A pretext was required, to be always advancing, and this pretext was the liberty of the seas.  It is quite incredible how easy it is to make the most intelligent people on earth swallow any nonsense for gospel.  It is still one of those contrasts which would be altogether inexplicable, if unhappy France had not been stripped of religion and morality by a fatal concurrence of bad principles and unfortunate events.  Without religion no man is capable of any sacrifice, and as without morality no one speaks the truth, public opinion is incessantly led astray.  It follows therefore, as we have already said, that there is no courage of conscience, even when that of honor exists:  and that with admirable intelligence in the execution, no one even asks himself what all this is to lead to?

At the time that Bonaparte formed the resolution to overturn the thrones of the Continent, the sovereigns who occupied them were all of them very honorable persons.  The political and military genius of the world was extinct, but the people were happy; although the principles of free constitutions were not admitted into the generality of states, the philosophical ideas which had for fifty years been spreading over Europe had at least the merit of preserving from intolerance, and mollifying the reign of despotism.  Catherine II. and Frederic II. both cultivated the esteem of the French authors, and these two monarchs, whose genius might have subjected the world, lived in presence of the opinion of enlightened men and sought to captivate it.  The natural bent of men’s minds was directed to the enjoyment and application of liberal ideas, and there was scarcely an individual who suffered either in his person or in his property.  The friends of liberty were undoubtedly in the right, in discovering that it was necessary to give the faculties an opportunity of developing themselves; that it was not just that a whole people should depend on one man; and that a national representation afforded the only means of guaranteeing the transitory benefits that might be derived from the reign of a virtuous sovereign.  But what came Bonaparte to offer?  Did he bring a greater liberty to foreign nations?  There was not a monarch in Europe who would in a whole year have committed the acts of arbitrary insolence which signalized every day of his life.  He came solely to make them exchange their tranquillity, their independence, their language, their laws, their fortunes, their blood, and their children, for the misfortune and the shame of being annihilated as nations, and despised as men.  He began finally that enterprize of universal monarchy, which is the greatest scourge by which mankind can be menaced, and the certain cause of eternal war.

None of the arts of peace at all suit Bonaparte:  he finds no amusement but in the violent crises produced by battles.  He has known how to make truces, but he has never said sincerely, enough; and his character, irreconcileable with the rest of the creation, is like the Greek fire, which no strength in nature has been known to extinguish.