The ministry of Lord Liverpool, though ultra-Tory, was nevertheless embarrassed by the course of affairs. On June twentieth the premier wrote to Castlereagh that he wished Napoleon had been captured by Louis XVIII, and executed as a rebel. This amazing suggestion was the result of the progress made within a year by the doctrine of legitimacy. Although Talleyrand had observed the Hundred Days from the safe seclusion of Carlsbad, and was coldly received by his "legitimate" sovereign when he returned to Paris under Wellington's ægis, yet there was no one equally able to restore a "legitimate" government, and, with the aid of Wellington, who assumed without question the chief place in reconstructing France, he was soon in full activity. In strict logic, the allies reasoned that Napoleon was their common prisoner, and, as the chief malefactor, he should meet the fate which was to be Ney's, and later that of Murat. By long familiarity with such notions, the Czar had finally been converted to the once abhorrent idea of legitimacy, and was hatching the scheme of the Holy Alliance; even he would have made no objection. But English opinion, however irritated, would not tolerate the idea of death as a penalty for political offenses. Whatever ministers felt or said, they dared consider no alternative in dealing with Napoleon except that of imprisonment. Accordingly, St. Helena, the spot suggested at Vienna as being the most remote in the habitable world, was designated and the island was borrowed from the East India Company. Acts of Parliament were passed which established a special government for it, and cut it off from all outside communication, "for the better detaining in custody Napoleon Bonaparte." The Continental allies, therefore, on August second, declared the sometime Emperor to be their common prisoner. To England they yielded the right to determine his place of detention, but to each of themselves—Austria, Russia, and Prussia—was reserved the right of sending thither a commissioner who should determine the fact of actual imprisonment.

It was in Torbay that the newspapers brought on board the Bellerophon first announced what was under consideration. On July thirty-first, with inconsistent ceremony, the determination was formally announced by an embassy consisting of Lord Keith, the admiral; Sir Henry Bunbury, an under-secretary of state; and Mr. Meike, secretary to the admiral. To whom did this highest official authority address itself? To General Bonaparte, a private citizen! Their message was read in French, and Napoleon displayed perfect self-control. Asked if he had anything to say, the ex-Emperor, without temper or bitterness, appealed against the judgment of governments both to posterity and to the British people. He was, he said, a voluntary guest; he wished to be received as such under the law of nations, and to be domiciled as an English citizen (sic). During the interval before naturalization he would dwell under superintendence anywhere in England, thirty leagues from any seaport. He could not live in St. Helena; he was accustomed to ride twenty miles a day; what could he do on that little rock at the end of the world? He could have gone to his father-in-law, or to the Czar, but while the tricolor was still flying he had confided in British hospitality. Though defeated, he was still a sovereign, and deserved to be treated as such. With emphasis he declared that he preferred death to St. Helena.

The embassy withdrew in silence from the moving scene. Lord Keith had previously expressed gratitude to Napoleon for personal attentions to a young relative who had been captured at Waterloo. Him, therefore, the imperial prisoner now recalled, and asked if there were any tribunal to which appeal might be made. The answer was a polite negative, with the assurance that the British government would mitigate the situation as far as prudence would permit. "How so?" said Napoleon. "Surely St. Helena is preferable to a smaller space in England," answered Keith, "or being sent to France, or perhaps to Russia." "Russia!" exclaimed Napoleon, taken off his guard. "God preserve me from it!" This was the only moment of excitement; the witnesses of the long and trying scene have left on record the profound impression made on them by Napoleon's dignity and admirable conduct throughout. Subsequently the prisoner composed a written protest appealing to history. An enemy who for twenty years had waged war against the English people had come voluntarily to seek an asylum under English laws; how did England respond to such magnanimity? In his own mind, at least, he instituted and therefore wrote a comparison between-himself and Themistocles, who took refuge with the Persians, and was kindly treated. The parallel broke down in that the great Greek had never forced his enemy into entangling alliances, as Napoleon had forced England into successive coalitions for self-preservation. Moreover, his surrender was not voluntary: his life would not have been worth a moment's purchase either in France or elsewhere on the Continent, to have fled by sea would have been to invite capture. "Wherever," as he himself repeatedly said—"wherever there was water to float a ship, there was to be found a British standard." Still there were many in England who took his view; much sympathy was aroused, and some futile efforts for his release were made.

For the journey to St. Helena, Napoleon was transferred to Admiral Cockburn's ship, the Northumberland. The suite numbered thirty, and was chosen by Napoleon himself. Its members were Bertrand, Montholon, and Las Cases, with their families, together with Gourgaud and, following in a later ship, a Pole of doubtful duty and dubious personality, the self-styled Colonel Piontkowski. There were sixteen servants, of whom twelve were Napoleon's. The voyage was tedious and uneventful. The admiral adhered to English customs, and discarded the etiquette observed toward crowned heads; but he remained on the best of terms with his illustrious prisoner. There were occasional misunderstandings, and sometimes ill-natured gossip, in which the admiral was denounced behind his back as a "shark"; but such little gusts of temper passed without permanent consequences. Napoleon had secured the excellent library he desired, and every day read or wrote during most of the morning; the evenings he devoted to games of hazard for low stakes, or to chess, which he played very badly. He was careful as to his diet, took abundant regular exercise, and, since his health was excellent, he appeared in the main cheerful and resigned.

The island of St. Helena is the craggy summit of an ancient volcano, rising two thousand seven hundred feet above the sea, and contains forty-five square miles. Its shores are precipitous, but it has an excellent harbor, that of Jamestown, which was then a port of call on the voyage from England, by the Cape of Good Hope, to India. It lies four thousand miles from London, one thousand one hundred and forty from the coast of Africa, one thousand one hundred and eighty from the nearest point in South America. There were a few thousand inhabitants of mixed race, and the tropical climate, though moist and enervating, is fairly salubrious. Under the act passed by Parliament, England increased the territorial waters around the island to a ring three times the usual size, and policed them by "hovering" vessels, which made the approach of suspicious craft virtually impossible. This, with numerous other precautionary measures of minor importance, made St. Helena an impenetrable jail. It was October sixteenth, 1815, when Napoleon landed on its shores.

The residence provided for the imperial captive was a rather ordinary farm-house in the center of the island, on a plateau two thousand feet high. The grounds were level, and bounded by natural limits, so that they were easy to guard, and could be observed in all their extent by sentries; eventually a circuit of twelve miles was marked out, and within this the prisoner might move at will; if he wished to pass the line, he must be attended by an English officer. Considering the conceptions of state and chivalry then prevalent, the place was mean; long after, when enlarged and repaired, the house was thought not unsuitable for the entertainment of an imprisoned Zulu chieftain. Longwood, for this is the familiar name, might at a pinch have sufficed for the lodging of General Bonaparte; it was certainly better than a dungeon; but its modest comfort was far from the luxurious elegance which had become a second nature to the Emperor Napoleon. Such as it was to be, however, it was still uninhabitable in October, and its destined occupant was, until December ninth, the guest of a hospitable merchant, Mr. Balcombe, at his villa known as The Briars. The sentinels and patrols remained six hundred paces from the door during the day; at night the cordon of guards was drawn close around the house; twice in twenty-four hours the orderly must assure himself of the prisoner's actual presence, and human ingenuity could devise no precaution which was not taken by land and sea to make impossible any secret communication, inward or outward. Cockburn's serene good-nature rendered it out of the question for the captive to do more than declare his policy of protest and exasperation, until April, 1816, when the admiral departed, and was replaced by Sir Hudson Lowe. The latter was a vulnerable foe. A creature of routine, and fresh from a two years' residence as English commissioner in Blücher's camp, he had thoroughly absorbed the temper both of the Tory ministry and of the Continental reactionaries. Neither irascible, severe, nor ill-natured, he was yet punctilious, and in no sense a match for the brilliant genius of his antagonist. With the arrival of this unfortunate official properly begins the St. Helena period of Napoleon's life—a period considered by many to be instructive; but, as regards the talk and futile calculations in which he indulged, comparable only to that of his ineffectual agitations in Corsica.

