CHAPTER XXIV.

ST HELENA.

 

 

The abdication of Napoleon, his retirement from Paris to Malmaison, and his flight to Rochefort, have been related in a previous chapter. When Napoleon arrived at that port (July 3,1815), he found the coast narrowly watched by British sail, and hazard upon every side. For ten days he waited to balance chances, conscious of a certain loss of elasticity in himself, listening to the counsels of others, himself indifferent. A clandestine escape, an ignominious capture in the ballast of a Danish sloop or in an open row-boat, would have been inconsistent with an impressive close; and, after some hesitation, he rejected all desperate expedients and determined to throw himself on the generosity of the English people. On July 13 he wrote to the Prince Regent that he had terminated his political career, and that he came, like Themistocles, to seat himself at the hearth of the British nation and to claim the protection of her laws. Two days later he gave himself into the charge of Captain Maitland of the Bellerophon. He knew well that he could expect little mercy from the restored Government of France, and that the Prussians would shoot him like a dog. But England was the refuge of the homeless and the asylum of the exile. She had sheltered Paoli, the friend of his youth; she had sheltered the Bourbons, the rivals of his manhood. Out of magnanimity she might shelter him.

But the man whose ambition had wrought such disasters could not expect to be treated with leniency; and the British Government determined that Napoleon was no guest, but a prisoner of war. It was a case of policy, not of precedents; and, even if Lord Liverpool’s Cabinet had been accessible to quixotic impulses, it would have been their plain duty to suppress them in the interests of European peace. The Congress of Vienna had declared Napoleon to be an outlaw, and, in virtue of a Convention struck on August 2, 1815, the four Great Powers agreed to regard him as their common prisoner. The turn of events had devolved upon Great Britain the ungracious office of the gaoler; but Austria, Russia, and Prussia were consenting parties; and all four Powers promised to name commissioners to assure themselves of Napoleon’s presence in the place of his captivity. Meanwhile, on July 28, the British Government had decided to send their captive to St Helena. In that lonely island of the Atlantic, with its precipitous coast, its scanty harbourage, its sparse population, the great prisoner of state might be securely guarded, the more so as the East India Company, to whom the island belonged, had recently erected upon it a complete system of semaphores. The climate was reported to be salubrious; and in St Helena Napoleon might enjoy a larger measure of liberty than any government would then have been prepared to concede to him in Europe. It was a hard fate, but brighter than an Austrian fortress, and gentler than the doom of Murat and of Ney.

On August 7 he was removed to H.M.S. Northumberland, which, under the command of Admiral Sir George Cockbum, was instructed to convey him to his destination. His suite consisted of twenty-five persons, including Count Montholon and General Gourgaud, who had served as adjutants in the last campaign; General Bertrand, who had controlled his household in Elba; Count de Las Cases, once a royal emigre, now one of the most attached of his adherents; and Dr Barry O’Meara, the surgeon of the Bellerophon, who, at Napoleon’s request and with the consent of the British Government, was allowed to act as his medical attendant. Montholon and Bertrand were accompanied by their wives, Las Cases by his son. On October 17, at the hour of eight in the evening, after a passage of ninety-five days, Napoleon landed at Jamestown. As the house destined for his reception was not yet ready, he took up his residence at the Briars, a villa belonging to a merchant named Balecombe, where he spent some weeks in pleasant and familiar intercourse with the family of his host. In December the exiles moved into Long­wood, a low wooden building on the wind-swept plateau, far above the prying curiosity of the port. It was here that the last scene in Napoleon’s life-drama was enacted.

For the general history of Europe the captivity at St Helena possesses a double interest. Not only did it invest the career of the fallen hero with an atmosphere of martyrdom and pathos which gave to it a new and distinct appeal, but it enabled him to arrange a pose before the mirror of history, to soften away all that had been ungracious and hard and violent, and to draw in firm and authoritative outline a picture of his splendid achievements and liberal designs. The Napoleonic legend has been a force in the politics of Europe; and the legend owes much to the artifice of the exiles. The great captain, hero of adventures wondrous as the Arabian Nights, passes over the mysterious ocean to his lonely island and emerges transfigured as in some ennobling mirage. He shares the agonies of Prometheus, benefactor of humanity, chained to his solitary rock; his spirit is with Marcus Aurelius, moving in the serene orbit of humane and beneficent wisdom. The seed sown from St Helena fell upon fruitful soil and was tended by devout hands.

Carrel, the great Liberal journalist of the July monarchy, claims Napoleon, on the ground of the Longwood conversations, as the friend of the Republic which he overturned. Quinet sings of him as of some vague and romantic embodiment of the democratic spirit:

“J’ai couronné le peuple en France, en Allemagne;

Je I'ai fait gentilhomme autant que Charlemagne ;

J'ai donnédes aïeux a la foule sans nom;

Des nations partout fai gravé le blason.”

