six million bushels of oats, forty-four thousand oxen, fifteen thousand
horses, three thousand six hundred waggons, with harness and drivers,
each carrying a load of fifteen hundred weight; and finally, hospitals
provided with every thing necessary for twenty thousand sick. It is
true, that all these supplies were to be allowed in deduction of the
remainder of the taxes imposed by the conquest.]




CHAP. III.


These two treaties opened the road to Russia to Napoleon; but in order
to penetrate into the interior of that empire, it was necessary to make
sure of Sweden and Turkey.

Military combinations were then so much aggrandized, that in order to
sketch a plan of warfare, it was no longer necessary to study the
configuration of a province, or of a chain of mountains, or the course
of a river. When monarchs, such as Alexander and Napoleon, were
contending for the dominion of Europe, it was necessary to regard the
general and relative position of every state with a universal _coup
d'oeil_; it was no longer on single maps, but on that of the whole
globe, that their policy had to trace its plans of hostility.

Russia is mistress of the heights of Europe; her flanks are supported by
the seas of the north and south. Her government can only with great
difficulty be driven into a straight, and forced to submit, in a space
almost beyond the imagination to conceive: the conquest of which would