The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Vol. 4 (of 4)

From the soldier's point of view, Napoleon had likewise such an easy triumph as has fallen to the lot of few commanders. His opponents were so conservative that their ideas were antiquated, his own strategy was so new and revolutionary that it dumfounded them. A favorite method of detraction is illustrated by the familiar story of Columbus's egg. What is once done, anybody can do. The strategic reputation of Frederick the Great is in our day first attacked by the so-called comparative method—that is, by comparing it with the achievements and system, not of his contemporaries, but of Napoleon, his successor; and then the strategic reputation of Napoleon is diminished by sneering at that of Frederick, with whose antiquated method the new one came into comparison and contact, to the complete disaster of the former. This vicious circle may be dismissed with contempt. Napoleon's strategic genius was, unlike any other talent he possessed, constructive and original. No doubt he studied Cæsar; no doubt he studied Maillebois; no doubt he studied the work of Turenne and of the great Frederick; no doubt he was a pupil of the giant soldiers who inaugurated and carried on the wars of the Revolution; but while others had pursued the same studies, it remained for him to devise and put into operation a strategy based upon past experience, but subversive of accepted dogmas, new, adapted to its ends, and founded on theories which, though modified in practice by the discoveries of an intervening century, have, when properly understood, never, not even to-day, been shaken in principle. His triumphs as a soldier, therefore, are his own; and it was not until all Europe had learned the lessons which he taught her generals by a series of object demonstrations lasting twenty years, that the teacher began to diminish in success and splendor. The persistent critics of Frederick have been asking and reiterating questions such as these: Why did not the king begin early in July, 1756? Why did he not storm the camp of Pirna? Why did he not continue the war in October? Why did he not renew hostilities the following year until forced to it? And so on, and so on. By this method they have shrunk the horizon to their own dimensions, and have imprisoned their victim within the pale of his faults; but a wider view and the historic background display his strategy in large outline, as illuminated by the light of his age; and thus the defeats of Kolin and Kunersdorf, as well as the victories of Leuthen, Rossbach, Zorndorf, and Torgau, exhibit the Prussian general as the great genius which he was. It was not until Napoleon had taught his rivals what fighting ought to be that men could also pick and nag at him by asking why Waterloo did not begin four hours earlier, why more explicit directions were not given to Grouchy, why in 1814 the desperate man chose to cut off the line of his enemies' communications rather than withdraw into Paris and call the nation to arms; and so on to infinity. Judged either historically or theoretically, the strategy of Napoleon is original, unique, and unexcelled. It is his greatest achievement, because his most creative.

CHAPTER XXI

Napoleon and the United States

A Decisive Epoch — Britain Dominates the Sea — Napoleon's Policy — Trade and Western Empire — To the West Indies — Needs of the Empire — Great Britain's Sea Rival — The Imperial Policy Revealed — Tempestuous Times in the United States — Party Government — Livingston's Efforts — Louisiana Purchased — Effect on American Life — Change in Constitutional Attitude — The Kaleidoscope of Party Politics — Preponderance of the South and West — The Louisiana Purchase and the Nation.

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. 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 generations 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 at that time will exhibit the elemental and almost ultimate fact that the sale of Louisiana was coincident with the turn of the age.

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. Events narrated in another connection proved the whole negotiation to have been on both sides purely diplomatic, an exchange of public and hollow courtesies in order to gain time for the realities in the 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 the 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 commerce; and second, that her colonial policy must be more aggressive than ever.

It was Samuel Adams who first sneered at his fatherland as a people of shopkeepers. The winged word soon became a commonplace to all outsiders, but as it flew every nation that used the gibe girded itself to enter the struggle for the same goal. France above all was determined to be a nation of shopkeepers, and the First Consul of what was still a shaky experiment in government knew well that rather than abandon that ambition, he must sacrifice every other. After all, a colonial empire has value only as the home nation has accessible ports, manufactories for colonial products, and wares to exchange with the producers. France had neither factories nor manufactures, and was destitute of nearly the whole machinery of exchange. Her merchant vessels sailed only by grace of the British fleet. Her home market was dependent on British traders even in times of war. Bonaparte's foremost thought, therefore, was for concentration of energy. The sea-power of the world was Britain's, and her tyranny of the seas without a real check; even the United States could only spit out defiant and revengeful threats when her merchantmen were treated with contempt on the high seas by British men-of-war. Therefore with swift and comprehensive grasp he framed and announced a new policy. The French envoy in London was informed that France was now forced to the conquest of Europe—this of course for the stimulating of French industries—and to the restoration of her Occidental empire. This was most adroit. The embers of French patriotism could be fanned into a white heat by these well-worn but never exhausted expedients—a blast against perfidious Albion and a sentimental passion for the New France beyond the Atlantic. The motions were a feint against England by the formation of a second camp at Boulogne, where a force really destined for Austria was assembled, and the wresting of Louisiana from the weak Spanish hands which held it. As an incident of the agitation it seemed best that the French democracy should have an imperial rather than a republican title, and the style of emperor and empire was exhumed from the garbage heap of the Terror for use in the pageantry of a court.

In Europe thus, as in the neighboring continents, the rearrangement of politics, territorial boundaries, social, economic, and diplomatic relations, a change which has made possible the modern system, was really dependent on the events which led to the adoption of the policy just described. But this policy involved a reversal of every sound historical principle in Bonaparte's plans. For twelve years longer he was to commit blunder upon blunder; to trample on national pride; to elevate a false system of political economy into a fetish; to conduct, as in the Moscow campaign, great migrations to the eastward in defiance of nature's laws; to launch his plain, not to say vulgar and weak, family on an enterprise of monarchical alliances for which they had no capacity; to undo, in short, as far as in him lay, every beneficent and well-conceived piece of statesmanship with which he had so far been concerned. It has been well said that had he died in midsummer, 1802, his glory would have been immaculate and there would have been no spots on his sun. The Napoleonic work in Europe was destined to have its far-reaching and permanent results, but the man was ere long almost entirely eliminated from control over them. The very last of his great constructions was the sale of Louisiana. He needed the purchase-money, he selected his purchaser and forced it on him, with a view to upbuilding a giant rival to the gigantic power of Great Britain.