The heir of the Napoleonic House, Louis Bonaparte, son of the ex-King of Holland, knew well how to exploit the democratic elements in his uncle’s career. In 1831 he was secretly negotiating with Republican leaders in Paris; in 1832 he published a statement in his Reveries politiques that his principles were “entirely republican.” In 1839 a slender volume came from the same pen, entitled Idées Napoleoniennes, which contained the whole essence of the exilic literature and the whole programme of the liberal Empire. The Siècle, a Bonapartist organ, spoke in 1840 of “the sublime agony of St Helena, longer than the agony of Christ, and no less resigned”; and in the haze of sentiment men lost sight of the elementary facts of Napoleon’s career. “The thought of Napoleon at St Helena,” say the editors of the official Correspondence (vol. xxix), “is a thought of emancipation for humanity, of democratic progress, of the application of the great principles of the Revolution”; and this was the pretext and apology for the Second Empire, the Government which, beginning with a cannonade in the Boulevards, ended with the capitulation of Sedan and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine.

Exile is in itself a form of martyrdom; and the exiles of Longwood ate their bread in genuine sorrow. As Las Cases remarked, “ The details of St Helena are unimportant; to be there at all is the great grievance.” A little company of French gentlemen and ladies, accustomed to the stirring life of a brilliant capital, found itself pitched on a desolate island, far from friends and home and all the great movement of the world. The attendants of Napoleon were not cast in the stoical mould; and, even if considerations of policy had not been involved, temperament would have inclined them to exaggerate minor discomforts, to strain against the restrictions of the governor, to shudder at the rocks and ravines, to condemn the rain when it was rainy, the sun when it was sunny, and the wind when it was windy, to compare the sparse gum-trees of the Longwood plateau with the ample shades of Marly and St Cloud, and the rough accommodation of the Longwood house with the comforts of a well-appointed Parisian hotel. To a man like Napoleon, whose whole soul was in politics, seclusion was a kind of torture. He had no administrative occupations to absorb his energies as had been the case in Elba; and “time,” to quote his own bitter phrase, was now “his only superfluity.” To quicken all the leaden hours was a task too heavy even for his busy genius. He learnt a little English, he dictated memoirs, he played chess, he read books and newspapers, he set Gourgaud mathematical problems, and in the later half of 1819 and the earlier half of 1820 he found some solace in gardening. In the first two years of his captivity his spirits were sometimes high and even exuberant; and in the exercise of his splendid intellect he must have found some genuine enjoyment. But at heart he was miserable, spiting himself like a cross child, and allowing petty insults to fester within him. Now he was calm, proud, and grand, now irritable and wayward. Even the approach of death could not purge his soul of its evil humours, and he left a legacy to Cantillon as a reward for attempting to assassinate the Duke of Wellington.

The colony of Longwood had a political object in magnifying the hardships of its position; and it has left a large literature of complaint. “Our situation here,” said Napoleon, as reported by Las Cases, “may even have its attractions. The universe is looking at us. We remain the martyrs of an immortal cause. Millions of men weep for us; our country sighs; and glory is in mourning. Adversity was wanting to my career. If I had died on the throne amid the clouds of my omnipotence I should have remained a problem to many men; today, thanks to my misfortune, they can judge of me naked as I am.” Nor was this the only advantage that might be reaped from the policy of complaint. Compassionate Whigs in England, learning the tale of hardships, the bad food, the damp house, the intercepted letters, the ostentatious cordon of sentinels, would rise and denounce the Government in Parliament. At the voice of Lord Holland the heart of the country would be stirred; and Napoleon would be summoned back to Europe on the crest of the Whig reaction. Even if this hope failed, still it would be wise to disparage the good name of England. The Bourbons owed everything to Great Britain, but the rivalry between France and England was older than the Bourbons; and the story of petty indignities heaped upon her greatest captain by a British Government would be accepted in France as a token that he too had suffered for the old cause, and that his dynasty would never forget it.

Holding the general conviction that Napoleon was far too dangerous to be allowed abroad, and having some reason to believe that plots were on foot to effect his rescue, Lord Liverpool’s Cabinet properly determined to keep a close watch on St Helena. Their precautions may have been excessive—and excessive the Duke of Wellington thought them—their suspicions over-done, their regulations too minute and harassing. Obtuse the Government undoubtedly was, but it was as humane and considerate as its sense of duty would permit. The prisoner received a yearly allowance of £8,000, subsequently raised to £12,000, inhabited the second-best house in the island, was permitted to retain a numerous suite and to move freely without an escort within a circuit of twelve miles. He might gratify his taste for books and newspapers and music, and he might ride or walk outside the radius with a British officer in attendance.