Napoleon, the prisoner, had a double object—release and self-justification. The former he hoped to gain by working on the feelings of the English Liberals; the latter by writing an autobiography which, in order to win back the lost confidence of France, should emphasize the democratic, progressive, and beneficent side of his career, and consign to oblivion his tyrannies and inordinate personal ambitions. The dreary chronicle of the quarrel between a disarmed giant and a potent pygmy is uninteresting in detail, but very illuminating in its large outlines. The routine of a court was instituted and for a time was rigidly observed at Longwood. The powerless monarch so successfully simulated the wisdom and judgment of a chastened soul that the accounts which reached the distant world awakened a great pity among the disinterested. As on shipboard and at The Briars, he gave his mornings to literature, clad in a studied, picturesque dishabille. The afternoon he devoted to amusement and exercise; but a distaste for more physical exertion than was actually essential to health grew steadily, until he became sluggish and corpulent. At table he was always abstemious; his sleep was irregular and disturbed. The evenings he spent with favorite authors, Voltaire, Corneille, and Ossian; frequently, also, in reading the Bible. The opinions he expressed were in the main those of his pseudoscientific days; among other questions discussed was that of polygamy, which he upheld as an excellent institution theoretically. Much time was spent by the household in abusing Longwood, and so effectually that a wooden house was constructed in England, and erected near by; but the prisoner made difficulties about every particular, and never occupied it. There were continuous schemings for direct intercourse with friends in France, and partial success ended in the dismissal of Las Cases. Gourgaud, too, departed, ostensibly because of a quarrel with Montholon, really, as he represented, to agitate with Alexander, Francis, and Maria Louisa for Napoleon's release. The exile confessed, in an unguarded moment, that no man alive could have satisfied him in the relation of governor of St. Helena, but yet he was adroit and indefatigable in his efforts to discredit Lowe. The "Letters from the Cape of Good Hope," published in England anonymously, but now incorporated in the official edition of Napoleon's works as the thirty-first volume, abuse the climate of St. Helena, depict the injustice of the imprisonment, and heap scorn on the governor. The book was widely read, and furnished the Whigs in Parliament with many shafts of criticism. This success emboldened the author, and further compositions by his hand were mysteriously published in Europe.

For three years Napoleon's self-appointed task as a historian was unremittingly pursued, and the results, while he had the assistance of Las Cases and Gourgaud, were voluminous; thereafter the output was a slender rill. Most of the volumes which record his observations and opinions bear the names of the respective memorialists, Montholon, Las Cases, Gourgaud, O'Meara, and Antommarchi, the two latter his attendant physicians. The period he took pains to elucidate most fully in these writings was that between Toulon and Marengo. Over his own name appeared monographs on Elba, the Hundred Days, and Waterloo. His professional ability is shown by short studies on the "Art and History of War," on "Army Organization," and on "Fortification"; likewise by his full analyses of the wars waged by Cæsar, Turenne, and Frederick the Great. These are not unworthy of the author's reputation; his versatility is displayed in a few commonplace notes—some on Voltaire's "Mahomet," some on suicide, and others on the second book of the Æneid. A widely circulated treatise, the "Manuscript from St. Helena," was long attributed to him, but was a clever forgery. As will be explained, its effect on history was important.

For nearly four years Napoleon's health was fair. O'Meara, the physician appointed to attend him, was assiduous and skilful, but when he became his patient's devoted slave he was dismissed by Lowe. Thereupon certain disquieting symptoms, which had been noted from time to time, became more pronounced, and the prisoner began to brood and mope in seclusion. In the autumn of 1819, Dr. Antommarchi, a Corsican physician chosen by Fesch, was installed at Longwood. For a time, as he claimed, he had some success in ameliorating the ex-Emperor's condition, and to what the writer records as their confidential talks we owe our knowledge of Napoleon's infancy. But from month to month the patient's strength diminished, and the ravages of his mysterious disease at length became very apparent. The obstinacy of Lowe in carrying out the letter of his instructions, by intruding on the sufferer to secure material for a daily report, seriously aggravated Napoleon's miseries. Two priests accompanied Antommarchi: one only remained for some time, and after his arrival mass was celebrated almost every morning in the chapel adjoining the sick-room. "Not every man is an atheist who would like to be," was a remark Napoleon dropped to Montholon. Yet, though preparing for death, he was making ready simultaneously to speed his Parthian arrow.

His testament displays his qualities in their entirety. The language sounds simple and sincere; there is a hidden meaning in almost every line. His religion had been outwardly that of a deist; he now professed a piety which he always felt but rarely practised. During his life France had been caressed and used as a skilful artificer caresses and uses his tools; the last words of his will suggest a passionate devotion. To his son he recommended the "love of right, which alone can incite to the performance of great deeds"; for his faithless wife he expressed the tenderest sentiments, and probably felt them. It was his hope that the English people would avenge itself on the English oligarchy, and that France would forgive the traitors who betrayed her—Marmont, Augereau, Talleyrand, and Lafayette—as he forgave them. Louis he pardoned in the same spirit for the "libel published in 1820; it is full of falsehoods and falsified documents." The blame for Enghien's murder he took to himself. The second portion of the document is a series of munificent-sounding bequests to a list of legatees which includes every one who had done the testator any important service since his earliest childhood. France under the Bourbons confiscated the imperial domain of about a hundred and eighty millions, which Napoleon had estimated at over two hundred and twenty. When the nation passed again under the Bonapartes it appropriated eight millions toward the unpaid legacies. In the end his executors collected three and a half millions of francs wherewith to pay bequests amounting on their face to over nine and a half. In a codicil he remembers a certain Cautillon, who had undergone trial for an alleged attempt to assassinate Wellington. "Cautillon had as much right to assassinate that oligarch as he [Wellington] to send me to the rock of St. Helena to perish there." Such was the nature and substance of an appeal to a generous, forgiving nation, and to posterity, by one who wrote in the same document that he wished to die in the bosom of the Christian church, whose central doctrine is love, and whose ethic is forgiveness of enemies.

