umphs. "We have," he said, "to deal with
more serious questions: it seems that the greatest dangers of the
State were not in Austria: let us hear the report of the Minister of
the Treasury." It then appeared that Barbe-Marbois had been concerned
in risky financial concerns with the Court of Spain, through a man
named Ouvrard. The Minister therefore was promptly dismissed, and
Mollien then and there received his post. The new Minister states in
his memoirs that the money, which had sufficed to carry the French
armies from the English Channel to the Rhine, had been raised on
extravagant terms, largely on loans on the national domains. In fact,
it had been an open question whether victory would come promptly
enough to avert a wholesale crash at Paris.

So bad were the finances that, though 40,000,000 francs were poured
every year into France as subsidies from Italy and Spain, yet loans of
120,000,000 francs had been incurred in order to meet current
expenses.[64] It would exceed the limits of our space to describe by
what forceful means Napoleon restored the financial equilibrium and
assuaged the commercial crisis resulting from the war with England.
Mollien soon had reason to know that, so far from avoiding Continental
wars, the Emperor thenceforth seemed almost to provoke them, and that
the motto--_War must support war_--fell far short of the truth.
Napoleon's wars, always excepting his war with England, supported the
burdens of an armed peace. In this respect his easy and gainful
triumph over Austria was a disaster for France and Europe. It beckoned
him on to Jena and Tilsit.

While reducing his finances to order and newspaper editors to
servility, the conqueror received news of the triumph of his arms in
Southern Italy. There the Bourbons of Naples had mortally offended
him. After concluding a convention for the peaceable withdrawal of St.
Cyr's corps and the strict observance of neutrality by the kingdom of
Naples, Ferdinand IV. and his Queen Caroline welcomed the arrival at
their capital of an Anglo-Russian force of 20,000 men, and intrusted
the command of these and of the Neapolitan troops to General Lacy.[65]
This force, it is true, did little except weaken the northward march
of Massena; but the violation of neutrality by the Bourbons galled
Napoleon. At Vienna he refused to listen to the timid pleading of the
Hapsburgs on their behalf, and as soon as peace was signed at
Pressburg he put forth a bulletin stating