When we turn therefore to America, we shall at once observe on how slender a thread a great event may depend, how great a fire may be kindled by a spark adroitly placed. While yet other matters were hanging in the balance, he selected his own brother-in-law, General Leclerc, such was his deep concern, to conduct an expedition to the West Indies. There were embarked 35,000 men, and these the very flower of the republican armies, superb fighters, but a possible thorn in the side of a budding emperor at home. Their goal was San Domingo, where a wonderful negro, Toussaint Louverture, noting the attractive example of the benevolent despots in Europe, had, under republican forms, not only abolished slavery, but had made himself a beneficent dictator. The fine but delicate structure of his negro state was easily crushed to the earth, but the fighting was fierce and prolonged, the climate and the pest were enabled to inaugurate and complete a work of slaughter more baleful than that of war, and two-thirds of the French invaders, including the commander and fifteen of his generals, fell victims to the yellow fever. The French were utterly routed, the sorry remnant sailed away, and the blacks fell into the hands of the worthless tyrant Dessalines, whose misrule killed the germs of order planted by Toussaint. One of our historians thinks this check of France by black soldiers to have been a determinative factor in American history, for thereafter there could be no question of a Gulf and Caribbean empire for France. Louisiana, he indicates, became at once a superfluous dependency, costly and annoying. This is a far-fetched contention: great as have been the services of the negro to the United States since he first fought on the battle-field of Monmouth under Washington, the failure of France in San Domingo was not through the sword of the blacks, but was an act of God through pestilence.

The circumstances that forced Louisiana upon the United States, then a petty power with revenues and expenditures less than those of many among the single states which now compose the federation, arose from Napoleon's European necessities. The cession from Spain included all that Spain had received from France, the whole Gulf coast from St. Mary's to the Rio Grande, and the French pretensions not only northwestward to the Rockies but even to the Pacific. The return made to Spain was the insignificant kingdom of Etruria and a solemn pledge that, should the First Consul fail in his promise, Louisiana in its fullest extent was to be restored to Spain. France therefore might not otherwise alienate it to any power whatever. The exacting and suspicious spirit shown both by Charles IV and his contemptible minister Godoy, Prince of the Peace, had exasperated Bonaparte beyond endurance. The Spanish Bourbons were doomed by him to the fate of their kinsfolk in France; a pledge to a vanishing phantom of royalty was of small account. It was during the delay created by the punctilio of Godoy that the failure of the San Domingo expedition extinguished all hope of making Louisiana the sole entrepôt and staple of supplies for the West Indies. And simultaneously it grew evident that the truce negotiated at Amiens as a treaty could not last much longer, that either France must endure the humiliation of seeing her profits therefrom utterly withheld, or herself declare war, or goad Great Britain into a renewal of hostilities. This last, as is well known, was the alternative chosen by Napoleon.

Our government had been in despair. The establishment of French empire in the West Indies would have destroyed our lucrative trade with the islands. It was trying enough that a feeble power like Spain should command the outlet of the Mississippi basin, but intolerable that such a mastery of the continent should fall into the hands of a strong and magisterial power like France. We were in dismay, even after the departure of the French from San Domingo. Bonaparte, however, was scarcely less disturbed; for Jefferson, despite his avowed Gallicism, spiritedly declared both to the First Consul and to Livingston, our minister to Paris, that the occupation of Louisiana by the great French force organized to that end could only result in an alliance of the two English-speaking nations which would utterly banish the French flag from the high seas. Bonaparte preserved an outward calm for those about him and went his way apparently unperturbed. But inwardly his mind seethed, and without long delay he took his choice between the courses open to him. It was the first exhibition to himself and his family of the imperial despot soon to be known as Napoleon I, Emperor of the French. If Britain was the tyrant of the seas, he would be despot of the land. To French empire he would reduce Germany, Italy, and Spain in subjection, and with all the maritime resources of the Continent at his back he would first shut every important port to English commerce, and then with allied and dependent fleets at his disposal try conclusions with the British Behemoth for liberty of the seas and a new colonial empire. By the second camp at Boulogne and the occupation of Hanover, Napoleon threw England into panic, while simultaneously he began the creation of his grand imperial army and thereby menaced Austria, the greatest German power, in her coalition with Russia, Sweden, Naples, and Great Britain. The latter, he was well aware, could face a hostile demonstration on her front with courage, if not with equanimity; and he determined to add a double stroke—to gain a harvest of gold and on her rear to strengthen her exasperated transatlantic sea rival by selling Louisiana to the United States.

That determination was the turning-point in his career, just as the sudden wheel and about-face of the splendid force at Boulogne, when he hurled it across Europe at Vienna, displayed at last the turning-point in his policy. His brother Lucien had been an influential negotiator with Spain and plumed himself on the acquisition of the great domain which had been for long the brightest jewel in the crown of France. His brother Joseph had negotiated the treaty of Amiens as a step preparatory to regaining a magnificent colonial empire for his country, an empire of which an old and splendid French possession was to be the corner-stone. Both were stunned and then infuriated when they learned their brother's resolution, sensations which were intensified to fury when they heard him announce that he would work his will in spite of all constitutional checks and balances. There is no historic scene more grotesque than that depicted by Lucien in his memoirs when he and Joseph undertook to oppose Napoleon. The latter was luxuriating in his morning bath on April seventh, 1803, in the Tuileries when the brothers were admitted. After a long and intimate talk on general politics the fateful subject was finally broached by Napoleon, as he turned from side to side and wallowed in the perfumed water. Neither of the brothers could control his feelings, and the controversy grew hot and furious from minute to minute until Joseph, leaning over the tub, roared threats of opposition and words of denunciation. Brother Napoleon, lifting himself half-way to the top, suddenly fell back and clenched his arguments by splashing a full flood in the face and over the body of Joseph, drenching him to the skin. A valet was summoned, entered, and, paralyzed by the fury of the scene, fell in a dead faint. New aid was called and, the fires of passion being quenched for the time, the conflict ended until Napoleon and Joseph were decently clothed, when it was renewed in the office of the secretary Bourrienne. Ere long hot words were again spoken, violent language was succeeded by violent gestures, until at last Napoleon in a theatrical rage dashed his snuff-box on the floor, and the contestants separated. Disjointed and fierce as was the stormy argument, it revealed the whole of the imperial policy.

Meanwhile events in America, if not so picturesque and majestic, were equally tempestuous. The peace policy of Jefferson was rapidly going to pieces in the face of a westward menace, the Federalists were jubilant, and in the Senate James Ross, of Pennsylvania, called for war. When the intendant of Spain at New Orleans denied Americans the storage rights they had enjoyed in that city since 1795, the French politics of the President fell into general disrepute and contempt, for men reasoned a fortiori, if such things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry? It mattered not that Spain's highest official, the governor, disavowed the act, the fire was in the stubble. The intendant was stubborn and the fighting temper waxed hot. Both the governor and the Spanish envoy at Washington disavowed the act again and rebuked the subordinate. Congress was soothed, but not so the people of the West and South. They were fully aware, as have been all our frontiersmen and pioneers from the beginning, that the Mississippi and all the lands it waters are the organic structure of unity and successful settlement on this continent. The Pacific and Atlantic coast strips, even the great but bleak valley of the St. Lawrence, are mere incidents of territorial unity and political control when compared with the great alluvion of the Mississippi. This was unknown, utterly unknown, and worse yet, entirely indifferent to our statesmen. Madison certainly, and possibly Jefferson, believed that western immigration would pause and end on the east bank of the Father of Waters.

