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 government could hardly fail to notice these suspicious circumstances, revealing as they did but too plainly the object of these pseudo-commercial agents. Lord Hawkesbury consequently made a verbal representation to the French ambassador of the facts; but his reply was so flimsy and unsatisfactory, that the French agents were detained in London, with a further intimation that if they left it they would at once receive orders to quit the country.

It is unnecessary to recapitulate at length the various acts by which Bonaparte, during a presumed period of peace, endeavoured to aggrandise his power. Suffice it to say that he despatched an enormous military force to the island of San Domingo with a view of placing the colonial power of France in the West Indies on a level with that of Great Britain: an expedition which, however, proved most disastrous, many thousands of his soldiers finding their graves in a climate singularly dangerous to European constitutions. But when Bonaparte sent Ney with thirty thousand men "to give," in the phraseology of the day, "a constitution" to Switzerland, the war party in England roused the entire nation to energetic action, and, though the public language of ministers still breathed a spirit of peace, it was resolved that effectual steps should be taken to curb Napoleon's further progress.

Italy, Holland, and Liguria (as the Genoese republic was called at that time) had fallen under his iron rule. Spain he had likewise overawed,