"I closed the abyss of anarchy and brought order out of chaos. I cleansed the Revolution, ennobled the people, and made the kings strong. I have awakened all ambitions, rewarded all merit, and enlarged the borders of glory." These were the words of Napoleon in 1816; he Lived in this hallucination to the end. In the autumn of 1820 he realized his condition, and throughout the winter he was feeble and depressed. In February, 1821, he began to fail rapidly, and the symptoms of his disease, cancer in the stomach, multiplied; but, in spite of feebleness, he faced death with courage. On May third two English physicians, recently arrived, came in for consultation; they could only recommend palliatives, and under the influence of that treatment the imperial patient kept an uncertain hold on his faculties. Two days later a violent storm of wind and rain set in. A spreading willow, under which Napoleon had spent many hours, was overturned; the trees planted by his hands were uprooted; and a whirlwind devastated the garden in which he had worked for exercise. The death of the sufferer was coincident, and scarcely less violent. The last words uttered were caught by listening ears as the sun rose; they were "Tête ... armée." Mme. Bertrand and her children were present; at the sight of their friend's suffering the boy fainted and the little girls broke into loud lamentation. At eleven in the morning the supreme agonies began; a little before six in the evening the heart put forth its last convulsive effort, and ceased to beat. The mournful band of watchers within bowed their heads. Without the door another watch was set—that of the orderly. During the first outburst of grief among those at the bedside two officers entered silently, felt the cold limbs, marked the absence of life, and left without a word. England's prisoner had escaped.

It requires a complex environment to develop a man of any sort; for the exhibition of his personality and identity he must live in family, church, and state, and beyond all these surroundings even the meanest of mankind is subject to some cosmopolitan influence. How much more true is this of a historical and political personage, who is and can be himself only under the conditions which permit the play of his powers. Removed from these, his soul and spirit sicken, his character becomes morbid, his capacities are crippled, his identity is distorted. Nothing could be more fatuous and simple than the effort to read the true character of Napoleon Bonaparte from his talk and behavior when an exile; a prisoner of time and space, as world communications then were; an exhausted body; a crippled, outraged spirit, reduced for attack and defense to the weapons of the pen and the tongue wielded on and over an immensity of apartness. Yet exactly this has been the self-imposed task of many investigators and writers. The literature of his prison-house has grown to vast dimensions, and readers feel cheated when the bald outline of all that may even be considered history is offered for their consideration. The narrative of the St. Helena epoch in his life just given is probably accurate, and there are portions of it that rest on historical evidence both objective and internal, as trustworthy as most of what passes for history.

But when this is said the statement must be carefully guarded, for the reason that substantially all our evidence is virtually such as would be given about himself by a convict behind the bars, his sympathizing accomplices, his jailer, and his prosecutors. The simile is not strained. The surgeon of the Northumberland, ignorant of French, gathered from those of Napoleon's attendants who spoke English such scraps regarding the prisoner as he could, published them, and lost his government employment. The book was widely read and proved a very lucrative enterprise. Outside its pages there was profound silence and complete ignorance in Europe regarding the now mysterious convict, buried to the world. Craving for information was universal and insatiate; if only Napoleon himself would speak! It appeared as if the longing were satisfied in a published "Manuscript arrived from St. Helena by unknown means." The volume was difficult to procure, although edition followed edition in swift succession; many a precious copy was used in reading circles and there are still in existence a considerable number of the very numerous reproductions made at the time with pen and ink. One of these was actually sold not long ago to an unsuspecting editor in the United States and published in his magazine as a rarity. It fell flat because so many knew the truth: that it was apocryphal, the merry jest of a Genevese gentleman, Lullin de Châteauvieux, who lived to see his sport a dangerous element in the falsification of history. It was not only Napoleonic in style, but too Napoleonic; and, considered as an imperialist pamphlet, an anti-royalist pronunciamento, brought into being the embryo of a legend such as men crave and which the loyal efforts of many historians have utterly failed to destroy. Its contents, of course, are utterly worthless except as a comedy, a mask of literature which influenced public opinion.

The first known opportunity of the Napoleon court for communication with the outside world was afforded by the British government. The guarding and maintenance of Napoleon proved a source of great expenditure. The garrison and military staff, the hovering vessels of the navy, the entertainment of the continental commissioners, and especially the allowance for the establishment of Longwood, miserable as it was—the total cost appeared to the London authorities exorbitant. Prices of supplies at St. Helena were enormous because of its remoteness. So the subordinates of the ministry, with the assent of their superiors, determined upon reductions, and they began with the household of the Emperor, issuing orders that four of its members should be dismissed. These were, first, the Polish adventurer Piontkowski, part gentleman, part domestic, and wholly emissary and spy, who had been sent out by the English government in a vessel which followed the Northumberland, for reasons best known to themselves. He appears to have accepted a charge from Napoleon; that, namely, of laying before the Czar a formal protest against the treaties which made Napoleon the joint prisoner of the allies, entrusted to the charge of Great Britain. The next to leave were Archambaud and Rousseau, one a huntsman, one a chief butler; they were to visit Joseph Bonaparte in the United States and give him the fullest information. The fourth was the chamberlain Santini, a Corsican, and, though a soldier, utterly illiterate. To him was confided a protest for use either in London or in Italy, as the event should determine. A copy was made in Chinese ink on white satin ribbon for concealment about his person, but the chief reliance was, that "verbally and literally" he was drilled in its repetition until he could neither forget nor mistake in its recital. The faithful servants reached Joseph's home in America, the Pole on arrival in England styled himself Count and Colonel, became the hero of a social season in London, and vanished from history as mysteriously as he entered it. But Santini with Italian adroitness gained not only the presence of Lord Holland but his attentive ear; his recital was translated into English and published, the matter was brought before Parliament by interpellation of the great Whig statesman and caused great excitement throughout the world.

Napoleon's "Appeal to the English Nation," as printed from Santini's copy, recited the stupidity of his jailer, the unhealthiness of the climate, the expense and difficulty of living. His statements were not merely confirmed, the conditions of life on St. Helena were monstrously exaggerated by Montchenu, the French commissioner, in a private letter which was published soon after the arrival of Santini in London. This, too, was circulated all abroad. Public opinion was further agitated. The allied dynasties were made to feel ashamed by their subjects, and in Great Britain there was a fierce surge of reprobation, the resonance of which has not yet died away. The exile was chained to a horrid rock, in a climate Europeans could not endure, his miserable existence in hovels overrun with vermin must be eked out by loans from friends and the sale of his silver tableware, he was put to needless shame by the stupid regulations of a stupid government, stupidly enforced by a stupid governor, he was sick of body and heart, very sick and might die. Whose was the responsibility for this disgrace to civilization? Somewhat in this way men talked and questioned; soon his faults were forgotten in the pitiful recital of his woes; the legend was further advanced, once more the glory of Napoleon's epoch became a powerful force in Europe.

On the fourteenth of March, 1818, there arrived in England a member of the St. Helena court, whose name and fame bid fair to rival if not to obliterate those of all his companions in exile, though most undeservedly. This was General Gourgaud, styled Master of Ordinance. He was thirty-five years old and had been a soldier for sixteen, winning promotion for intelligence and intrepidity, securing Napoleon's affection by personal charm and by services which once at least, and probably twice, directly saved the Emperor's life, until at last he was a baron, a general at Waterloo, and a companion in St. Helena. This all seems passing strange because he was a high officer of Louis XVIII before Napoleon's return from Elba; made obeisance to established authority as soon as he returned from captivity, and during the successive governments of France to his death in 1852 found favor with each in turn. Whatever he was before and after, his life in St. Helena was that of a sentimental, jealous, sensitive child, scarcely a male at that. Every word and every act of every one gave him such pangs of wounded vanity that at last his presence was intolerable and by the influence of the Montholons it was arranged that he should leave. No sooner was the dust of Longwood shaken from his feet than within sight of its doors he accepted the kindly attentions of his former jailers with eagerness, and no sooner were those feet ashore in England than he began to woo the ministry, to make advances to the Bourbons, and to fawn on the Holy Alliance itself. It was not until he experienced certain chills and got his groping finger on the pulse of public opinion that he found himself utterly mistaken and in danger of mortal error. He then wrote, and gave to the public prints, a curious letter, addressed to Marie Louise, asserting that Napoleon was dying in the torments of a frightful agony. This amounted to a recantation. In consequence he was banished from England under the Alien Bill. At once he hurried away to Prince Eugène (Napoleon's treasurer) and from him reclaimed and received, for four years certainly, his arrears of imperial pay and pension. In 1822 he was permitted to return to France.

