“I cannot get it into my head that the British Ministry has acted in good faith in subscribing to preliminaries of peace, which, considering the respective position of the parties, would be harmful to the English people....  People are persuaded in France that the moderation of England is only a snare put in Bonaparte’s way, and it is mainly in order to dispel it that our journals have received the order to make much of the advantages which must accrue to England from the conquests retained by her; but the journalists have convinced nobody, and it is said openly that if our European conquests are consolidated by a general peace, France will, within ten years, subjugate all Europe, Great Britain included, despite all her vast dominions in India.  Only within the last few days have people here believed in the sincerity of the English preliminaries of peace, and they say everywhere that, after having gloriously sailed past the rocks that Bonaparte’s cunning had placed in its track, the British Ministry has completely foundered at the mouth of the harbour.  People blame the whole structure of the peace as betraying marks of feebleness in all that concerns the dignity and the interests of the King; ... and we cannot excuse its neglect of the royalists, whose interests are entirely set aside in the preliminaries.  Men are especially astonished at England’s retrocession of Martinique without a single stipulation for the colonists there, who are at the mercy of a government as rapacious as it is fickle.  All the owners of colonial property are very uneasy, and do not hide their annoyance against England on this score."[184]

This interesting report gives a glimpse into the real thought of Paris such as is rarely afforded by the tamed or venal Press.  As Bonaparte’s spies enabled him to feel every throb of the French pulse, he must at once have seen how great was the prestige which he gained by these first diplomatic successes, and how precarious was the foothold of the English Ministers on the slippery grade of concession to which they had been lured.  Addington surely should have remembered that only the strong man can with safety recede at the outset, and that an act of concession which, coming from a master mind, is interpreted as one of noble magnanimity, will be scornfully snatched from a nerveless hand as a sign of timorous complaisance.  But the public statements and the secret avowals of our leaders show that they wished “to try the experiment of peace,” now that France had returned to ordinary political conditions and Jacobinism was curbed by Bonaparte.  “Perhaps,” wrote Castlereagh, “France, satisfied with her recent acquisitions, will find her interest in that system of internal improvement which is necessarily connected with peace."[185] There is no reason for doubting the sincerity of this statement.  Our policy was distinctly and continuously complaisant:  France regained her colonies:  she was not required to withdraw from Switzerland and Holland.  Who could expect, from what was then known of Bonaparte’s character, that a peace so fraught with glory and profit would not satisfy French honour and his own ambition?