Page:The Great problems of British statesmanship.djvu/42

22 hommes hâtons-nous de les y porter, rendons à l'Angleterre les maux qu'elle nous a faits. Qu'une République s'élève à côté d'elle pour son instruction ou pour son châtiment. …

Si nous sommes bientôt en mesure de faire ce que j'ai indiqué en parlant de la Russie, au moins d'en annoncer l'intention, je ne doute pas que la Porte ne sente le prix de ce service et n'associe ses forces aux nôtres pour repousser la Russie loin des bords de la Mer Noire.

The war programme of the French Directoire against England, which included an attack on Egypt, an expedition against India, the support of Turkey, the raising of Ireland in rebellion, and war upon British commerce, bears a curious resemblance to the comprehensive and world-wide war plans of modern Germany.

Napoleon seized the Government of France and became the heir of the grandiose world-embracing policy of the Republic. He took up the plan which was designed to destroy simultaneously the power of England and Russia and to make France all-powerful throughout the world. Catherine the Second, the great enemy of the French Revolution, had died in 1796, and had been succeeded by the weak, eccentric, violent, and scarcely sane Czar Paul the First. During the first years of his reign he also was hostile to revolutionary France and had made war upon that country, but in 1800 he quarrelled with England. Napoleon at once utilised the opportunity and persuaded him to attack England in Asia in conjunction with France. In O'Meara's book, 'Napoleon on St. Helena,' we read that Napoleon described to his Irish surgeon the invasion planned in the time of Paul the First as follows:

If Paul had lived you would have lost India before now. An agreement was made between Paul and myself to invade it. I furnished the plan. I was to have sent thirty thousand good troops. He was to send a similar number of the best Russian soldiers and forty thousand Cossacks. I was to subscribe ten millions for the purchase of camels and other requisites for crossing the desert. The King of Prussia was