The notoriety of his name is due to two sets of circumstances. Sir Walter Scott told the truth about his conduct, just when the noble general was beginning to swim in the refulgence of the Napoleonic legend. There ensued a wordy warfare. The weapons on one side were official papers; on the other denials, insinuations, and finally the assertion of some vague commission or another given by the great captive, impossible of fulfilment in any way other than by the mysterious course of the plenipotentiary. This mystery is still unsolved and the commission undiscovered, but in France at least the conflict still rages. As late as 1908 a caustic critic was challenged to a duel by the testy and furious family head of the Gourgauds. The other set of circumstances is equally curious. Gourgaud left behind him a journal of his St. Helena life. Its contents are certainly authentic evidence of the writer's character, and as there is no means of checking the authenticity of what is recorded about Napoleon and his Longwood household, the record may possibly be and probably is accurate. The sore spirit of the writer required a confidant, and since there was no congenial soul to receive his outpourings he relieved himself as other sentimental egoists have done in the pages of a journal. From these the most conscientious efforts have been made to construct a psychology of the Emperor. The result is a morbid psychology of a caged falcon, the revival of bitter controversy as to the treatment of the great prisoner by a Tory ministry, and generally of a rather abstracted but intense interest in the Napoleonic legend. Hence the prolonged vogue of a celebrity which should have been ephemeral. The general is in no proper sense a historical factor except as the influence of his behavior in Europe served to quicken the existing lively interest in Napoleon. As far as his earliest testimony went, and many inclined to heed it, the master he had served was in excellent health, was kindly treated, and in general was better off than could have been expected. This of course lashed the imperialists to fury; their information was to the diametrically opposite effect.

Antecedent to Gourgaud's departure was that of Las Cases, but his journey was so impeded, his health so shaken, and his devotion so discounted, that whatever he accomplished in molding public opinion was logically subsequent to the work of the general. Spanish by origin, French by six centuries of devotion, his family was of the higher nobility. He himself had been an emigrant, but had returned to become a member of the Council of State. As a great civil official he had learned to love Napoleon and deliberately chose exile with him rather than honors and service under the restored Bourbons. In 1816 he wrote, and endeavored to forward secretly, letters containing his views as to the disgraceful treatment of Napoleon. These were intercepted and the writer was condemned in Lowe's first fury to depart. On second thought the governor begged him to remain under certain restrictions; these Las Cases would not accept, possibly because he saw himself of greater use in Europe than in St. Helena. He reached the Cape of Good Hope in January, 1817, was there detained eight months, was then forwarded to England, where he was forbidden to land, thence to Belgium, and finally, in December, a physical derelict, he found shelter in Frankfort-on-the-Main, where he lived for a time under the strictest surveillance. His faculties were soon restored to a certain rather impaired activity, and in 1818 he laid a powerful protest against the treatment of Napoleon before the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. No less a person than the Emperor's mother was his agent and intermediary. A meeting of reactionary sovereigns and their ministers, terrified by the throes of a revolutionary spirit more and more personified in Bonaparte, could in no case be receptive to such a remonstrance, and was utterly cold and scornful in the face of Gourgaud's evidence to the well-being and kind treatment of Napoleon, already published. Even with the most enlightened and liberal public of Europe, that of Great Britain, Las Cases' controversial publications fell rather flat. Readers were weary of the theme, since O'Meara was now and had been for some time past in possession of the Napoleonic field.

Dr. O'Meara, the Emperor's body-physician, was a warm-hearted Irishman, faithful, able, and devoted. That he received substantial gratuities from his patient is no longer questioned, and these transfers of money have been called by a harsh name; yet it is easy for a loyal but illogical devotee to confuse salary, gifts, fees, bribes, each with each, and one with the other; the crime was not quite so heinous with a man of his character as it would have been in persons of severer quality and mold. It seems equally certain that the stern pedant acting as governor would gladly have employed the same inducements to secure him as a spy. At least he did not qualify as the channel of a double espionage, and for that reason fell under the grave suspicion of authority. The diagnosis of Napoleon's malady as very grave, which he had made, was confirmed in January, 1819, by Stokoe, the ship's surgeon of the Conqueror, the British flag vessel then in the harbor. But from O'Meara it was not accepted; he was dismissed from service and on July twenty-fifth, 1818, sailed homeward. On August seventeenth the London "Morning Post" began to print communications sent from St. Helena by him, and shortly after he landed, in October, there appeared a pamphlet by him attacking Sir Hudson Lowe. His voluminous "Voice from St. Helena" was not published until after Napoleon's death. Like the rest of the contemporary memoirs and memorials, the value of his writings lies in their effect on the liberal sentiment of the world. The Metternich system of repression and intervention, which worked its will in dynastic government for a generation after Napoleon, engendered a newer liberalism which forgot the tyranny of Napoleonic imperialism and remembered the Consulate as expressing a well-organized form of government, adapted superbly for crushing systems, dynastic or aristocratic or plutocratic, which oppressed mankind by denying the only possible equality, equality of opportunity, the Napoleonic "carrière ouverte aux talents." By all sympathetic nationalists, constitutionalists, and radicals these books were literally devoured, and in France particularly their effect was lasting. There could never have been a second Napoleon except as he was thought likely to reproduce the Consulate; when his rule had proved to be imperialistic the country was disenchanted. Liberty with order is so ardently desired! but too often the devices to secure it beget license with chaos. The literal correctness of O'Meara's reporting, like that of the rest, cannot be controverted by any rebutting testimony, but the nature portrayed is the same morbid, sensational, notoriety-seeking, unwholesome, and pathological specimen as that furnished by the others.

Dr. Stokoe was speedily disgraced because it was now certain that any bulletin of serious illness was evidence of conspiracy by the Emperor and his friends for his escape. It is still affirmed that this second physician yielded to the Emperor's blandishments and disobeyed Lowe's orders. His successor, Dr. Verling, was Lowe's man, and, finding his position intolerable, resigned with the insinuation that he could not accept bribes. The party strife demanded either that Napoleon must be entirely well and well treated, or else utterly moribund and abominably used. Neither was the case, but a mortal disease had declared itself, his grand marshal was seriously alarmed, and the members of the Bonaparte family in Europe were dreaming of Napoleon's escape or planning the renewal of his household by fresh blood. The Bertrands and the Montholons, though faithful and devoted, were simply worn out. A Corsican physician, Dr. Antommarchi, and an Italian priest, Buonavita, were added to the household in September, 1819. Mme. Montholon with her child was already at home seeking substitutes, having departed from St. Helena in July. Neither event had any special consequences. Mme. Montholon found a possible successor to the grand marshal in the person of Planat, an officer of the Hundred Days. Negotiations for his sailing were protracted; such was Napoleon's condition before they were concluded that Montholon would not consider deserting his post, though Bertrand was quite willing to see Planat supplant himself. Buonavita was ill and returned to Europe. Antommarchi was detested by his patient, a new priest and a new doctor were found, and the faithful Pauline desired to join her exiled brother. By this time the year 1820 had passed and the fateful spring of 1821 was well advanced. All preparations for relieving the household and the guard at St. Helena were now, of course, futile. Three years of suffering had culminated in the death of the exile.