These are not the provisions of an inhuman Government; and the man who was sent out to administer them was not inhuman. Sir Hudson Lowe, who assumed sole charge of the island on April 14, 1816, was an officer with a respectable record, though not one which would be likely to commend him to Napoleon. He had led a regiment of Corsican rangers, participated in the siege of Toulon, and brought the news of Napoleon’s abdication to London. In five stormy interviews, all held within the first four months of Lowe’s arrival, Napoleon poured out the vials of his wrath upon the luckless governor, whose chief crimes consisted in his refusal to extend the twelve miles’ limit or to forward a letter of complaint to the Prince Regent save through the ordinary ministerial channels. After this, Napoleon never suffered the “Sicilian thief-taker” to approach him, or attempted to revise his first and hasty estimate. It may be conceded that Lowe was a martinet, that he was deficient in graciousness and tact, and that he ultimately came to suffer from a mania of suspicion. To be a good regimental officer is one thing, to discharge a delicate political mission is another. Lowe was full of loyal punctilio, the home Government, with almost incredible pedantry, had insisted that Napoleon should be refused the Imperial title and known only by the designation of General Bonaparte. A wise governor would have taken good care to minimise the effect of so stupid a regulation as soon as he had ascertained that it was violently objected to. Lowe on the other hand administered the rule with military exactitude. He intercepted a book from Europe because it was directed to “the Emperor,” and recommended the officers of the 20th regiment to decline a copy of Coxe’s life of Marlborough presented to them by Napoleon during his last illness because it contained the Imperial name on the title-page. So wondrous an exhibition of obtuse literalism has rarely been afforded. But there was no inhumanity in Lowe. He was genuinely solicitous for the creature comforts of the exiles.

It was, however, part of the policy of Longwood to court martyrdom and to advertise woes. When Napoleon failed to obtain a relaxation of the twelve miles’ limit, he declared that he would not ride out at all; when he was reminded of the need of economy, he ordered his plate to be broken up, as if the wicked gaoler had driven him to starvation’s brink. On October 9, 1816, some new and more stringent regulations arrived from England, which had probably been suggested by intelligence received in London in the previous August, to the effect that three hundred men had set sail from Baltimore to attempt a rescue. The limit was contracted to eight miles, and the sentinels were drawn in close to the house at sunset, so that the exiles were deprived of the full enjoyment of the coolest and most delicious hours of the day. The new restrictions (which were subsequently relaxed) were certainly unpleasant; and it is not surprising that they should have provoked a protest.

In 1817 a thin volume was published in London entitled Letters from, the Cape of Good Hope in reply to Mr Warden. The letters, which purported to be written by an Englishman, were in reality translated from the French; and the original draft was secretly dictated by Napoleon to Las Cases. They were designed to impress the British public with the sufferings of the exiles, and to furnish a defence for those episodes in Napoleon’s career which had proved most repugnant to British opinion—the execution of the Duc d’Enghien, the death of Captain Wright, the treatment of the Spanish Bourbons, and the return from Elba. It was represented that the new code of rules was worthy of Botany Bay; that Napoleon could not go out into his garden without being spied on by a red-coat; that he was not allowed even to exchange a word with a native; that the climate of St Helena was fatal to health, and the food mediocre; that for many months Napoleon had not left his four ill-built, unwholesome little rooms; and that the British Government was incurring a cost of £20,000 a year to keep a prisoner within four walls under a tropical sun. It was a skilful demonstration, but the Tory garrison showed no sign of distress, and the Quarterly blew its loudest note of defiance. At the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (November 21,1818) the representatives of Russia, Austria, and Prussia formally testified their approval of the new regulations.

The Emperor’s autobiography had been commenced at the Tuileries and St Cloud, where he had dictated accounts of several of his Italian battles to General Bertrand and given orders that plans and maps should be drawn to illustrate his Italian and Egyptian campaigns. 'Hie work was resumed at St Helena with such materials as the Emperor was able to gather round him; and the story of Brumaire and the Provisional Consulate, of the early exploits in Italy, Egypt, and Syria, of the return from Elba and the Hundred Days, was written in a connected form at Napoleon’s dictation, together with a critical account of the Hohenlinden and Waterloo campaigns. Chapters were added upon the rights of neutrals, the battle of Copenhagen, and the assassination of Paul I. Four notes were dictated on Lacroix’s Memoires pour server a l’histoire de Saint Domingue, and six notes on de Pradt’s Les Quatres Concordats; but, with the single exception of Waterloo, no unlucky campaign was recorded, and the account of Waterloo was not a record but an apology. For a moment, in 1817, Napoleon seems to have contemplated a narrative of the Russian expedition; but the plan was soon dropped for lack of materials, and a projected history of the Revolutionary Convention shared the same fate. The choice of episodes was not fortuitous. The Memoires were designed to exhibit Napoleon as the soldier of the Republic, and to clear his military reputation from the stain of his last resounding defeat.