Yet party government was a necessity under the American system, and Jefferson's ladder, the Republican party, would be knocked into its component parts should the West and South, noisy, exacting, and turbulent, desert and go over to the expiring faction of the Federalists; nay, worse, it might be forced into almost complete negation of its own existence by a forced adoption of the Federalist policy, alliance with Great Britain—monarchic and aristocratic—rather than with radical and democratic France. What could a distracted partizan do? Jefferson was adroit and inventive. He sent James Monroe to negotiate with Bonaparte for the purchase of New Orleans and both Floridas at the price of two millions, or upward to ten, for all or part, whatever he could get; he was not even to disdain the deposit or storage right, if nothing else could be had, and if he could get nothing, he was to await instructions. With such credentials he sailed on March eighth, 1803. A peace-lover must sometimes speak low and small, even as cowards sometimes do. Three weeks later appeared in New Orleans Laussat, the advance agent of French occupation; Victor and his troops were to follow. It is not possible to conceive that a foreign policy could be more perplexing, confused, or uncertain than that of the philosophic theorist who is the hero of the strict-constructionist party in these United States.

Robert R. Livingston, the regular American envoy at Paris, had, under his instructions from home, worked with skill and zeal on the spoliation claims and incidentally on the question of the Mississippi and the Floridas. While the colonization schemes of Bonaparte seemed feasible, Livingston made no headway whatever, except to extort an admission that the spoliation claims were just. Neither Talleyrand nor Livingston was much concerned about the great Northwest. The American was clear that the importance of any control lay in the possession of New Orleans, and on April eleventh, 1803, he said so to the French minister, vigorously and squarely declaring further that a persistent refusal of our request would unite us with Great Britain to the serious discomfiture of France in her colonial aspirations. This was said with some asperity, for Livingston had been aware that the First Consul wanted all negotiation transferred to Washington under the guidance of a special envoy, the wilful Bernadotte, sent for the purpose; and now, worse yet, he himself was to be superseded by Monroe. He had been a diligent and even importunate negotiator; it was a ray of comfort in later days to recall that the first suggestion for the sale of all Louisiana was made to him in that momentous interview.

What had occurred Livingston could not know. It was this. On the morning of that very day there reached the Tuileries despatches giving in full detail an account of the tremendous preparations making in England for the renewal of war both by land and sea. Bonaparte's impatience knew no bounds. Hitherto he had concealed his true policy of sale behind a scheme to spend the purchase-money on internal improvements in France, and he had on his work-table map-outlines for five great canals. Now, at daybreak, he summoned Barbé-Marbois, sometime French consul-general in the United States, an official of state with a thorough knowledge of our affairs, and ordered that a negotiation for the sale, not of the Floridas and New Orleans, but of all Louisiana, should immediately be opened with Livingston. He fixed the price at fifty million francs. The envoy could of course do nothing, but he thought thirty millions enough. Next day Monroe arrived at Havre, and reaching Paris on the thirteenth, that very same day Barbé-Marbois and our two great statesmen began to treat. Upon Monroe and Livingston devolved a momentous responsibility. To Monroe by a most indefinite implication was left a certain liberty, for under no circumstances whatsoever was he to end a negotiation if once it was begun. And here, instead of minimizing terms, was, so to speak, a great universe of land tender. But we had not so easily thrown off the bright and glistening garment of righteousness as had Napoleon Bonaparte, and in the minds of both Americans was the question, non-existent for the First Consul, as he himself squarely said, of whether the inhabitants of the district, men and women, human souls, could be dealt in as chattels are.

Livingston had already seen darkly as in a glass what possession of the west might do for the United States. Bonaparte's contributions to the discussion were terse and trenchant. If he did not transfer the title right speedily, a British fleet would take possession almost in a twinkling; the transfer, he said, might in three centuries make America the rival of Europe; why not? it was a long way ahead; but, on the other hand, there never had been an enduring confederation, and this one in America was unlikely to begin the series; finally, he wanted the cash, as the United States wanted the land. Let there be no delay. And there was none. The terms of the sale and the facts of the transfer do not concern us here. In Bonaparte the United States had no friend; but what the ancient régime began in helping to establish American independence, the First Consul completed; for, thanks to him, the war of 1812 was fought for commercial liberty, while the exploitation of Louisiana has made the nation what it is to-day. The great territory, with all its responsibilities and possibilities, made the United States a world power; a puny enough power at first, but it has grown. Jefferson and his agents were primarily statesmen for the purpose of existing conditions, and in Monroe's mission desired a remedy solely and entirely for party evils. They had, however, the courage to accept the fortune forced upon them, even though in their case, as in that of Bonaparte, it entailed, we repeat, a complete reversal of all the political and party principles of the platform on which they had hitherto stood.

The change wrought by the Louisiana purchase in American life and culture was simply revolutionary. Hitherto in our weakness we had faced backward, varying between two ideas of European alliance. We virtually had British and French parties. Jefferson, who represented the latter, thought of no other alternative in his trouble than to strike hands with England. With Louisiana on our hands, we turned our faces to our own front door. The Louisiana we bought had no Pacific outlet in reality, but the Lewis and Clark expedition gave it one, and that we have broadened by war and by purchase until we control the western shore of the continent. Under such engrossing cares we ceased to think of either French or British ties, except as exasperating, and became not merely Americans, but, realizing Washington's aspirations, turned into real continentals, with a scorn of all entanglements whatever. In the occupation and settlement of Louisiana the slavery question became acute, and the struggle to expand that system over Louisiana soil precipitated the Civil War.

But if the change in national outlook was radical, that in constitutional attitude was even more so. The constitutions of our original states were the expression of political habits in a community, the Federal Constitution was in the main a transcript of those elements which were common in some degree to all the British colonies. It was an age of written constitutions, because the flux of institutions was so rapid that men needed a mooring for the substantial gains they had made. The past was so recent that statesmen were timid, and they wanted their metes and bounds to be fixed by a monument. Nothing was more natural than to pause and fall back on the record thus made permanent, and strict construction was and long continued to be a political fetish. The Louisiana purchase was a circumstance of the first importance in party struggle. Yet neither Federalist nor Republican dared, after mature deliberation, to urge the question of constitutional amendment as essential to meet the crisis thus precipitated. The enormous price entailed what was felt to be an intolerable burden of taxation, and in the uproar of spoken and printed debate played no small part. But the vital question was whether the adjustment of new relations was constitutional.

