The course of Napoleon's conduct, in and out of Europe, was calculated to fill all independent neighbours with new or aggravated suspicion; and in England, where public opinion possesses the largest means of making itself heard, and consequently the greatest power, the prevalence of such feelings became, from day to day, more marked. The British envoy's reclamation against the oppression of Switzerland, was but one of many drops, which were soon to cause the cup of bitterness to overflow. As in most quarrels, there was something both of right and of wrong on either side. When the English government remonstrated against any of those daring invasions of the rights of independent nations, or crafty enlargements, through diplomatic means, of the power of France, by which this period of peace was distinguished, the Chief Consul could always reply that the cabinet of St. James's, on their part, had not yet fulfilled one article of the treaty of Amiens, by placing Malta in the keeping of some power which had been neutral in the preceding war. The rejoinder was obvious: to wit, that Napoleon was every day taking measures wholly inconsistent with that balance of power which the treaty of Amiens contemplated. It is not to be denied that he, in his audaciously ambitious movements, had contrived to keep within the strict terms of the treaty: and it can as little be disputed that the English cabinet had _equity_ with them, although they violated the letter of the law, in their retention of the inheritance of the worthless and self-betrayed Knights of St. John.
The feelings of the rival nations, however, were soon kindled into rage; and, on either side of the Channel the language of the public prints assumed a complexion of even more bitter violence than had been observable during the war. The English journalists resorted to foul, and often false and even absurd, personal criminations of the Chief Consul: and the Parisian newspapers replied in language equally indefensible on the score of truth and decency, but with this most essential difference, that whereas the press of England was free, that of France, being entirely under the control of Fouché and the police, could not, as all men knew, put forth any such calumnies otherwise than with the consent of the consular government. When Napoleon complained to the English ministers, their answer was obvious: "Our courts of law are open--we are ourselves accustomed to be abused as you are, and in them we, like you, have our only resource." The paragraphs in the _Moniteur_, on the other hand, were, it was impossible to deny, virtually so many manifestoes of the Tuileries.