Sainte-Beuve, the finest of critics, has recognised the literary quality of the St Helena writings, the prompt imperious brevity, the exquisite clearness, the occasional beauties of sentiment and eloquence. It is natural to compare the record of the Egyptian and Syrian campaigns, where Napoleon depicts himself at once as soldier, statesman, and discoverer, with another splendid fragment of military autobiography, the Commentaries of the Gallic War. The two stories have the same lucidity, the same gift of perspective, the same command of professional technique, the same wide scope of observation, the same close adherence to detail. Caesar has more formal eloquence; Napoleon has more romance, more passion, more vibration. But, while each wrote to defend his policy and his military reputation, Caesar had no interest in con­cealing or confusing the truth.

Yet the formal memoirs, however strongly conceived and carefully executed, are the least interesting portion of the St Helena retrospect. Napoleon was a voluble talker; and, when the long tension of his political career was relaxed, his restless mind poured itself out upon all the incidents of his wonderful life. It is true that he desired a certain reading of his career to be accepted, and that he more than once prompted his faithful followers to record his remarks; but he was far too mobile to maintain a steady pose. He was not a chilly man sitting down to falsify a dull life, but a child of nature, frank, passionate, impetuous, full of sudden turns and ruses which carried him far beyond the boundaries of his set apology. The schemer’s mind, constant to its old habit, schemes for the past, as it had formerly schemed for the future; and we cannot tell whether the plans which he attributes to himself had actually been in his mind. A man of such a temperament could talk neither sober autobiography nor sustained deceit. And so, side by side with the official legend, the Moniteur of exile, deferential to a moral judgment whose power it uneasily apprehends but never understands, we have the fragments of spontaneous talk, sometimes shrewd and lively, sometimes grand and eloquent, sometimes brutal, sometimes kindly, always and through every mood vivid and unmistakable.

Napoleon shrewdly saw that the forces of reaction were spreading over Europe, and that the yoke of the Bourbons would soon become intolerable to France. Some day the King of Rome would have his chance. In the sombre gloom of clericalism and privilege and military impotence, men would point back to the bright vision of a Liberal Empire, which had been based on social equality and religious tolerance, which had made France the arbitress of Europe, and Paris the centre of European civilisation. Then France would turn to her great, calm, and beneficent Prometheus, would gather his lightest words and descry his true intentions. She would learn that he alone had understood and adored her; that he loved peace, but was driven by wicked foreigners into ceaseless war; that, although he had showered golden gifts upon her, his cornucopia was still full of the manifold blessings of prosperity and con­stitutional rule which he intended to bestow upon Europe after the conclusion of a general peace. She would read his own authentic accounts of campaigns which he had fought as the soldier of the Republic, and, perusing his story of Waterloo, would recover faith in his supreme mastery of war.

“The system of government,” said Napoleon once to O’Meara,  must be adapted to the national temperament and to circumstances. In the first place France required a strong government. While I was at the head of it, I may say that France was in the same condition as Rome when a dictator was declared necessary for the salvation of the Republic. A series of coalitions against her existence was formed by your gold amongst all the powerful nations of Europe. To resist successfully, it was necessary that all the energies of the country should be at the disposal of the chief. I never conquered unless in my own defence. Europe never ceased to make war upon France and her principles. We had to strike down others or to be ourselves struck down. Between the parties that so long agitated France I was like a rider seated on an unruly horse, who always wanted to swerve either to the right or to the left; and to make him keep a straight course I was obliged to let him feel the bridle occasionally. In quieter times my dictature would have finished, and I should have com­menced my constitutional reign. Even as it was, with a coalition always opposing me, either secret or public, avowed or denied, there was more equality in France than in any other country in Europe. One of my grand objects was to render education accessible to everybody. I caused every institution to be formed upon a plan which offered instruction to the public either gratis or at a rate so moderate as not to be beyond the means of the peasant. The museums were thrown open to the canaille. My canaille would have become the best educated of the world. All my exertions were directed to illuminating the mass of the nation instead of brutalising them by ignorance and superstition.... There never was a king who was more the sovereign of the people than I was. I always prided myself upon being the man of the people... Those English who are lovers of liberty will one day lament with tears having gained the battle of Waterloo. It was as fatal to the liberties of Europe as that of Philippi was to those of Rome.”