Never did the kaleidoscope of politics display a more surprising reversal of effect. The loose-construction party lost its wits entirely, while the strict constructionists suddenly became the apostles not of verbal but of logical construction. Jefferson violated his principles in signing the treaty, but he was easily persuaded that amendment was not necessary, that on the contrary the treaty-making power covered the case completely. This was not conquest, which would have been covered by the war power, but purchase, which is covered by the treaty power, surrendered, like the other, by the states to the federal government. The Federalists were represented in the House by Gaylord Griswold; in the Senate by Ross and Pickering. Their resistance was identical in both factious to the highest degree. They contended that the executive had usurped the powers of Congress by regulating commerce with foreign powers and by incorporating foreign soil and foreign people with the United States, this last being a power which it was doubtful whether Congress possessed. Supposing, however, that New Orleans became American, how could a treaty be valid which gave preferential treatment to that single port in admitting French and Spanish ships on equal terms with those owned by Americans? The treaty, they asseverated, was therefore unconstitutional and, even worse, impolitic, because we were unfitted and did not desire to incorporate into our delicately balanced system peoples different in speech, faith, and customs from ourselves. They were, however, only mildly opposed to expansion; they were determined and captious in the interpretation of the Constitution. The party in power were avowedly expansionist; their retort was equally dialectic and vapid. The whole discussion would have been empty except for Pickering's contention that there existed no power to incorporate foreign territory into the United States, as was stipulated by the treaty. The House had resolved, ninety to twenty-five, to provide the money and had appointed a committee on provisional government; the Senate ratified the treaty, twenty-six to five.

What made the debates and action of Congress epochal was the Federalist contention that Thomas Jefferson as provisional and interim governor was nothing more or less than an American despot in succession to a Spanish tyrant. Where was the Constitution now; where would it be when in appointing the necessary officials—executive, judicial, and legislative—he would usurp not merely Spanish despotism but the powers of both the other branches of the federal government? The Republicans quibbled, too; to appoint these three classes of officials was not to exercise their powers. But they confirmed in unanswerable logic a distinction thus far only mooted in our political history—that between states and territories. Already presidential appointees were exercising all three powers in Mississippi and Indiana. This clenched the contentions of the Republicans, and the bill for provisional government passed by an overwhelming vote on October thirty-first. Both parties throughout the struggle had tacitly abandoned the position that Congress possessed merely delegated powers and nothing further except the ability to carry them into effect. Both therefore admitted the possible interpretation of the Constitution under stress of necessity, and the Federalists in their quibbling contentions lost hold everywhere except in New England. That section saw its influence eclipsed by the preponderance of Southern and Western power and ere long was ripe for secession.

Volumes have been written and more will be on the romance of the Louisiana purchase; Josiah Quincy threatened the dismemberment of the Union when the present state of Louisiana was admitted in 1812; but for Jefferson's wisdom in exploration it might have remained a wilderness long after settlement began; Great Britain coveted it in 1815 when Jackson saved it; Aaron Burr probably coveted an empire within it; Napoleon III had dreams of its return to the new France he was to found in Mexico. Excluding the Floridas, which Spain would not concede as a part of it, and the Oregon country, the territory thus acquired was greater than that of Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy combined. Its agricultural and mineral resources were, humanly speaking, inexhaustible. No wonder it excited the cupidity as it stirred the imagination of mankind; no wonder if men avid to retain their power were dismayed at the preponderance it was sure to exert eventually in a federal union of states. At the present moment fourteen of our commonwealths, with a population of about sixteen millions and a taxable wealth of seven billions, occupy its soil. By the time we are fifty years older, at the present rate of settlement, these will contain about a third of the power in the Union as determined by numbers and prosperity. All of them, however, were from the first administrative districts, never states, and by the retroactive influence of this fact state sovereignty has thus been made an empty phrase.

And this leads us to remember that, if the Louisiana purchase revolutionized our national outlook, our constitutional attitude, and our sectional control, it quite as radically changed our national texture. From that hour to this we have called to the masses of Europe for help to develop the wilderness, and they have come by millions, until now the men and women of Revolutionary stock probably number less than fifteen millions in the entire country. These later Americans have, like the migrations of the Norsemen in central and southern Europe, proved so conservative in their Americanism that they outrun their predecessors in loyalty to its essentials. They made the Union as it now is, in a very high sense, and there is no question that in the throes of civil war it was their blood which flowed at least as freely as ours in its defense. It is they who have kept us from developing on colonial lines and have made us a nation separate and apart. This it is which has prevented the powerful influence of Great Britain from inundating us, while simultaneously two English-speaking peoples have reacted one upon the other in their radical differences to keep aflame the zeal for exploration, beneficent occupation, and general exploitation of the globe in the interests of a high civilization. The localities of the Union have been stimulated into such activities that manufactures and agriculture have run a mighty race; commerce alone lags, and no wonder, for Louisiana gave us a land world of our own, a home market more valuable than both the Indies or the continental mass of the Far East.

CHAPTER XXII

Napoleon's Place in History

Exhaustion — The Change in Napoleon's Views — Intermitting Powers — Their Extinction — Common Sense and Idealism — The Man and the World — The Philosophy of Expediency — A Mediating Work — French Institutions — Transformation of France — Napoleon and English Policy — His Work in Germany — French Influence in Italy and Eastern Europe — Napoleon and the Western World.

Summary

If Napoleon's qualities as usurper, statesman, and warrior be as remarkable as they appear, why was his time so short, what were the causes of his decline, and what is his place in history? The causes of his decline may be summed up in a single word—exhaustion. There exists no record of human activity more complete than is that of Napoleon Bonaparte's life. In its beginnings we can see this worshiper of power stimulating his immature abilities in vain until, with reckless desperation, he closed the period of training and made his scandalous bargain with Barras; then, grown suddenly, inexplicably rich, becoming with better clothing, food, and lodging physically more vigorous, he seems mercilessly to drive the rowels into his own flanks until initiative, ingenuity, and ruthlessness are displayed with apparently superhuman dimensions. The period of achievement is short, but glorious in politics; the age of domination is long and exciting. Throughout both there is the same wanton physical excess and intellectual dissipation. Then comes the turn. Every human age has in it the germs of the next; we begin to die at birth, and the characteristic qualities and powers of one period diminish as those of the next increase. So it was with Napoleon. He compressed so much, both as regards the number and importance of events, into so short a space that his times are like those wrinkled Japanese pictures which are made by shriveling a large print into a small compass—intense and deep, but unreal. To change the metaphor, he found the ship of state dashing onward, with her helm lashed and no one daring to take the task of the steersman in hand. He cut the lashings and laid hold. His unassisted efforts as a pilot gave the vessel a new course; but he had no steam or other mechanical power, no deus ex machinâ, to aid him; and, as the storm increased, exhaustion followed; he seemed to be steering when, in reality, his actions were under the compulsion of events he was not controlling; and this continued until the wreck.

