, we shall wreck their rank, we shall
keep Corfu and Ancona for ourselves." On the twenty-sixth, only the
day previous, a letter to his "friends" of the Venetian provisional
government had assured them that he would do all in his power to
confirm their liberties, and that he earnestly desired that Italy,
"now covered with glory, and free from every foreign influence, should
again appear on the world's stage, and assert among the great powers
that station to which by nature, position, and destiny it was
entitled." Ordinary minds cannot grasp the guile and daring which seem
to have foreseen and prearranged all the conditions necessary to plans
whi