been maintained by the First Consul in the Council of State with
remarkable earnestness. The choice of a successor remained an open
question, which encouraged many hopes. The brothers of the First Consul
were loaded with honors; the family of the master took rank by themselves
from the moment when the name they bore in common appeared with a
freshness which was in part to eclipse its glory. In imitation of the
Italian Consulate, the Senate proclaimed Napoleon Bonaparte Consul for
life.

A few prudent friends of liberty in France began to feel uneasy at this
unheard-of aggrandizement of power without a curb. To the fear which
France in anarchy had caused in Europe already succeeded the disquietude
inspired by an absolute master, little careful of rights or engagements,
led by the arbitrary instincts of his own mind, susceptible by nature or
by policy, and always disposed to use his advantages imperiously. Peace
was already beginning to be irksome to him; he cherished hopes of new
conquests; his temper became every day more exacting, and the feebleness
of the English minister furnished him with occasions of quarrel. A
stranger to the liberal spirit of the English constitution, a systematic
enemy to the freedom of the press, Bonaparte required from Addington and
Lord Hawkesbury that they should expel from England the revolutionary
libellers, whose daily insults in the journals irritated him, and the
emigrant Chouans, whose criminal enterprises he dreaded. To the demands of
the French minister at London was added the official violence of the
_Moniteur_, edited and inspired by Barere. "What result," said the journal
of the First Consul, "what result can the English Government expect by
fomenting the troubles of the Church, by harboring, and re-vomiting on our
territory, the scoundrels of the Cotes-du-Nord and Morbihan, covered with
the blood of the most important and richest proprietors of those
unfortunate departments? Does it not know that the French Government is