But the inertia of his powers resembled their rise so perfectly as to represent continuous growth, and thus to deceive observers: in a few years he had ordered the Revolutionary chaos of western Europe to his liking, and the resultant organization worked by the principles he had infused into it. As he saw his imperfect and shallow theories of society successively confounded, he had no vigor left to reconstruct them and adapt himself to new situations. His efforts at the rôle of liberator throughout the Hundred Days deserve careful study. He simply could not yield or adapt himself, except in non-essentials. The shifts to which he had resort would have been ridiculous had they not been pathetic. The governmental forms attempted by the Revolution had been successively destroyed by the furious energy of Jacobinism: the Directory was but a compromise, and when it took refuge for safety in the army its performances seemed to the masses sure to bring back the Terror; the Consulate was only a disguised monarchy founded on military force; and as royalism was impossible, there seemed to vast numbers no other alternative than the Empire. That there was no other alternative was due to Napoleon's imperious character, now developed to its utmost extent. He was selfish, hardened, and, though active like his symbolic bee, without capacity for further development. His mother knew that he could not hold out; she said it, and saved money for a rainy day. He himself had haunting premonitions of this truth. His passion to perpetuate himself by founding a dynasty was the real basis for his warlike ardor. Profoundly moved, in fact awe-stricken, by the imperishable hatred of the older dynasties, and yet reveling in his military genius, he waged war ruthlessly and with zest, enjoying the discomfiture of his foes, and delighting in the exercise of his powers. But, after all, war was but a means. He frequently dwelt on the advantages of hereditary succession; he lingered with suspicious frequency over the satisfaction a dynastic ruler must feel in the devotion or, if not that, in the submissiveness of his people; he was hypersensitive to the slightest popular disturbance; and he must have foreboded his own fall, since he was accustomed to wear poison in an amulet around his neck, so that when the great crisis should arrive he might take his own life. "Ah! why am I not my grandson?" he longingly ejaculated.

This single cause of Napoleon's fall can be better seen in the record of his second captivity than in any other portion of his life. There is no such thing as absolute exhaustion short of death. But intermittent and flickering exertion is symptomatic of failing powers in a jaded horse; it forebodes the end in a worn-out man. Cheerful and busy at first, because recruited by a long and favorable sea-voyage, he set out in St. Helena at a racing gait to write history and mold the public opinion of Europe. Playful and energetic, he caught together the scanty remnants of his momentary grandeur, and emulated the masters of ceremony at the Tuileries in organizing a court and issuing edicts for the conduct of its little affairs. His life was to be that of a caged lion—caged, but yet a lion. The plan would not work. In the affairs of Longwood there were, as everywhere, hitches and irregularities. To Napoleon these soon became not the incidents, but the substance of life. With the departure of his secretaries the business of biographical composition became first irksome, then impossible, and the poor muse of history was finally turned out of doors. To regular exercise succeeded spasmodic over-exertion; complaint became the subject-matter for the exercise of both mind and tongue; daily association with kindly but second-rate persons checked the flow of great ideas; the combinations of Austerlitz and Wagram gave place to the small moves in a game of spite with a bureaucratic British governor. From the days of his boyhood until his alliance with Barras the exile had been a dreamy, vague, indefinite, unsuccessful fellow; his powers were not quickly developed. While he had France and Europe to work upon, he showed the extraordinary qualities repeatedly outlined, mind and hand, thought and deed, working together. Already jaded, his stupendous capacity became intermittent after the fatal armistice of Poischwitz; but it worked, for it still had the raw material of grand strategy and great politics to work on. This continued until after Waterloo. That battle, not a great one in itself, was nevertheless epic, both in its effects upon the world and in its ruin of the brains which had swayed the destinies of Europe for twenty years. Between the flight to Charleroi and the escape to the Bellerophon, Napoleon shows no pluck and no brains.

In actual captivity his mind was without a sufficient task and under no pressure from necessity. It consequently, though somewhat invigorated at first, intermitted more and more toward the close, working, when it did work, awkwardly and with friction, until the physical collapse came, and the end was reached. The attempts to remodel history, the efforts to delineate his own and others' motives, the specious summaries of his career and its epochs, the fragmentary expositions of his philosophy in ethics, politics, and psychology—all the stately volumes which bear his name, his literary remains, in fact, present a pitiful sight when closely examined. They are but the scoriæ of a burnt-out mind, but dust and ashes; a splendid mass, but an extinct volcano. It was only natural that his successors and admirers should seek to erect a more enduring foundation for his fame by collecting and carefully editing what he had written when at his best, when acting according to his momentary, normal impulse, and when, therefore, he had the least pose and the greatest sincerity. But it is a proof of their shrewdness that they selected and published less and less after Erfurt, and that out of the voluminous pen-product of St. Helena they chose a hundred and fifty pages which the "Correspondence," intended to be the most splendid monument to the Emperor's glory, could present as authentic biographical material.

If, then, Napoleon was after all but a plain man, how did he become a personage? Simply because he was the typical man of his day, less the personal mediocrity; the typical burgher in personal character, the typical soldier in war, the typical despot in peace, and the typical idealist in politics; capable in all these qualities of analysis; capable, consequently, of being understood; capable of exhaustion and of being overwhelmed by combinations. In other words, he was really great because he was the shrewd common-sense personage of his age, considering the ideal social structure as a level of comfort in money, in shelter, in food, in clothes, in religion, in morality, in decency, in domestic good-nature, in the commonplace good things fairly divided as far as they would go round. This was the side of his nature which in a period of social exhaustion planted him four-square as a social force, presented him to France as the rock against which the "red fool-fury" of Jacobinism had dashed itself to pieces, and gave him for a time command of all hearts. Thus established, he at once fell heir to French tradition—that is, to the continuous policy of the nation in foreign and domestic affairs; which was that France should be the Jupiter in the Olympus of European nations by reason of her excellence both in beauty and in strength. Here was a temptation not to be resisted, the superlative temptation like that of the serpent and the woman, the chance to transcend by knowledge, the opportunity to "hitch his wagon to a star," to commingle the glory of France with his own until the elements were no longer separable. Into this snare, great as he was in his representative plainness, he fell, and in the ensuing confusion he not only destroyed himself, but brought the proud and splendid nation which had cherished him to the very verge of destruction. He could not sway one emancipated people without swaying an emancipated Europe, and this after Austerlitz he determined to do. Then he lost his head: his wisdom turned out to be nothing but adoration of mere expediency; his strength proved weakness when, with his imperial idealism, he braved in Spain the idealism of a true nation; his vaunted physical endurance disappeared with self-indulgence, the golden head and brazen loins fell in a crash as the feet of clay disintegrated before the storm of national uprisings.

