The motives which impelled Napoleon to the enterprises now to be considered were as many-sided as the maritime ventures themselves.  Ultimately, doubtless, they arose out of a love of vast undertakings that ministered at once to an expanding ambition and to that need of arduous administrative toils for which his mind ever craved in the heyday of its activity.  And, while satiating the grinding powers of his otherwise morbidly restless spirit, these enterprises also fed and soothed those imperious, if unconscious, instincts which prompt every able man of inquiring mind to reclaim all possible domains from the unknown or the chaotic.  As Egypt had, for the present at least, been reft from his grasp, he turned naturally to all other lands that could be forced to yield their secrets to the inquirer, or their comforts to the benefactors of mankind.  Only a dull cynicism can deny this motive to the man who first unlocked the doors of Egyptian civilization; and it would be equally futile to deny to him the same beneficent aims with regard to the settlement of the plains of the Mississippi, and the coasts of New Holland.

The peculiarities of the condition of France furnished another powerful impulse towards colonization.  In the last decade her people had suffered from an excess of mental activity and nervous excitement.  From philosophical and political speculation they must be brought back to the practical and prosaic; and what influence could be so healthy as the turning up of new soil and other processes that satisfy the primitive instincts?  Some of these, it was true, were being met by the increasing peasant proprietary in France herself.  But this internal development, salutary as it was, could not appease the restless spirits of the towns or the ambition of the soldiery.  Foreign adventures and oceanic commerce alone could satisfy the Parisians and open up new careers for the Praetorian chiefs, whom the First Consul alone really feared.

Nor were these sentiments felt by him alone.  In a paper which Talleyrand read to the Institute of France in July, 1797, that far-seeing statesman had dwelt upon the pacifying influences exerted by foreign commerce and colonial settlements on a too introspective nation.  His words bear witness to the keenness of his insight into the maladies of his own people and the sources of social and political strength enjoyed by the United States, where he had recently sojourned.  Referring to their speedy recovery from the tumults of their revolution, he said:  “The true Lethe after passing through a revolution is to be found in the opening out to men of every avenue of hope.—­Revolutions leave behind them a general restlessness of mind, a need of movement.”  That need was met in America by man’s warfare against the forest, the flood, and the prairie.  France must therefore possess colonies as intellectual and political safety-valves; and in his graceful, airy style he touched on the advantages offered by Egypt, Louisiana, and West Africa, both for their intrinsic value and as opening the door of work and of hope to a brain-sick generation.