Such was the general scheme of apology. The conquests were forced upon him, but they made for the well-being of the conquered ; and the whole foreign policy was part of the great battle for light against darkness, which had been waged by Voltaire and continued by the men of the Revolution. The “grand objects” were to re-establish the kingdom of Poland as a barrier against “the barbarians of the north,” and to endow Spain with a constitution, which would have crushed privilege and super­stition and opened a full career to talent. He admits that the Spanish War destroyed him; but the “Peninsula could not have been left to the machinations of the English, to the intrigues, the hopes, the pretexts of the Bourbons.” The interview of Bayonne was not an ambush but “ an immense coup d’état.'" He had never mingled in the intrigues of the Spanish Court, had never broken engagements with the Spanish princes, and had used no duplicity to draw them to Bayonne. “When I saw them at my feet and could judge by myself of their incapacity, I pitied the lot of a great people, and seized the unique occasion which fortune presented me to regenerate Spain, to rescue her from England, and to unite her entirely to France.” Again, if he had been successful in crossing the Channel, he would have founded independent republics in England and Ireland. “I would have dethroned the House of Hanover, abolished the nobility, proclaimed liberty, fraternity, equality... .Your canaille would have been on my side, knowing that I am a man of the people and that I spring from the people myself.” His designs in Italy were equally liberal. “I purposed, when I had a second son, as I had reason to hope, to make him King of Italy, with Rome for his capital, uniting all Italy, Naples, and Sicily into one kingdom.” The three great obstacles to Italian unity had been the foreign dynasties, the spirit of locality, and the residence of the Pope at Rome. In the short span of fifteen years all had been removed, “broken by the great movement of the French Empire.” The Pope was at Fontainebleau; and, but for the Russian campaign, the headquarters of the Catholic religion would have been permanently transferred to Paris. All had been prepared for the proclamation of Italian independence upon the birth of the second son. It was settled that Prince Eugene should act as Viceroy during the minority.

It was true that mistakes had been made in Germany. The King of Prussia should have been deprived of his kingdom after Jena. “ After Friedland I should have taken Silesia and given it to Saxony. Had I done this, given a free constitution, and delivered the peasants from feudal anarchy, they would have been contented.” He thought that he should have declared Hungary independent, that he should have sub­divided Austria, that he should at least have “devoured” Prussia before starting on his Moscow campaign. Still, the Confederation of the Rhine and the kingdom of Westphalia, the grand-duchy of Warsaw and the crippled state of the Hohenzollerns, were sufficient evidence of French predominance beyond the Rhine.

The problems of the Balkan Peninsula, of Asia, Africa, and America had not been solved; and here it was necessary to acknowledge some failures and errors of judgment. The idea of the policy, however, was large, magnificent, and liberal. Egypt was the key to the East; and France, once mistress of Egypt, would have been able to unlock the treasures of India. She would have pierced the Isthmus of Suez, and, in alliance with Russia, Persia, and the Mahrattas, broken the British power in the East. “ Egypt once in possession of the French, farewell India to the English.” The possession of Egypt was also designed to secure a further advantage. The Ottoman Empire was corrupt to the core; and though, on its inevitable dissolution, part of the spoil would go to Russia, the remainder would fall to France, the mistress of Egypt. During the negotiations subsequent to the Peace of Tilsit, the partition of Turkey had been frequently discussed between Napoleon and Alexander. But, though at first Napoleon was pleased with the Russian proposals because he thought “ it would enlighten the world to drive those brutes the Turks out of Europe,” mature reflexion convinced him that the plan would endanger the equilibrium and the peace of Europe. “I considered that the barbarians of the North were already too strong, and probably in the course of time would overwhelm all Europe, as I now think they will.” Accordingly it became his object to bridle the Muscovite barbarians in the interests of European civilisation. On the one hand, he would lure them far into the East; on the other hand he would erect strong bulwarks in the west and south, a national kingdom of Poland, a group of German States under French suzerainty, a French Italy, a French Egypt, possibly also a French Constantinople. Thus he would have accomplished a work analogous to that of Leo I and Charles Martel, of Charlemagne and Otto I, who saved the fabric of Greek and Latin civilisation from destruction at barbarian hands.

The great design had failed, and Europe would live to regret it; but the failure had been the result of the incapacity of subordinates, of incalculable accident, of the perverse policy of England, and was in no way inherent in the design itself. An admiral’s error had lost the battle of the Nile; the chance stroke of an assassin had destroyed the general who could have preserved Egypt for France. And what benefits might not fifty years of French rule have secured to Egypt! A thousand dykes would have distributed the waters of the Nile; sugar and cotton, rice and indigo, would have been cultivated; and the commerce of the Indies would have resumed its ancient route. “After fifty years of possession, civilisation would have spread into the interior of Africa by the Sennaar, Abyssinia, Darfour, and the Fezzan; several great nations would be called to enjoy the benefits of the arts, the sciences, the religion of the true God, for it is from Egypt that the people of central Africa must receive light and happiness.” An elaborate argument was designed to show that the French army could have maintained itself in the country without help from home.