This being true, we have in his career every element of epic greatness: a colossal man, a chaotic age, the triumph of principle, the reëstablishment of historical equilibrium by means of a giant cast away when no longer needed. And this epic quality, which is not in the man alone nor in the age alone, appears when the two are combined, and then only. Looking at him in our cold light, he has every attribute of the commonplace adventurer; looking at the France of 1786 with our perspective, the people and the times appear almost mad in their frantic efforts to accomplish the work of ages in the moments of a single lifetime. Yet combine the two, and behold the man of the third estate rising, advancing, reflecting, and then planting himself in the foreground as the most dramatic figure of public life, and you have a scene, a stage, and actors which cannot be surpassed in the range of history. To the end of the Consulate the action is powerful, because it represents reality: a nation unified, a people restored to wholesome influences, peace inaugurated, constitutional government established. There is so far no tawdry decoration, no fine clothes, no posing, no ranting. But with the next scene, that of the Empire, the spectator becomes aware of all these annoyances, and more. The leading actor grows self-conscious, identifies himself with the public interest for personal ends and to the detriment of the nation, displays no moral or artistic self-restraint, and soon arranges every element so as to make his studied personal ambitions appear like the resultants of ominous forces which act from without, and against which he is donning the armor of despotism for the public good. The play becomes a human tragicomedy, and, verging to its close, ends, like the tragedies of the Greeks, with a people betrayed and the force of the age chained to a torrid rock as the sport of the elements.

Was this the end, and did Napoleon have no place in history, as many historians have lately been contending? Far from it. From his couch of porphyry beneath the gilded dome on the banks of the Seine, the Emperor, though "dead and turned to clay," still exercises a powerful sway. The actual Napoleonic Empire had, as we have before remarked, a striking resemblance to those of Alexander and Charlemagne. Based, as were these, upon conquest, and continued for a little life by the idealism of a single person, it seemed like a brilliant bubble on the stream of time. But Alexander hellenized the civilization of his day, and prepared the world for Christianity; Charlemagne plowed, harrowed, and sowed the soil of barbaric Europe, making it receptive for the most superb of all secular ideals, that of nationality; Napoleon tore up the system of absolutism by the roots, propagated in the most distant lands of Europe the modern conception of individual rights, overthrew the rotten structure of the German-Roman empire, and in spite of himself regenerated the long-abused ideas of nationality and fatherland. It must be confessed that his own shallow political science, the second-hand Rousseauism he had learned from his desultory reading, had little to do with this, except negatively. One by one he saw his faiths made ridiculous by the violent phases of Jacobinism after it took control of the Revolutionary movement. His heart, his conscience, his intellect, all undisciplined, then revolted against the metaphysic which had misled him, and "ideologist" became his most contemptuous epithet. Controlled by instinct and ambition, he nevertheless remained throughout his period the one thorough idealist among the men of action, Goethe being the superlative, transcendent genius of idealism among the thinkers. Each successive day saw his scorn of physical limitations increase, his impatience of language, customs, laws, of local attachment, personal fidelity, and national patriotism grow. The result was a fixed conviction that for humanity at large all these were naught. At last he planted himself upon the burgher philosophy of utility and expediency, putting his faith in the loyalty of his family, in homely dependence upon matrimonial alliance, in the passion of humanity for physical ease and earthly well-being. This was the concert by which he sought to create a federation of beneficent kingdoms that would win all men to the prime mover. Space and time rebelled; the lofty ideals of humanity and philosophy would not down; selfishness proved impotent as a support; the dreamer recognized that again he had been deceived. Haggard and exhausted, he finally turned, in the rôle of Napoleon Liberator, to the notion of nationality and of government swayed by popular will in all its phases. But it was too late. Instead of being the leader of a van, he had forgotten, in his own phrase, to keep pace with the march of ideas, and was a straggler in the rear, without a moral status or a devoted following.

All this is true; but it is equally true that much of his work endured both in France and in the civilized world. In France, indeed, the work he did has been in some details only too enduring. History is there to tell us that the test of high civilization is not necessarily in great dimensions. Those histories of the ancient world in which humanity seems strange and distasteful, of Egypt, Phenicia, Babylon, and Assyria, were wide in extent and long in duration: those of Greece and Rome, whose poets, statesmen, legislators, and warriors are our despair, were small in proportion and comparatively short in duration, while they were normal and healthy; the world-empires of both were neither natural nor admirable. It will not do, therefore, to judge Napoleon by the length of his career, nor by the standards of other times and different circumstances. The centralization of administration in the commonwealth which he rescued from the clutches of anarchy was probably essential to the rescue; the expediency which he deliberately cultivated in the Concordat, in the laws of the family and inheritance, and in the fatal Continental System, was possibly a statesman's palliative for momentary political disease. His artificial aristocracy, his system of great fiefs, his financial shifts—who dares to say that these institutions did not meet a temporary want? Moreover, it is worth considering whether a direct reaction to moderate, sane republicanism from extreme and furious Jacobinism was possible at all, and whether a reaction from Napoleon's imperial democracy was not easier and the results more permanent. In other words, is it likely that the third French republic could have been the direct successor of the first? The question is certainly debatable. No pen can so delineate the sufferings of France under Napoleonic institutions as that of Taine has so ably and scathingly done; his wonderful etching powerfully exhibits painful truths. But who is to blame if a nation is hampered by its administration, by a centralization it no longer needs, by social regulations which it has outgrown, by political habits which do not suit the age? Not alone the man who inaugurated them, for ends partly selfish but also partly statesmanlike; the people who timidly endure are responsible for the doom which will certainly overtake any nation living in a social and political structure antiquated and unsuitable.

