fore the British declaration of
war was issued.

On May 22nd, 1803, appeared at Paris the startling order that, as
British frigates had captured two French merchantmen on the Breton
coast, all Englishmen between eighteen and sixty years of age who were
in France should be detained as prisoners of war. The pretext for this
unheard-of action, which condemned some 10,000 Britons to prolonged
detention, was that the two French ships were seized prior to the
declaration of war. This is false: they were seized on May 18th, that
is, on the day on which the British Government declared war, three
days after an embargo had been laid on British vessels in French
ports, and seven days after the First Consul had directed his envoy at
Florence to lay an embargo on English ships in the ports of
Tuscany.[257] It is therefore obvious that Napoleon's barbarous decree
merely marked his disappointment at the failure of his efforts to gain
time and to deal the first stroke. How sorely his temper was tried by
the late events is clear from the recital of the Duchesse d'Abrantes,
who relates that her husband, when ordered to seize English residents,
found the First Consul in a fury, his eyes flashing fire; and when
Junot expressed his reluctance to carry out this decree, Napoleon
passionately exclaimed: "Do not trust too far to my friendship: as
soon as I conceive doubt as to yours, mine is gone."

Few persons in England now cherished any doubts as to the First
Consul's hatred of the nation which stood between him and his oriental
designs. Ministers alone knew the extent of those plans: but every
ploughboy could feel the malice of an act which cooped up innocent
travellers on the flimsiest of pretexts. National ardour, and, alas,
national hatred were deeply stirred.[258] The Whigs, who had paraded the
clemency of Napoleon, were at once helpless, and found themselves
reduced to impotence for wellnigh a generation; and the Tories, who
seemed the exponents of a national policy, were left in power until the
stream of democracy, dammed up by war in 1793 and again in 1803,
asserted its full force in the later movement for reform.

Yet the opinion often expressed by pamphleteers, that the war of 1803
was undertaken to compel France to abandon her republican principles,
is devoid of a shred of evidence in its favour. After 1802 there were
no French republican principles to be combated; they had already been
jettisoned; and, since Bonaparte had crus