In the West Indies Napoleon had to confess to the miscarriage of his plans. He told O’Meara that he should have declared San Domingo free, and that he should have acknowledged the black government; for, if this had been done, England would have lost her West Indian colonies. However, in the notes appended to Lacroix’s memoirs, he takes a precisely opposite line and defends the policy of the expedition, ascribing its failure to the mistakes of Le Clerc, the intrigues of the English, and the ravages of yellow fever. He had found it necessary to permit the slave ­trade and to maintain the institution of slavery in Martinique and the De de France, but these decisions had not disturbed the course of events in San Domingo. Slavery was founded upon antipathy of colour; and antipathy of colour could only be overcome by polygamy. He had therefore held several consultations with theologians with the view of preparing a measure to authorise polygamy in the French colonies, “restraining the number of wives to two, one white, one black.” This was the solution which the legislator would be bound to adopt, whenever it should be thought desirable to enfranchise the blacks in the French colonies. The experiment was never made, for the naval war stripped France of her islands; yet in the Continental System a compensation was provided, which in time would have made Europe independent of colonial imports. In two or three years beetroot-sugar would have been sold as cheaply in the French market as the cane-sugar of the tropics.

Nor was this the only compensation for the temporary hardships of war. Napoleon had made France the centre of a federal empire; and it was his intention that Paris should be the capital of Europe, “unique, incomparable,” adorned with all the treasures of art and science, the seat of the Papacy and of the College of Cardinals, the centre of the foreign missions, the home of the University of France, the seminary of all the ideas and thoughts which were to sway the course of European civilisation. In order “ to facilitate the fusion and uniformity of the federal parts of the Empire ” he had designed, in the Institute of Meudon, a school in which all the princes of the Imperial House would have received a common education. Each prince would bring with him “ten or twelve children more or less of his own age and belonging to the first families of his country,” with results which might easily be predicted. French principles would take root in all the dependencies; Italy, Spain, Germany, and Holland would attach themselves more closely to the French connexion; foreign sovereigns would clamour for the admission of their sons; and, looking back upon the friendships of early youth, the rulers of Europe would be more likely to keep the peace.

Great as had been his ambition, his course was untarnished by crime or corruption. Surveying the past from St Helena he declares that he is astounded at his moderation. After one or two preliminary volleys, he ordered the guns of Vendemiaire to be charged with blank cartridge. Nothing would have been easier for him than to have procured the death of the French and Spanish Bourbons; yet the temptation was rejected. He would probably have pardoned the Duc d’Enghien, if Talleyrand had not intercepted a letter in which the Duke offered his services to the new Government of France. “My secret thought,” he said on one occasion, “ was to give him the Constable’s sword so as to be quit of the emigres? He had never taken a bribe; he had never bought a vote or a party by promise of place or power; he had found great dilapidations; he had left administrative purity. Council of State, Tribunate, Senate, all were pure and irreproachable. As for himself he had never cared to amass wealth. “J’avais le gout de la fondation et non celui de la proprieté. Ma proprieté à moi etait dans la gloire et la celebrité."

As to the solidity of his great social experiment, the creation of the nobility, he was under no illusions. In a singularly penetrating way he explained one day to Las Cases that the French Revolution had destroyed the social charms of the home, and the ease, luxury, and wealth which form the basis of cultivated enjoyment. In consequence of this, society took its pleasure in public entertainments. The throne had also ceased to be a lordship, a seigneurie, and had become an office ; and the whole tone of a modem Court differed from that of the Courts of the ancien régime. The modem Court had less social influence, for the influence of Courts can only penetrate the nation through the medium of an aristocracy. He had to be cautious about introducing men of the ancien régime to the Court; “for every time I touched this cord there was a trembling of spirit, as with a horse when the reins are pulled in too tight. I have made princes and dukes, but I could not make real nobles.” In twenty years, however, all would have been well, for he had intended to intermarry the new blood with the old.

He recurred to this subject at St Helena, saying that the creation of the nobility was one of his greatest, his most complete, his most happy ideas. He had three objects in view, all of which would in time have been attained—to reconcile France with Europe, to amalgamate the new France with the old, and to annihilate the feudal nobility. He claimed that his national titles would have re-established that equality which the feudal nobility had proscribed: “ for parchments I substituted fine actions,” forgetting apparently that fine actions are not transmitted from father to son. It was clear, however, that he had not succeeded in winning the Faubourg St Germain. “ J'ai fait trop, ou trop peut” he said one day to Las Cases—enough to discontent the democrats and not enough to attract the royalists. “If on the return of the emigres I had attached them to myself, the aristocracy would readily have adored me.” He goes on to speculate upon all that he would have done to bind the ancienne noblesse to his throne. His first thought, “his true inclination,” when seeking for a second wife, was to marry a daughter of one of the old French Houses. He would have adopted the daughters of the Montmorencys, the Nesles, the Clissons, and married them to foreign sovereigns. “For the good and the magic of aristocracy consist in antiquity and in time, the sole things which I was unable to create.” Talleyrand, his usual scapegoat, prevented advances to the emigres, and his councillors persuaded him to the Austrian marriage; so the Faubourg St Germain was never conciliated. We must remember that on this occasion he was talking to a royalist.