One thing at least the new France has done with magisterial style: she has introduced into her political machinery respect for political habit. The French government of to-day is distinctly an outgrowth of conditions, and not of theories. Its constitution has none of the fatal marks of completeness which her other republican constitutions have borne; on the contrary, there never was a period in modern times when to the outsider French institutions seemed as crescive as they do to-day. And they have abundant material on which to work. There are signs that the system of nations as armed camps, for which Napoleon set the example, is breaking by its own weight; modern armies are mostly national schools controlled by scientific inquisitiveness and permeated by a civic spirit; the pacific federal system of the great European powers sometimes seems feeble and rickety, but it is in existence. Alliances are now federations for peace; the Triple Alliance continues to be a federation for peace; so too the Sextuple Alliance, so energetic and persistent in its support of Turkey, has been a federation for peace. Perhaps the day is nearer than we think when the Hague tribunal shall develop a vigorous, practical working system of international understandings, without appeal to war. Then certainly, but long before, let us hope, France may anchor her liberties in a bill of rights, destroy judicial inquisition, begin to slacken the bonds of her prefectoral system, emancipate her universities and academies, regenerate public feeling as to the increase of population by modifying her laws of the family, and go on not only to populate her own fertile fields, but to make the magnificent colonies which she has acquired the future homes of countless children, a field for exerting her superfluous energy—in short, when she may slough off her now superfluous Napoleonic institutions.

It would be utterly unjust, however, to plead a justification of Napoleon solely by such a monumental fact as that he was in all likelihood the forerunner of modern France. Even when the country adopted him, his positive, direct influence for good was great. The Concordat whatever its faults, partly secured a free church and a free state, separating thus what God had never joined together in holy wedlock; his splendid codes—for no matter who pondered and shaped them, they were his in execution—have guaranteed the perpetuity of civil equality not only in France, but, as the sequel has shown, throughout great expanses of Europe; the questions of a nation's right to its chosen ruler and government, agitated in a new form during the Hundred Days, were those with which succeeding generations were concerned until they were answered in the affirmative. The difference between the France of 1802 and that of 1815 is on one side painful, but on another side it is remarkably significant. The former was transitional and chaotic; the latter had that amazing but completed social union, stronger than any ever known in history, which has saved the country in succeeding storm-periods. In it there was respect for persons, for contract, for property; the administration was unitary, homogeneous, and active; the finances, though not regulated, were restored to vigor; and the processes were inaugurated by which the great cities of France have become healthful and beautiful, while at the same time the internal improvements of the country have been systematized and rendered splendid in their efficiency. Revolutionary concepts were so modified and assimilated that the efforts of the dynasties, when put to the test of public opinion, failed because they were felt to be absurd by the masses. It was one of Napoleon's aphorisms that "to have the right of using nations, you must begin by serving them well." Like a good burgher, he made his servants comfortable and happy. His example, moreover, was reflected abroad throughout Europe; and to the millions of plain and not very shrewd inhabitants of other lands, the Revolution, as Napoleon had shaped it, lost many of the horrors with which Jacobinism, to the everlasting damnation of both the thing and its name, had clothed it. It is a question whether there was in existence a strong liberal France, such as idealists depict, that could pacifically have done this wonderful work. Examining and duly weighing the desperation of dynastic absolutism, it looks as if nothing but the counter-poison of Napoleon's militarism could have prevented its annihilating French liberalism. Without Napoleon the conservative liberalism of to-day would have been impossible.

Turning to the field of general history, there are certain facts, admittedly Napoleon's doing, which quite as certainly are among the most important factors of contemporary politics. Of themselves these would suffice to give him a high place in constructive history. In the first place, he deprived England of the monopoly in what had long been essentially and peculiarly her political ideal. What was the basis of the long conflict between England and France to which Napoleon fell heir? Was the struggle of these two glorious and enlightened sister nations a struggle for territorial ascendancy in Europe? Not entirely. Was it a life-and-death struggle for ascendancy in the western world? No. The Seven Years' War had decided that question against France, and the American war for independence had in a sense evened the score in its decision against England; for the prize had been awarded to a new people. No; the conflict did not rage over this. What, then, was the cause? Nothing less than a passion for the ascendancy of one of these highest forms of civilization throughout the globe, including both Europe and America. This Anglo-Saxon political, commercial, religious, and social conception was, after the Napoleonic wars, no longer confined to Great Britain. Thence onward the great powers of Europe have been chiefly concerned, aside from their care for self-preservation, in partitioning Africa and Asia among themselves; and this process is no sooner complete than they begin to murmur about the Monroe doctrine and to cast longing eyes toward Central and South America. The state system which was once European has become coextensive with the sphere on which we live, and this notion of world-domination, so denounced when held by Napoleon, has become the motive-power of every great modern civilization.

If we consider the national politics of Europe beyond the boundaries of France, history again becomes a record of influences started by Napoleon's works, either of commission or of omission. Russia's grandeur as a European power appears to be largely due to the temporary extinction of Poland's hope for national resurrection. Had Napoleon, instead of playing his doubtful game with the grand duchy of Warsaw, turned into an autonomous permanency the scarcely known provisional government of Poland, which he actually inaugurated and which worked for a considerable time, and had he restored to its sway both the Prussian and Austrian shares in the shameless partition, we might have seen quite another result to the military migration of 1812. We can scarcely doubt, moreover, that Poland, restored under French protection, would have been a buffer state between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, rendering the crushing coalition an impossibility in 1813, while in 1814 the allies could probably never have crossed the French frontier, if indeed they had dared to go even so far in their march across Europe. But his positive achievement was quite as important. The Germany of to-day is a great federal state guided, but not dominated, by Prussia. What are its other important members? Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Baden—all three in their present extent and influence the creations of Napoleon; the nice balance of powers in the German Empire is due to his arrangement of the map. There is even a sense in which all Germany, as we know it, sprang full armed from his head. He not merely taught the peoples of central Europe their strategy, tactics, and military organization: it was he who carried the standard of enlightenment (in his own interest, of course, but still he carried it) through the length and breadth of their territories, and made its significance clear to the meanest intellect of their teeming millions. Thereafter the longings for German unity, for German fatherland, for the organization of German strength into one movement, could never be checked. The swarm of petty tyrants who had modeled their life and conduct on the example of Louis XIV, and who in struggling to vie with his villainies had debauched themselves and their peoples, was swept away by Napoleon's ruthlessness, to give place to the larger, more wholesome nationality of the nineteenth century, which was destined in the end to inspire the surrounding nations with the new concept of respect, not alone for one's own nationality, but for that of others.

What French influence effected in Italy is a topic so recondite as to require separate discussion; for the results were not so immediate or so dramatic as they were in Germany. But the destruction of petty governments was as ruthless as in the north; the ideas which marched in Bonaparte's ranks found at least a large minority of intelligent admirers among the invaded; and Italian unity, though won by a family he feared and abused, is in no doubtful sense indebted for its existence, not merely to Napoleon's age, but to the ideas he disseminated and to the efforts at a practical beginning which he made. As to Austria-Hungary, the new historical epoch which makes her essentially the empire of the lower Danube takes its rise from Napoleon's time and influence. The relaxation of her grasp on Italy has thrown her across the Adriatic for the territorial expansion essential to her position as a great power. It has been her mission to rescue by moral influence some of the fairest lands in the Balkan peninsula from waste and anarchy. Mere proximity is a powerful factor; the turbulence of Austrian local patriotism has been the seed of wholesome discontent among the Christian populations of Turkey, whose first awakening was largely due to the emissaries sent by Napoleon to fire the hearts of the oppressed and suffering subjects of that distracted land. Servia is one example of this; and in a sense the national awakening of Greece began with the hopes similarly aroused.

