obligatory, nor HONOURABLE,' to be disclosed; the other, merely commercial, and which as usual, was committed to a formal contract. This double plot, it was, which perplexed the best informed men in Kentucky, at that day as the clandestine, and dishonourable part, was carefully concealed from all but coadjutors; and that which was ostensible, enabled Wilkinson to carry on his political intrigue for many years; and finally to escape the punishment, due to his perfidy-to the no small emolument of himself and others; and to the very great annoyance of better, and honester men."

But neither such assertions as these nor the damaging testimony of Clark's Proofs sufficed to establish the whole truth as to what happened during Wilkinson's first visit to New Orleans. WILLIAM R. SHEPHERD.

1 Quoted from Wilkinson's mouthpiece in "A Plain Tale" (Clark's Proofs, appendix, 5): "It is neither necessary, nor obligatory, nor would it be honourable to detail the means he employed to effect this object [i. e., procuring for "his fellow citizens in the west... the invaluable advantages of a free trade with New Orleans"] it will suffice to say that his country was accommodated and benefited by his enterprise, and that his personal speculations, in their nature politically innocent, were directed to the friendly correspondence, harmonious intercourse, and reciprocal interests of the two countries."

2 Kentucky, I. 313.

THE WORLD ASPECTS OF THE LOUISIANA

PURCHASE

ARGUMENT by title is a very attractive form of fallacy. We therefore freely confess that it is rather a thesis we have to establish than a theme to unfold when we speak of the Louisiana purchase as a decisive epoch of general history and of American history in particular. Moreover, there is a sense in which every moment throughout the comparatively short duration of recorded history is a decisive one in the pursuit of that idea the verge between sound, solemn truth and fanciful fiction is but a razor-edge.

Yet by common consent some men and some events are epochal. Carefully scrutinized, such men and such events are known by very definite qualities. There are times when the great central current has few lagoons, no back-water, and never an eddy. The whole substance of history is thrown into a single channel, affording a notable example of the unity of history and compelling its study by transverse sections rather than by longitudinal fibers. The man of such a period is fairly certain to be preeminently busy, so diligent, so comprehensive, so perspicacious as to be for the duration of his activity and ability an indispensable person, the man of his age. He is literally and etymologically a governor, for he steers the bark of state alike on the convexity of the swift and swollen tide, and in the hollowing current of a falling flood.

Such a decisive epoch was that of the eighteenth-century revolutions, a crisis reached after long, slow preparation, precipitated by social and religious bigotry, dizzy in its consummation, wild and headlong in its flight, precipitous in its crash. Of this important time the results have been so permanent that they are the commonplaces of contemporary history; in what Carlyle called the revolutionary loom the warp and woof were spun from the past, and the fabric is that from which our working clothes are cut. Moreover, within those years appeared the great dominating soul of modern humanity, who displayed first and last every weakness and every sordid meanness of mankind, but in such giant dimensions that even his depravity inspires awe. His virtues were equally portentous because they worked on the grand scale, with materials that had been threshed and winnowed in the theory and experience of five genera

tions of mankind. It was well within this stupendous age and by the act of this representative man that Louisiana was redeemed from Spanish misrule and incorporated with the territories of the United States. Nor was this all. A careful examination of the general political situation just a hundred years ago will exhibit the elemental and almost ultimate fact that the sale of Louisiana was coincident with the turn of the age. It is to this exhibit and to some reflections on its meaning that we address ourselves.

The substance of the treaty of Amiens was that Great Britain ostensibly abandoned all concern with the continent of Europe, and that France, ostensibly too, should strictly mind her own affairs in her colonies and the remoter quarters of the globe. George III. removed from his escutcheon the fleur-de-lis, and from his ceremonial title the style of king of France. The whole negotiation was on both sides purely diplomatic, an exchange of public and hollow courtesies, to gain time for the realities of a struggle for supremacy between the world powers of the period, a struggle begun with modern history, renewed in 1688, and destined to last until the exhaustion of one of the contestants in 1815. Neither party to the treaty had the slightest intention of observing either its spirit or its letter. While the paper was in process of negotiation Bonaparte was consolidating French empire on the continent, and after its signature he did not pause for a single instant to show even a formal respect for his obligations. The reorganization of Holland in preparation for its incorporation into the French system, the annexation of Piedmont and defiance to Russia in the matter of her Italian protégés, the Act of Moderation in Switzerland, and finally the contemptuous rearrangement of Germany were successive steps which reduced England to despair for her continental trade. To her it seemed as if there could be no question about two things: first, that the old order must be restored, in order to safeguard her commercial safety; and second, that her colonial policy must be more aggressive than ever.