The Imperial system might be accused of having stifled liberty and injured education. To such allegations Napoleon replies that his work was a torso, not a statue. The extreme centralisation of the prefectoral system was essentially transitional, “a weapon of war”, and would in time have given way to “our peace establishment, our local institutions”; and here he sketches out a system of local government by unpaid magistrates somewhat after the English plan. Again, the conscription, far from harming education, was designed to benefit it. “Conscription is the eternal root of a nation; it purifies morality and trains habits”; and the virtues engendered by the military life would in time have been fortified by the instruction given in the regimental schools which the Emperor had planned in order that the conscripts might continue their studies. He had also devised a scheme for the improvement of clerical education. The elements of agriculture, medicine, and law were to be added to the theological course provided for those intending to take Orders. Dogma and controversy would insensibly have become rarer in the pulpit; and, while the cure would preach “pure morality” in church, he would be in a position to give useful counsels to his parishioners on practical affairs.

He denied that the Senate was servile; he asserted that the Tribunate was useless and expensive, and that its suppression was sanctioned by the public voice. “J’ai toujours rnarché avec l’opinion de cinq ou six millions d'hommes." There could be no doubt as to the solidity and excellence of his finance. “Never,” he said to Gourgaud, “has anyone brought more order and more light into financial accounts than I. In part my good measures are due to my knowledge of mathematics, to my clear ideas on everything.” At another time he spoke of his Code as the “arch of salvation,” as his “ title to the benedictions of posterity.” These were legitimate vaunts; and the noblest monument to his memory, as he once told Montholon, would not be a catalogue of the exploits of “ the most audacious soldier in the history of war,” but a collection of the thoughts which he uttered in the Council of State, and the instructions which he issued to his ministers, and a list of the public works which were undertaken during the period of his rule.

There were moments in which bravado and apology were cast aside, and he saw himself and the world truly. “ None but myself ever did me any harm,” he said once to O’Meara, “I was my only enemy”; and again to Montholon, “I stretched the cord too much. I could not wait to finish the Spanish business before I crossed the Niemen.” But of con­trition for bloodshed and treasure spent and lives broken there is no trace. He broods over his failure and tries to explain how he should have averted it, now saying that he should have shot Fouche after Waterloo and sent twenty deputies to the scaffold, now that with a man like Turenne to help him he would have made himself master of the world. In unguarded moods he shows how little he cared for the principles of the Liberal Empire. Had he conquered at Waterloo, he would have sent the Chambers packing. If he were back again in France, he would close the University and entrust the education of the country to the priests. “I too have suffered from the mania for propagating the sciences, but my experience has corrected it. We want cultivators, workmen, manufacturers, not philosophers.”

But a reconciliation of his inconsistencies is not to be attempted. As the mood seized him he could be brutal, cynical, obscurantist; and who can keep the chart of his moods and thoughts? There is not a noble sentiment which he will not pitch overboard when the scowling storm is on him; there is hardly a proposition which stands unrefuted in the confused effulgence of his contradictory apologies. At one moment he loudly proclaims his beneficence, and then suddenly the notes of the edifying anthem are stopped, and we hear the chagrined cry of the baffled schemer laying the blame of failure on his confederates. On the whole he bore his hour of trial with a certain noble courage, cheering his despondent and irritable companions, and himself setting an example of resolute work. But, as hope after hope went out and disease gained on his constitution, his giant energy flagged. At the opening of 1821 it was clear that he had not long to live; and after the end of March he scarcely rose save to change his bed. The disease which slew him was the same which had slain his father, cancer in the stomach; but he bore the pain with patient fortitude and full knowledge. When Bertrand asked him what conduct his friends should pursue and what end they should aim at, he answered with fine magnanimity, “The interests of France and the glory of the Fatherland. I can see no other end.” The last faint sounds caught from his lips as he expired on May 5, 1821, are said to have been, “France, armée, tête d’armée, Josephine'"', and so in the midst of the great hurricane he passed out of life, charging at the head of his ghostly legions. De Tocqueville has written his epitaph— “He was as great as a man can be without virtue.”