The documentary material for the St. Helena epoch is very scanty. The "Mémorial" of Las Cases and the "Voice" of O'Meara are both valuable as works but not as transcripts. Of Gourgaud's "Journal" the value is greater, but the medium of transmission most abnormal. The volumes of Mrs. Abell and Lady Malcolm furnish very slight material; the papers of the outsiders like Montchenu, Balmain, and Sturmer, like even Lowe himself, furnish side-lights only; the souvenirs of Mme. Montholon are trifling and cannot bear critical examination. The recitals of Montholon were thought of importance until careful scrutiny showed how he had drawn on Las Cases and O'Meara, how scanty, scrappy, and confused his own notes were, and finally, when his letters to his wife were printed, how completely these unfalsified documents contradicted the other publications in the few interesting points on which they touch, both in the English edition of Colburn and the carefully edited and reedited French edition. The more the slight authentic material is examined the more certain it appears that it is hopeless to read from it Napoleon's character, even in the unnatural environment of St. Helena, least of all for the years of real life. Conduct is the only test of belief, not the invalid lamentations or cynical banter of dreary, hopeless imprisonment. And when all this talk of a man in anguish is dubiously reported, distorted by the medium of a heart-sick listener, or by the transcription of men bored to extinction, its value is obviously still further diminished. The story has been briefly narrated of how the legend was engendered, of how it was planted and watered on the continent of Europe, and its influence on subsequent generations has been indicated. This is the sum total of what history finds as its material during the closing years of Napoleon's life. The souvenirs of Bertrand and Marchand are as yet inaccessible, if indeed they exist. Some day their possible publication may shed a few rays of new light on minor points: they cannot greatly enlarge or substantively reconstruct the slight historical material we have been able to discover. For valuable generalizations we must fall back on the many abundant facts of Napoleon's long career, on the very few facts of his conduct when mewed and exasperated at St. Helena, on the effects which these in sum have produced in history. The world at large marvels at the general, the statesman, the conqueror, the emperor; it is apt to pass unnoticed the judge and tamer of two epochs, the mediator between a ruined past, a chaotic present, and a future, orderly at least, though streaked with the stains of tyranny.

CHAPTER XX

Soldier, Statesman, Despot

Questionings — The Industrious Burgher — The Industrious Sovereign — End of the Marvelous — Public Virtue and Private Weakness — The Man and The Age — Latin and German — First Struggles — Usurpation of Power — Political Theories — The Napoleonic System — Its Foundation — Stimulus to Despotism — The Surrender of France — The Master Soldier.

Review

The tomb of Erasmus in Basel is marked by a stone slab on which are an epitaph, an effigy, and then the pathetic word "Terminus." Should these fateful syllables be written over the mortal remains of Napoleon Bonaparte? No. Beyond his death there was more, far more than the work he wrought during his life. Men ever love a seeming mystery, and while they do, a favorite theme of speculation will be the career of the great Corsican in its historical aspect. Before our long study can be brought to a close, two questions must be considered, or rather two sides of one question must be viewed. Why did he rise, and what did he accomplish? The answers will be as various as the investigators who give them. But the man as seen in the preceding pages certainly displays these recognizable characteristics: he was a man of the people, he had a transcendent military genius, he was indefatigable, and he had unsurpassed energy.

No mere man, even the most remarkable, can climb without supports of some kind, however unstable they may be. Napoleon Bonaparte did not soar, he rose on the ladder of power by stages easily traceable: first by the protection of the Robespierres; then by the necessities and velleities of Barras and the Directory; afterward by the encouragement of all France, which was sick of the inefficient Directory; and still later by the army, which adored a leader who frankly repaid devotion in the hard cash of booty, and bravery in the splendid rewards of that glory which was a national passion. With such opportunities, Bonaparte unfolded what was certainly his supereminent quality—the quality which endeared him to the French masses as did no other, the quality which above all others distinguished him from the hated tyrants under whom they had so long suffered, the quality which even the meanest intellect could mark as distinctively middle-class, in opposition to its negation in the upper class—the quality, namely, of untiring industry; laborious, self-initiated, self-guided, self-improving industry. This burgher quality Napoleon possessed as no burgher ever did. It was no exaggeration, but the simple truth, when he said to Roederer: "I am always working. I think much. If I appear always ready to meet every emergency, to confront every problem, it is because, before undertaking any enterprise, I have long considered it, and have thus foreseen what could possibly occur. It is no genius which suddenly and secretly reveals to me what I have to say or do in some circumstance unforeseen by others: it is my own meditation and reflection. I am always working—when dining, when at the theater; I waken at night in order to work." How profoundly this was impressed upon those intimately associated with Napoleon can be traced in their memoirs on many a page. It was Soult who said, most sapiently: "What we call an inspiration is nothing but a calculation made with rapidity."

Generally there is no mystery in the power of domination: he rules who is indispensable. The Jacobins needed a man, they found him in the unscrupulous Bonaparte; the Directory needed a man, they found him in the expert artillerist; France needed a man, she found him in the conqueror of Italy. And having risen, he did not intermit his industry for a moment. Rehearsing his coronation by means of puppets, or studying with painful care the complicated accounts of his fiscal officers, or absorbing himself in whatever else it might be, he was always the man who knew more about everything than any one else. Throughout his reign he was the fountainhead of every governmental activity: the council of state sharpened not their own, but his thoughts; his secretaries were his pocket note-book; his ministers were the executors of his personal designs; pensions and presents were given by him to his friends, and not to those who served the state as they themselves thought best; every French community received his personal attention, and every Frenchman who came to his general receptions was treated with rude jocularity. In all this he was perfectly natural. At times, however, he felt compelled to attitudinize; perhaps, in the theatrical poses which he assumed for self-protection or for the sake of representing a personified, unapproachable imperial majesty, he copied Talma, with whom he cultivated a sort of intimacy. Possibly, too, his violent sallies were considered dramatic by himself. "Otherwise," he once said, "they would have slapped me on the shoulder every day." "It is sad," remarked Roederer, apropos of a certain event. "Yes, like greatness," was Napoleon's rejoinder.

Napoleon's preëminence lasted just as long as this effective personal supremacy continued. When his faculties refused to perform their continuous, unceasing task, he began to decline; when the material of his calculations transcended all human power, even his own, the descent grew swifter; and the crash came when his abilities worked either intermittently or not at all. Ruin was the consequence of feebleness; the imagination of the world had clothed him with demoniac qualities, but it ceased so to do just in proportion as his superiority to others in plan and execution began to diminish. "There is no empire not founded on the marvelous, and here the marvelous is the truth." These were the words of Talleyrand, addressed to the First Consul on June twenty-first, 1800, just after the news of Marengo had reached Paris. The marvel of the absolute monarchy was the divine right of kings: when men ceased to hold the doctrine, the days of absolutism were numbered. The marvel of Napoleon was his unquestioned human supremacy: when that declined his empire fell.

