drew from Chaptal the confession that life there
was the life of a galley slave. And if we seek for the hidden reason
why a ruler eminently endowed with mental force and freshness should
have endured so laboured a masquerade, we find it in his strikingly
frank confession to Madame de Remusat: _It is fortunate that the
French are to be ruled through their vanity._ <

* * * * *

CHAPTER XIV

THE PEACE OF AMIENS

The previous chapter dealt in the main with the internal affairs of
France and the completion of Napoleon's power: it touched on foreign
affairs only so far as to exhibit the close connection between the
First Consul's diplomatic victory over England and his triumph over
the republican constitution in his adopted country. But it is time now
to review the course of the negotiations which led up to the Treaty of
Amiens.

In order to realize the advantages which France then had over England,
it will be well briefly to review the condition of our land at that
time. Our population was far smaller than that of the French Republic.
France, with her recent acquisitions in Belgium, the Rhineland, Savoy,
Nice, and Piedmont, numbered nearly 40,000,000 inhabitants: but the
census returns of Great Britain for 1801 showed only a total of
10,942,000 souls, while the numbers for Ireland, arguing from the
rather untrustworthy return of 1813, may be reckoned at about six and
a half millions. The prodigious growth of the English-speaking people
had not as yet fully commenced either in the motherland, the United
States, or in the small and struggling settlements of Canada and
Australia. Its future expansion was to be assured by industrial and
social causes, and by the events considered in this and in subsequent
chapters. It was a small people that had for several months faced with
undaunted front the gigantic power of Bonaparte and that of the Armed
Neutrals.

This population of less than 18,000,000 souls, of which nearly
one-third openly resented the Act of Union recently imposed on
Ireland, was burdened by a National Debt which amounted to
L537,000,000, and entailed a yearly charge of more than L20,000,000
sterling. In the years of war with revolutionary France the annual
expenditure had risen from L19,859,000 (for 1792) to the total of
L61,329,000, which necessitated an income tax of 10 per cent. on all
incomes of L200 and upwards. Yet, despite party feuds, the nation was
never stro