making
her the workshop as well as the market of the world. From the first the
mind of Buonaparte had been set on a struggle with this growing
world-power. Even amidst his earliest victories he had dreamed of
wresting from England her dominion in the East; and if his Egyptian
expedition had done nothing for India, it had secured in Egypt itself a
stepping-stone for further efforts. But now that France was wholly at
his disposal, the First Consul resolved to free his hands from the
strife with the Continent, and to enter on that struggle with Britain
which was henceforth to be the task of his life.

[Sidenote: Pitt's position.]

The significance then of the Peace of Luneville lay in this, not only
that it was the close of the earlier revolutionary struggle for
supremacy in Europe, the abandonment by France of her effort to
"liberate the peoples," to force new institutions on the nations about
her by sheer dint of arms; but that it marked the concentration of all
her energies on a struggle with Britain for the supremacy of the world.
For England herself the event which accompanied it, the sudden
withdrawal of William Pitt from office which took place in the very
month of the treaty, was hardly less significant. To men of our day the
later position of William Pitt seems one of almost tragic irony. An
economist heaping up millions of debt, a Peace Minister dragged into the
costliest of wars, he is the very type of the baffled statesman; and the
passionate loyalty with which England clung to him through the
revolutionary struggle is one of the least intelligible passages of our
history. But if England clung to Pitt through these years of gloom, it
was because then more than ever she saw in him her own representative.
His strength had lain throughout in his reflection of public opinion:
and public opinion saw itself reflected in him still. At the outset of
his career the set of opinion had been towards a larger and more popular
policy than of old. New facilities of communication, new industrial
energy, and a quick accumulation of wealth, as well as the social
changes which followed hard on these economical changes, all pointed
forward to political progress, to an adaptation of our institutions to
the varied conditions of the time. The nation was quivering with a new
sense of life; and it faced eagerly questions of religion, of
philanthropy, of education, of trade, as one after another they
presented themselves before it. Ab