In the truest sense of that word so dear to modern times, Napoleon was a self-made man. By his extraordinary energy he made a deficient education do double duty; and those of his natural gifts which in a sluggish man would have been mediocre, he paraded so often, and in such swift succession, that they appeared miraculous. This fiery energy, it cannot too often be repeated, was the man's most distinctive characteristic; when it failed he was undone. Was consistency, as generally understood, to be expected in this personage; is it, indeed, found in most great men? Nowhere does the theory of evolution writhe to sustain itself more than in psychology; nowhere does it discover a greater complexity—a complexity which makes doubtful its sufficiency. Admitting that Napoleon was selfish; that he was lustful; that once, at least, he was criminal; that at various times—yes, even frequently—he was unpopular, and dared not in extremity call for a national uprising to sustain his cause; that he had pitiful limitations in dealing with religion, politics, and finance; supposing him to have displayed on occasion the qualities of a resurrected medieval free-lance, or of the Borgias, or of other historical monsters; confessing that he was launched upon the fiery lake of revolution by the madness of extreme Jacobinism; sustaining the awful indictment in each detail—was there no reverse to the medal, no light to the shadow, no general result except negations? Was the work of Alexander the Great worthless because of his debaucheries? Was Catharine II of Russia a mere damned soul because of her harlotries? Did Talleyrand's duplicity and meanness render less valuable or permanent the work he did in thwarting the coalition at Vienna? The answer of history is plain: what the great of the earth have wrought for others or against them is to be recorded and judged with impartiality; how they sinned against themselves is to be told as an awful warning, and then to be left for the decision of the Great Tribunal. Modern philosophy requires such complicated and yet such minute knowledge in every department of science that the specialist has supplanted the general scholar and the system-maker; the man who aspires to create a plan displaying the unity of either the objective or the subjective world, or any harmony of one with the other, is generally regarded as either an antiquated imbecile or a charlatan. Yet in the examination of historical characters a symmetrical consistency capable of being grasped by the meanest intellect is imperiously demanded by all readers and critics. This is natural, but not altogether reasonable: symmetry cannot be found in the commonest human being on our globe, much less in those who rise supereminent. The greater the man, the more impossible to connect in a mathematical diagram the different phases of his conduct. The search for mediocre consistency in the character of Napoleon is like the Cynic philosopher's quest for a man.

This personage strove, and with considerable success, to think and act for an entire nation—ay, more, for western Europe. In order to render this conceivable, he first took command of his own body—sleeping at will, and never more than six hours; eating when and what he would, but always with extreme moderation; waking from profound slumber and rousing his mind instantaneously to the highest pitch, so that he then composed as incisively as in the midst of active ratiocination. He was able to train his secretaries and servants into instruments destitute of personal volition—even his great generals, who were taught to act for themselves within certain limits, never transcended the fixed boundary, and grew inefficient when deprived of his impulse. He never failed to reward merit or to gratify ambition for the sake of securing an able lieutenant, and nascent devotion he quickened into passion by the display of suitable familiarity. A thoughtful, self-contained, self-sufficient worker, he was sometimes a trifle uneasy in social intercourse, perhaps always so beneath his mask of good breeding, when he wore one; but he played his various rôles in public with consummate skill, except that he made nervous movements with his eyes, hands, and ears. His little tricks of rolling his right shoulder, tugging at his cuffs, and the like; his inability to write, and his generally clumsy movements when irritated, were due to deficient training in early childhood. Forbidding in his intercourse with ambitious women and other self-seekers, he was considerate with the suffering, and found it difficult, if not impossible, to refuse the petitions of the needy. Loving rough and ready ways in those busied about his person,—as, for instance, when his valet rubbed him down in the morning with a coarse towel,—he was yet so sensitive that he had to have his hats worn by others before he could set them on his own head. It is useless to seek even homely physical consistency in a man thus constituted.

It is equally useless to ask whether Napoleon could have been as great a man in another epoch as he was in his own. In any epoch of warfare he would have been great; it is likely that in any epoch of peace he would have reached eminence as a legislator and administrator. The real historical question is this: How did he, being what he was, and his age, being what it was, interact one upon the other; and what was the resultant? There was as little consistency in his age as in himself; the sinuosities of each fitted strangely into those of the other, and the result was a period of twenty years on which common consent fixes the name of the Napoleonic age. Does his personality throw any light on the antecedent period—does his career influence the succeeding years?

The age of the Revolution has such intimate connection with the movements of French society that it is very generally called in other countries the French Revolution. But while the movement developed itself more easily and took more radical forms in France than elsewhere, it was due to the condition of civilization the world around. France has been in a peculiar sense the teacher of Europe; for in language, literature, laws, and institutions she is the heir of Rome. In spite of Roman Catholicism, or perhaps in consequence of the Roman hierarchy, her inheritance has been pagan rather than Christian; her ethics have been Hellenic, her literature Augustan, her laws imperial, her temperament a combination of the Stoic and Epicurean which is essentially Latin, her language elegant, elliptical, and precise like that of Livy or Tacitus. The Teuton in general, the Anglo-Saxon in particular, may give his days and nights to classical studies: he is never so imbued with their spirit as the Gaul. "It is with his Bible in one pocket and his Shakspere in another," said an eminent Frenchman not long since, "that the Anglo-Saxon goes forth to reduce the world in the interests of his commerce, his civilization, and his religion. The most enlightened has neither the cold worldliness of Horace nor the calculating zeal of Cæsar, but he has the persistency of faith in himself and his nation which, whatever may be his personal belief, is a constituent element in his blood, or, better still, the controlling member of that complex organism to which he belongs." I venture to believe, on the other hand, that the Frenchman espouses his cause from an unselfish impulse begotten of pure reason, an ethereal ichor percolating through society by channels of sympathy, which diminishes the historic pressure for continuous national consistency and natural unity, but emphasizes the great uplifting movements of society. The French armies of the Revolution went forth to scour Europe for its deliverance from feudalism, absolutism, and ecclesiasticism, because the French people had renewed their youthful and pristine vigor in their enthusiasm for pure principle without regard to experience or expediency. Napoleon Bonaparte had all their doctrine, with something more: a consuming ardor unconscious of any physical limitations to the nervous strength of himself or others, and a readiness for any fate which would transmute his dull, unsuccessful, commonplace existence into excitement. When he found his opportunity to heap Pelion upon Ossa, to supplement himself by the splendors of French devotion, he did indeed come near to transcending even the Olympians and storming the seat of Kronos.

