Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/69

52 inconsistent with Lucien's remark that it was wanted for war,—but the canals were never built or begun; and the sixty millions were spent, to the last centime, in preparations for an impracticable descent on England.

Yet money was not the inducement which caused Bonaparte to sell Louisiana to the United States. The Prince of Peace would at any time have given more money, and would perhaps have been willing, as he certainly was able, to pay it from his private means rather than allow the United States to own Louisiana. In other respects, the sale needed explanation, since it contradicted the First Consul's political theories and prejudices. He had but two rooted hatreds. The deeper and fiercer of these was directed against the republic,—the organized democracy, and what he called ideology, which Americans knew in practice as Jeffersonian theories; the second and steadier was his hatred of England as the chief barrier to his military omnipotence. The cession of Louisiana to the United States contradicted both these passions, making the ideologists supreme in the New World, and necessarily tending in the end to strengthen England in the Old. Bonaparte had been taught by Talleyrand that America and England, whatever might be their mutual jealousies, hatreds, or wars, were socially and economically one and indivisible. Barely ten years after the Revolutionary War had closed, and at a time when the wounds it made were still raw, Talleyrand remarked: "In every part of