The astounding magic of his name in the United States is partly due to a quality of the American mind which makes its possessor the passionate and indiscriminating adorer of greatness in every form. The Americans are more French than the French in their admiration of power. But, after all, this is not the main reason for their interest in Napoleon. They are, dimly at least, aware of certain facts which have determined their history and made them an independent nation; though already stated and discussed, we may be pardoned for recapitulating them in this connection. Their first war for independence left them tributary to the mother-country both industrially and commercially. It was Napoleon who pitilessly, though slyly and indirectly, launched them into the second war with Great Britain, from which they emerged with some glory and some sense of defeat, but, after all, with the tremendous and permanent gain of absolute commercial independence. In the second place, their purchase of Louisiana, though understood by only a few at the moment, revolutionized their national system both inside and outside. That momentous step destroyed the literal interpretation of the constitution, hitherto enslaving a congeries of jarring little commonwealths in the bondage of verbalism, because, though manifestly beneficent and necessary, it could be justified before the law only by an appeal to the spirit and not to the letter. Thenceforward Americans have steadily been enlarging their constitutional law by interpretation, and the apparent timidity of amendment which they display is simply due to the absence of necessity for revision as long as expansion by interpretation continues. But certainly quite as important as this was also the displacement, by the acquisition of that vast territory, of what may be called the national center of gravity. Until then the aspirations of Americans had been toward Europe; the public opinion of the country had, until then, demanded the largest possible intercourse with that continent compatible with freedom from political entanglement. Thereafter there was a change in their spirit: a continent of their own was open to their energies. For two generations their history has been concerned with exploration, with mechanical invention, and with solving the great problem of how to prevent an extension of slavery corresponding to the extension of territory. But nevertheless, steadily and vigorously two correlated concepts were propagating themselves: neglect of Europe, in order to expand and assimilate their recent acquisition; industrial exclusiveness, for the sake of this great home market which immigration, settlement, and the formation of new commonwealths were creating, not at the front door, but in the rear of the states stretching along the Atlantic. This resulted in a temporary "about-face" of the nation; and it is only now, when the prize of material greatness and of territorial unity has been secured, that the people turn once more toward the rising sun, in order to get from older lands everything germane to its own civilization, and to assimilate these acquisitions, if possible, in realizing its own ideals of moral grandeur.

HISTORICAL SOURCES

In making this book I had access to the following original sources:

I. Unpublished Documents: a, The papers of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the years of Napoleon's life, including those of the "Fonds Napoléon." b, The unpublished correspondence of Napoleon kept in the French Ministry of War, including the "Volumes Rouges" and the "Dossier de l'Empereur." This is as voluminous at least as the published correspondence, but of personal and technical rather than political interest. I have also consulted the archives of the General Staff in the same building concerning many events connected with Napoleon's career. c, The papers of Napoleon's youth known as the Ashburnham papers, but now owned by the Italian government, and kept in the Laurentian Library at Florence. Since I used them they have been published by Masson and Biagi, but the editors have corrected the text to an extent which is in our day not considered scientific. d, The despatches of American diplomatists resident abroad during Napoleon's career. e, Certain papers from the Record Office in London relating to Napoleon's surrender and his life in St. Helena. f, Certain papers of Henri Beyle containing characterizations of Napoleon and contemporary anecdotes concerning him. These were translated by Jean de Mitty from a cipher manuscript in the public library at Grenoble. g, A considerable number of Napoleon's letters, kindly put at my disposal by various collectors.

II. Published Official Papers. Within the last few years original documents concerning the Napoleonic epoch have been printed very extensively. Nearly all the important books are based on archival research, and the respective authors generally print a certain number of despatches or reports in justification of their conclusions. The following collections are the most important: a, The Correspondence of Napoleon. b, Official Papers of the Helvetic Republic. c, Diplomatic Correspondence between Prussia and France, 1795-97. d, Lord Whitworth's despatches. e, Ducasse's Supplement to Napoleon's Correspondence. f, The Papers of Gentz and Schwarzenberg. g, The Papers of Metternich. h, Napoleon's Letters to Caulaincourt. i, Napoleon's Letters to King Joseph. j, The Letters of King Jerome, Queen Catharine, and King Frederick of Würtemberg. k, The Papers of Castlereagh, Banks, Jackson, and other English statesmen of the time. l, Diplomatic Correspondence between Russia and France. m, The Archives of Count Woronzoff. n, Diplomatic Correspondence of the Sardinian ambassadors at St. Petersburg. o, Diplomatic Correspondence of the ministers of the republic and kingdom of Italy. p, Lecestre's Unpublished Letters of Napoleon. This list might be extended almost indefinitely by adding such collections as Ducasse's Memoirs of King Joseph, Napoleon's Letters to Josephine, the Correspondence of Eugène, etc., etc.; but these older books are too well known to require enumeration, and, though authentic, are only semi-official or personal publications.

III. Contemporary Memoirs. Those titles given in the bibliography are, with a few exceptions, the most valuable. The positive, literal truth of the so-called memoirs attributed to Bourrienne, Constant, Caulaincourt, Barras, Fouché, and Avrillon is very slender. They are all made by skilful patchwork and must be read with the utmost caution. In fact, it is doubtful whether, with the exception of Barras's scandalous record, they have, strictly speaking, any right to the names they bear. This much negative value they have: that they show how history can be falsified in one interest or another.

During the fourteen years which have elapsed since the book was completed for magazine publication, and the twelve since it was revised to the form of four volumes, great numbers of what were then manuscript journals, memoirs, or letters have been printed and published; of these proper use has been made in this edition, and their titles are given in the bibliography. The author may be pardoned for remarking that few details of importance have been found incorrect, wherever experts agree, and that his many critics have made no demand for the reconstruction of his characterization in its broad outlines, however opposed they may be to his portrayals or discussions.

This list of books makes no pretense to completeness. It is a conservative estimate that there are two hundred thousand titles of books relating to Napoleon and his age. What is here given is sufficient to assure the reader a complete view of Napoleon and his times from the best sources.

Wm. M. Sloane.

New York, August 1, 1910.