In July, 1797, Great Britain alone was at war with France, and so continued for over a year longer.  Portugal, though nominally an ally, contributed to the common cause nothing but the use of the Tagus by the British Navy.  Austria, it is true, had not yet finally made peace with France, but preliminaries had been signed in April, and the definitive treaty of Campo Formio was concluded in October.  By it Belgium became incorporated in the territory of France, to which was conceded also the frontier of the Rhine.  The base of her power was thus advanced to the river, over which the possession of the fortified city of Mayence gave her an easy passage, constituting a permanent threat of invasion to Germany.  Venice, as a separate power, disappeared.  Part of her former domains upon the mainland, with the city itself, went to Austria, but part was taken to constitute the Cisalpine Republic,—­a new state in Northern Italy, nominally independent, but really under the control of France, to whom it owed its existence.  Corfu, and the neighboring islands at the mouth of the Adriatic, till then belonging to Venice, were transferred to France.  The choice of these distant and isolated maritime positions, coupled with the retention of a large army in the valley of the Po, showed, if any evidence were needed, a determination to assure control over the Italian peninsula and the Mediterranean Sea.

The formal acquisitions by treaty, even, did not measure the full menace of the conditions.  The Revolutionary ferment, which had partially subsided, received fresh impetus from the victories of Bonaparte and the cessation of Continental war; and the diplomacy of France continued as active and as aggressive as the movement of her armies had previously been.  By constant interference, overt and secret, not always stopping short of violence, French influence and French ideas were propagated among the weaker adjoining states.  Holland, Switzerland, and the Italian Republics became outposts of France, occupied by French troops, and upon them were forced governments conformed to the existing French pattern.  In short, the aggrandizement of France, not merely in moral influence but in physical control, was being pushed forward as decisively in peace as in war, and by means which threatened the political equilibrium of Europe.  But, while all states were threatened, Great Britain remained the one chief enemy against which ultimately the efforts of France must be, and were, concentrated.  “Either our government must destroy the English monarchy,” wrote Bonaparte at this time, “or must expect itself to be destroyed by the corruption and intrigue of those active islanders.”  The British ministry on its part also realized that the sea-power of their country was the one force from which, because so manifold in its activities, and so readily exerted in many quarters by reason of its mobility, France had most reason to fear the arrest of its revolutionary advance and the renewal of the Continental war.  It was, therefore, the one opponent against which the efforts of the French must necessarily be directed.  For the same reason it was the one centre around whose action, wisely guided, the elements of discontent, already stirring, might gather, upon the occurrence of a favorable moment, and constitute a body of resistance capable of stopping aggressions which threatened the general well-being.