It was a long, discouraging, heartbreaking struggle by which he gained his first vantage-ground. This was no exceptional experience; for every adventurer knows that it is more troublesome to make the start than to continue the advance. It is harder to save the first small capital than to conduct a prosperous business. It is more difficult, apparently, in human life to overcome the inertia of immobility than that of motion; at least psychological laws seem in this respect to contravene those of physics. It is not true that the armies of the Republic were those of the Bourbons: the transition may have been gradual, but it was radical. It is also untrue that the armies of Napoleon were those of the Revolution: they differed as the zenith from the nadir, being recruited on a new principle, animated by new motives, and led by an entirely different class of men. A supreme command having been attained by means curiously compounded of chivalric romance and base scheming, the man of action did not hesitate a moment to put every power in motion. Throwing off all superior control, he set himself to every task in the revolution of Italy—conquest, political and religious; constructive politics and administration; social and financial transformation. Winning the devotion of his troops by intoxicating successes, as a leveler he was permanently successful; but this typical burgher had no permanent success in building up a democratic-imperial society out of the royal, princely, and aristocratic elements which had so long monopolized the ability of the peninsula; what he wrought outlasted his time, but the country had to undergo another revolution before its middle classes were ready for the heavy burden of independence and self-government. Yet the struggle for what was accomplished appears to have created a climacteric in the doer. Before the days of Italy his ambitions were petty enough: employment in the service of Russia or England, supremacy in Corsica or military promotion in France; but afterward they enlarged by leaps and bounds: Italian principalities, Austrian dukedoms, Lombard confederations, the primacy of France in some form, Oriental dominion—one such concept took form in the morning, to be swept away at night and replaced by ever more luxurious growths of fantasy. The realization of these dreams was still more amazing than their misty formation. The Revolutionary doctrines of the passing age had stimulated France to over-exertion; her leaders were discredited, her people exhausted. The same agitation had stupefied the Italians; but whatever their political disintegration may have been, the Roman chair and throne retained its moral influence as the bond and mainspring of society throughout the whole peninsula; and now the successor of St. Peter was humbled to the dust, willing to escape with the mere semblance of either secular or ecclesiastical independence. It was an exceptional moment, a vacillating, retrogressive hour in the history of Austria, of France, and of Italy. The exceptional man, the vigorous citizen of a new political epoch, the inspired strategist of a new military epoch, the unscrupulous doubter of a new religious epoch—this typical personage was at hand to take advantage of the situation; and he did so, hastening the disintegrating processes already at work, seizing every advantage revealed by the crumbling of old systems, and reaping the harvest of French heedlessness. The opportunity gave the man his chance, but the chance once seized, the man enlarged his sphere with each successive year.

This he did by means which were as remarkable as the personage who devised them—and remarkable, too, not for their negative, but for their constructive quality. Broadly stated, the Revolution utterly expunged all the governmental and social guarantees of the preceding monarchy, destroying not merely the absolute power of one man with its sanction of divine right, but all the checks upon it to be found either in the ancient traditions of the people or in their ancient institution of parliaments. It will be clear to the careful student of the Revolutionary governments that while there was a gradual clarifying of opinion antecedent to the Consulate, and a vague longing for guarantees of individual rights higher than the acts of any assembly, however representative it claimed to be, nevertheless great ideas, great conceptions, great outlines, had all remained in their inchoate state, and that of the several succeeding constitutions each had been more worthless than the one before. Almost any kind of a constitution will serve an enlightened nation which has confirmed political habits, if it chooses to support a fundamental law not hostile to them; and none, however ingenious, can stand before recalcitrant populations. The Revolutionary constitutions of France, excepting perhaps that of 1791, were alike feeble; and in the stress applied to the one democratic land of Europe by her dynastic enemies all around, they were not worth the paper and ink used to record them. Under each had developed a pure despotism of one kind or another, on the plea that in war there must be a single head, either an executive committee or an executive man. These persons or person had, on pleas of necessity or expediency, gradually arrogated to the executive all the powers of government, befooling the people more or less completely by the specious formalities of various kinds through which the popular will was supposed to find expression. No one understood this fact better than Napoleon Bonaparte; and since it seemed that the supreme power had to be in the hands of some one man or clique, he was easily tempted to grasp it for himself when it became clear that the profligate and dishonest Directory had run its course. He did not make the situation, but he used it. History does not record that the French nation was shocked or discouraged by the events of the eighteenth of Brumaire; on the contrary, the occurrences in Paris and at St. Cloud seemed commonplace to a storm-tossed people, and the results were welcomed by the majority in every class.

The reasons for this general satisfaction varied, of course; for the conservative and progressive royalists, the conservative and radical republicans of every stripe, had widely different expectations as to the next act in the drama. But the chief actor was concerned only for himself and the nation; partizans he neither honored nor feared, except as he was anxious not to be identified with them. To him, as a man of the people, it seemed that in the Revolution the third estate had asserted itself; that the third estate must be pacified; that the third estate must be prosperous; that the third estate, for all these purposes, needed only to be confirmed in their simple theory of government, which was that the power could be delegated by them to any one fit to wield it, and this once done, the delegate might without harm to the state be left undisturbed to manage the public business, while the people should give their undivided attention to their private affairs. How successful the Consulate was in this respect is universally known and admitted. With consummate cleverness the First Consul summoned to his assistance all the giants of his time, whether they were scholars with their theories and knowledge, administrators with their tact and experience, political managers with their easy consciences and oiled feathers, or skilful demagogues with their greedy followers and insatiate self-interest. These he either enticed or bullied into his service, according as he read their characters; a few—a very few—like Barère, he found obdurate, and drove into provincial exile. At no time did he make a finer display of his astounding capacity for molding strong men by his still stronger will than during the early days of the Consulate; and the manifest reason for his success was that he had a fine instinct for character and for putting the right man in the right place.

What he thus accomplished has been told. The foundations he then laid rest solid to-day; the now antiquated edifice he erected on them, though altered and repaired, still retains its identity. The Revolution had overthrown the old régime completely, and the ruins of society were without form and void. From this chaos Napoleon painfully gathered the substantial materials of a new structure, and out of these reconstructed the family, the state, and the church. He revived the domestic spirit, made marriage a solid institution, and reëstablished parental authority while destroying parental despotism. In civil society he restored the right of property and fixed the sanctity of contract, thus assuring respect for the individual and the ascendancy of the law. The finances he reformed by an equitable system of taxation, and by the establishment of an ingenious treasury system comparable to that devised by Alexander Hamilton for the United States. In the Concordat he went as far, probably, as France could then go in emancipating religion and the church; Protestantism has prospered under the regulations he laid down, and by his treatment of the Jews they have been changed from despised and down-trodden social freebooters into prosperous and patriotic citizens. Upon every class of men then living he imposed by an iron will a system of his own. The leading survivors of Jacobinism, extreme royalists, moderate republicans, proscribers and proscribed, men of the bourgeoisie—all bowed to his sway and accepted his rewards. It is said that they yielded to the superior force of his police and his pretorians. Be it so. The fivefold police system he established was a system of checks and counter-checks within itself, within the administration, and even within the army—a body without which, as he firmly believed, the beginnings of social transformation could not be made. He professed, and no doubt honestly, that he would divest himself of this police service as opportunity served, and deluded both himself and his followers into the belief that the process was almost complete before the close of his era. Through the perspective of a century we can see the faults of Napoleon's plan. The Gallic Church is still Roman, in spite of his intention that the Roman Church should become French; the extreme centralization of his administrative system still throttles local free government and makes both oligarchic rule and political revolution easier in France than in any other free land; the educational scheme which he formed, although more fully changed than any other of his institutions, and but recently embarked, let us hope, on a course for ultimate independence, nevertheless suffers in its present complete dependence on state support, and in the consequent absence of private personal enthusiasm which might make its separate universities and schools rich in opportunities and strong in the loyalty of their sons. But we must remember that the Consulate was a hundred years since, and that for its day it wrought so beneficently that Bonaparte, First Consul, remains one of the foremost among all lawgivers and statesmen. And that, too, precisely for the reasons which some cite as condemning him. He took the revolutionary ideas of political, civil, and religious emancipation: with these he commingled both his own sound sense and the experience of advisers from every class, realizing as much of civil liberty and good order as appears to have been practical at the moment.

