Offensive operations against them were now merely a question of adequate force, and the South of France depended greatly upon free access to their ports.

Taking Piedmont from the King of Sardinia, too, relieved any scruples the British might have concerning their use of the island of Sardinia injuring a friendly monarch, a consideration which kept them away from Sicily.
Nelson, instructed by the experience and observation of the recent past, and by a certain prescient sagacity which was at once native and cultivated in him, recognized that the Mediterranean, with its immense indented coast line, its positions of critical importance,--such as the Straits of Gibraltar and the Bosphorus, Egypt and Malta,--and its comparatively short water distances, was the field of operations to which the maritime ambitions of Bonaparte, debarred a wider flight by the sea-power of Great Britain, must inevitably incline.

To this contributed also its remoteness from England, as well as its nearness to France and to the ports subject to her influence in Italy and Spain; while the traditional ambitions of French rulers, for three centuries back, had aspired to control in the Levant, and had regarded Turkey for that reason as a natural ally.

It was, therefore, not merely as magnifying his own office, nor yet as the outcome of natural bias, resulting from long service in its waters, that Nelson saw in the Mediterranean the region at once for defence and offence against Bonaparte; where he might be most fatally checked, and where also he might be induced most surely to steps exhaustive to his strength.

This conviction was, indeed, rather an instance of accurate intuition than of formulated reasoning.