A favorite charge of Napoleon's detractors is that he left France without a colonial empire. This was due to no absence of either aspirations or efforts. His earliest. passion, his mature intention, his latest yearnings were for a French colonial empire. This was true, because there was not one item of the great political creed formulated by Richelieu to which he did not consider himself the heir; oriental aspirations, western ventures and explorations, the dominance of France in the tropic seas, around the globe, were articles of that creed. It had been therefore no slight blow to his personal ambition when he failed in Egypt. Turkey was still safe under the

protection of Great Britain, and the highway to India was still in British hands. Almost without a moment's hesitancy, he turned his forces westward and formed the majestic design of a second New France around the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and eventually with a mighty wing toward South America. This adjunct became the chief corner-stone of the policy when, after its initial failure, he had a chance to renew it in 1808 by Sassenay's mission to Argentina.

Simultaneously he had come to terms with Paul of Russia, and with him he negotiated a grandiose treaty providing for a great land expedition against Hindustan. Each power was to furnish 35,000 men and a corps of scholars; the march was to be a colonization of the wilderness, and the wealth of the East Indies was to be the reward. Paul died by violence just as his army was crossing the Volga on the ice in March, 1801, and Alexander, his more or less blood-guilty but philosophic heir, put a stop to further procedure. A curious chapter of England's resistance to the French Revolution is that for which Lord Wellesley furnished the subject-matter in his campaign against Tippoo Sahib, then in alliance with a mighty band of French adventurers, who, though royalists, were willing to stand and fight for French supremacy in India. To this long and gallant struggle the treaty of Amiens was an extinguisher, for it restored the five French cities to Bonaparte. Decaen, the noted and boasting Anglophobe, had demanded a mission to India on the very morrow of Hohenlinden; less than a month after the signatures were affixed. at Amiens he was despatched to occupy the French towns of Pondicherry, now to be restored. But with an expedition of 1,600 men he had the monstrous disproportion of seven generals and a corresponding mass of minor officers. Clearly he was to reorganize the whole French force of India. Wellesley refused to execute the treaty, and Decaen was forced back on the French settlements of Réunion as a base from which to await developments. Hindu troops were drilled, reorganized, and found thoroughly trustworthy; a detachment of them had even been sent to Egypt, where they had some slight share in the retention of British control. It was Bonaparte's rôle to present a dauntless front to his foes, whatever his inner discouragement and hesitancy. Accordingly he despatched the notorious Sebastiani as a so-called commercial agent to examine the situation in the Levant. The result was a report giving an exact account of all the English and Turkish forces beyond the Adriatic, and drawing the highly pertinent conclusion that 6,000 French soldiers could reconquer Egypt. When this stinging insult was published by the First Consul in the Moniteur, the British world. was worried into open defiance.

From this rapid survey there emerge the important facts essential to our discussion. It was surely a turning-point in the history of the civilized world, so far as Asia was concerned; when Bonaparte's oriental designs were permanently thwarted, when Russia was forced into an eastward expansion north of the great central mountain ridge of Asia to become a hyperborean power, when England defiantly claimed for the first time all Hindustan as her own. It wrote "finis" to the chapter of France's glory in India and indeed to the story of her Asiatic aspirations: her far eastern colonies seized under the present republic are comparatively insignificant factories, which she holds on the sufferance of the European concert, and for which she would not defy the world a single moment, as she would defy it to the spilling of her heart's blood should her present African empire be menaced.

Again, the situation was a turning-point of the first importance in Africa. In consequence of the desire of both contracting parties to catch their breath, Egypt was restored to Turkey, and the Cape Colony was to be a free port, a no-man's-land; Malta, which is an African isle, was to be returned to the Knights of St. John. The theory was that not one Christian power, continental or insular, was to hold a coign of vantage as regards the dark continent. Russia, to be sure, was jealous for Malta; England and France, for Egypt and the Cape; they might remain so, but that was all. Of course we are familiar with the late partitions of Africa among the powers, the coast and hinterland arrangements which bid fair to become permanent occupations. Had it not been for the compulsory suspension of Bonaparte's oriental plans, the retention by England both of India and of the Indian highway through the Mediterranean, and the confirmation of this situation by the evolution of affairs across the Atlantic which culminated in the sale of Louisiana to us, the fate of Africa, humanly speaking, would, like that of Asia, have been far different in every single respect.

What was written for Europe in the book of fate was soon revealed. No one could prate more serenely about destiny than General Bonaparte, nor scrutinize more quizzically the sibylline leaves. But like the augurs of old, he could scarcely retain his mirth when he announced the oracle, nor keep his body from shaking with laughter while the feigned fury of passion was distorting the features of his face in frenzied anger. The treaty of Amiens was negotiated subject to guaranties from the other powers, and Addington well knew that Russia was going to fish in the troubled waters of neutrality for the leviathan of her disappearing prosperity. So the English refused to evacuate Malta. The Whitworth scene is one of