"Must the war which for eight years has ravaged the four quarters of the
globe, be eternal? Is there no other means of arriving at a mutual
understanding?

"How can the most enlightened nations of Europe, powerful and strong
beyond what their security and independence require, sacrifice the
interest of commerce, the prosperity of their people, and the happiness of
families, to ideas of vainglory?

"These sentiments cannot be foreign to the heart of your Majesty, who
governs a free nation with the sole aim of rendering it happy.

"Your Majesty will see in these overtures only my sincere desire to
contribute effectively, for the second time, to a general pacification by
a prompt procedure, full of confidence and divested of those forms which,
necessary perhaps, in order to disguise the dependence of feeble States,
only reveal between strong States a mutual desire to deceive each other.

"France and England, by the abuse of their power, may for a long time yet
retard its termination; but I dare to say that every civilized nation is
interested in the close of a war which embraces the whole world."

At the same time, and in nearly the same terms, Bonaparte wrote to the
Emperor Francis. He had treated formerly with this sovereign, and would
not perhaps have found him inflexible; but Pitt did not believe the
Revolution finished, and had no confidence in a man who had just seized
with a victorious hand the direction of the destinies of France. A
frigidly polite letter, addressed by Lord Granville to Talleyrand, the
minister of foreign affairs, repelled the advances of the First Consul.