But in one respect he failed miserably, and that failure vitiated much of the substantial gain which seemed to have been made. He failed in curbing his own ambition. The majestic ridge of his achievement was the verge of the precipice over which he fell. In the first place, his signal success as a lawgiver was due entirely to the dazzling splendors of his victories. Marengo was the climax to a series of such achievements as had not so far been wrought on the tented field within the bounds of French history. It is easy to assert that the French were intoxicated because they were French: there is not the slightest reason to suppose that any other nation under similar circumstances would have behaved differently. The Seven Years' War turned the heads of the English people completely, and they lost their American colonies in consequence; Rome lost her political liberty when she became mistress not only of the Latin, but of the Greek and Oriental shores of the Mediterranean; the distant military expeditions of Alexander the Great prepared the fall of his ill-assorted empire. In each case the careful student will admit that social exaltation was the forerunner of division and of subsequent despotism in some form. Even in the little states of Greece and southern Italy the tyrants always arose from the disintegration of legal government, and by the assertion of some form of power—mind, money, or military force.

It was, therefore, as a military despot that the First Consul promulgated beneficent codes, founded an enduring jurisprudence, created an efficient magistracy, and established social order. In this process he completed the work of the Revolution by exalting the third estate to ascendancy in the nation. The whole work, therefore, was not only recognized as his in the house of every French burgher: he was considered at every fireside to be the consummator of the Revolution for which France had so long suffered in an agony of bloody sweat. Was it therefore any wonder that not only he himself, but even the most enlightened leaders of European thought, considered the safety and renovation of European society to depend upon the extension of his work? It is hard for us to appreciate this, because in France Napoleon's institutions have remained almost as he left them, and well-nigh stationary, while for a century the processes of ruthless reform have been continuously working in other European lands, and some neighboring peoples have outstripped the French in the matter of a national unity consistent with local freedom. The First Consul felt that in order to become great he had been forced to become strong; we can understand that he could easily deceive himself into concluding that in order to be greater he must become stronger. It was in these days that he exclaimed, in the intimacy of familiar intercourse: "I feel the infinite in me." Thereafter democracy in any form, even the mildest, was offensive. Such men as Roederer were sent to Naples, Berg—anywhere out of France. The times were not far removed from those of the beneficent despots, except that this one ruled, not by hereditary divine right, but by military force. Bonaparte's imperfect training in politics and history made it possible for such visions as those which now arose to haunt his brain. The beneficence he had displayed already; for despotism he had had the finest conceivable training, first among the sluggish populations of the Italian states which he had reorganized, then in the myth of Egyptian conquest which he had created and felt bound to maintain, and lastly in the national disorders of a France shuddering at the possibility of a return either to the hideous excesses of the Terror or to the intolerable abuses of ecclesiasticism and absolute monarchy.

Among other dreadful curses incident to revolution and civil war is the stimulation of fanaticism. In his seizure of the supreme power the purpose of the First Consul was justified to himself, and his procedure was rendered tolerable to the nation at large by the scandalous intrigues and complots which were hatched like cockatrices' eggs in every foul cranny of the land. The conspirators stopped at nothing: bad faith, subornation, murder of every variety, from the dagger to the bowl. This gave the First Consul his chance to become himself the arch-intriguer, and as such he overmatched all his opponents, ultramontanes, radicals, and royalists. Finally only a few unreconstructed reactionaries were left from each of these classes, who, though exhausted and panting, still had the strength to be noisy, and occasionally to make a feint of activity. But in the various localities and classes of France each of the factions had numerous silent and inactive sympathizers who had surrendered only as they felt unable to keep up the uneven conflict. The flames of the volcano were quenched, and the gulf of the crater was bridged by a crust, but the lava of sedition boiled and seethed below. It is a well-known nostrum for civil dissension to stir up foreign conflict, and then to call upon the patriotism of men from all parties. To this the First Consul dared not openly resort. In fact, the indications are that if his enemies in France and his foes abroad had consented peaceably to the fulfilment of his now manifest ambitions, he would himself have been glad enough to secure without further fighting what he had gained by war, and to extend the influence of a Bonapartist France by steady encroachments rather than by exhausting hostilities. The word of every man has exactly the value which his character gives it, and treaties are worth the good faith of those who make them, not a tittle more. Neither of the parties to the general peace was exhausted, neither was really earnest. It was a bellicose age: war was then in the air, as peace is now. The rupture of the treaty made at Amiens was quite as much the work of George III as it was of Bonaparte the First Consul, and the two nations over which they ruled were easily led to renew the struggle. Nothing goes to prove that there was long premeditation on the part of either; but at the time and since, were it not for the widespread distrust in Bonaparte's character, popular opinion would have put the blame of renewed war more upon his opponent than on him. Thus far the angel and the devil which struggle for possession of every man had waged a fairly even conflict, and the blame and praise of what is stigmatized as Bonaparte's conduct must be meted out to his foes in even measure. He and his times had interacted one upon the other to a remarkably even degree. But once launched on the career of personal aggrandizement, every hindrance to consuming ambition was ruthlessly cast aside. Until 1812 the responsibility for inordinate bloodshed is all his own.

It is needless to dwell upon the period of the Empire in order to study Napoleon's character. It shines forth effulgent, but noxious. He remained personally what he had always been—imperious, laborious, unprincipled; but, on the other hand, kindly, generous, sensitive to the popular movements. His thirst for power became predominant; his lavish contempt for men and money displayed the recklessness of a desperate parvenu; his passion for war burst all its bounds. Personal ambition eclipsed principle, expediency, shrewdness—in short, every quality which makes for self-preservation. The reason was not conscious despair, but unconscious desperation. Politically he had fought and won an easy but a decisive battle. Imperialism was firmly seated. The behavior of the French people was natural enough, but they lent themselves to his purposes with complete surrender. In this the world learned a lesson which should never be forgotten: that democracy is an excellent workhorse, but a poor charger; a good hack, but an untrustworthy racer. The interest of the plain man is in his daily life, his family, his business, his advancement. He cannot be an expert in foreign or domestic politics, in public law, or in warfare; expertness requires the exclusive devotion of a lifetime. Make the common person a theorist, and he is an ardent democrat, but a poor administrator. Hence the necessity in transition epochs for a wise constitution. It was not difficult to convince the French burgher that, all other forms of democratic administration having had a chance and having failed in times of war, the only one so far untried—that of delegating power to a single superior man—should have a fair trial, the more as the excellent man was at hand. Even in times of peace the hard-worked citizen either neglects his political duties altogether, or, performing them in a thoughtless routine, longs for some one he can trust to do his thinking and acting: in war, as far as we have had the opportunity to observe in ancient and modern times, his imperialism is avowed, and he demands a dictator. We have no reason to suppose that there is any democracy which could outlast twenty years of a herculean struggle for national life or death, and such the Franco-English wars which introduced the last century seemed to the Frenchman of that time to be.