Men of a conservative temper who were spectators of the downfall of the Empire were apt to see little in Napoleon’s career but a superb and maleficent explosion of human energy, the devastations of which it would be the duty of subsequent generations to repair. To them he was merely the last and the greatest of the Jacobins, the upstart captain of the revolutionary and militant democracy which had overturned the settled institutions of France and thrown its insolent challenge at the old order of Europe. Others, taking longer views of history, have been principally concerned with the fact that Napoleon was a powerful dissolvent of medieval barbarism. They think of the wars of the Empire, not merely as a great effusion of Frankish chivalry, inexhaustible, as the Crusades themselves, in audacious and pathetic extravagance, but also as one of the decisive episodes in the secular duel between the Latin and the

Teutonic nations. For the conquests of France involved the acceptance of the political system which had been fashioned in the fires of revolution; the obliteration of outworn boundaries; the destruction of the social groupings of the feudal age, noble caste, trade guild, religious order; the extension of a system of private law, as hostile to the Teutonic principle of free association as it was favourable to the Roman principle of State omnipotence. To others, again, the true significance of Napoleon lies in the fact that he made possible the national movements of the nineteenth century. He is the herald of Italian unity; and, alike by reason of the things which he destroyed and by reason of the efforts which he provoked, he takes rank as one of the makers of Germany. For the old aristocratic federalism of the Dutch he substituted the principles which govern the modem kingdom of Holland. It was one of his many policies to excite the national and inextinguishable aspirations of the Poles; and quivers of hope spread even to Serbs, Roumans, and Greeks, communicated by the mighty movements of so many men, and the sudden catastrophe of such ancient things. If South-American democracies value their independence, statues of the man who destroyed the prestige of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies might be raised, without an excessive strain on historical propriety, in the squares of Valparaiso or Buenos Ayres.

This, however, is not the aspect which chiefly impressed Englishmen. That dauntless and dogged generation, who never cried craven and never drew breath, viewed Napoleon, not with complete justification, but also not without justification, as the tyrant who respected no pledge, stopped short of no ambition, and flinched before no crime. They thought of him not as the creator of nationalities (for he created none in his lifetime), but as the destroyer of peoples and the enemy of constitutional freedom all over the world. As the men of the fifth century regarded Attila the Hun, so, with few exceptions, did the contemporaries of Pitt and Liverpool regard Napoleon. The thunders of the storm have now long died away; and we see that some precious seeds were borne upon the hurricane. Nor did they fall upon the continent of Europe alone. The maritime and colonial power of England was fortified by a war which gave us Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope, promoted the occupation of Australia, and led to the destruction of the Mahratta power in India. The sea-power of France, broken by the disorders of the Revolution, was finally shattered by the wars of the Empire. So impressive was the aggrandisement of England beyond the seas that some writers have regarded the augmentation of the British Empire as the most important result of Napoleon’s career.

What was his legacy to France? To the extravagance of his later projects France owes the loss of the Rhine frontier, which had been the earliest conquest of the revolutionary arms, and the immemorial ambition of French diplomacy. That he terminated the romance of the Revolution, that he founded a government above party, that he healed the schism in the Church, and conciliated the principles of social equality and political order—all this is acknowledged even by his enemies. To his resolute energy France owes the rapid completion and the wide reputation of her Codes; nor has any great modern community of men received so much from a single human mind. His economic legislation is open to criticism, even granting his own assumptions. Was it wise for a government resting upon the support of the peasantry to promote the growth of towns by giving high protection to manufactures? Was it statesman­like to exclude the manufactures of Italy and Germany from the French market? Was it not chimerical to suppose that Europe could be made independent of tropical produce? Socialism had been the peril which, in the eyes of the middle classes, had justified the Consulate; and socialists can find little comfort in the Civil Code. Napoleon believed in the magic of private property; and it was left for the Second Empire to legalise trade-unions. His religious policy had issues widely different from those which he intended; for a Church, pinched, policed, and bullied by the State, was inevitably thrown back upon the support of the Papacy. If the Revolution, by confiscating the Church lands, destroyed the Gallicanism beloved by St Louis and Bossuet, Napoleon promoted that modern form of Ultramontanism which wages a truceless war against the very foundations of the democratic State. The Revolution broke with religion and sowed the seeds of martyrdom. Napoleon exploited it, and promoted at once clerical opportunism and Ultramontane zeal. The idea of a vast community, organised on a rigid plan and trained to a definite end, will always continue to fascinate minds impatient of the free and miscellaneous movements of human activity. In attempting to control all the sources of spiritual and intellectual influence in France, Napoleon essayed a task beyond the compass of any man or any government. The frontiers of liberty and authority must necessarily shift from age to age and from occasion to occasion. When Napoleon grasped the helm of State, France needed a spell of strong government. This he gave her, and more besides. He gave her a scheme of education framed to meet the needs of a military despotism. He restored the administrative centrali­sation of the ancien régime, with those improvements which the Revolution had rendered possible—a centralisation scientific, uniform, all-pervasive, untrammelled by the spirit of locality, caste, or corporation; and men trained in the Napoleonic school have worked the machine of French government ever since.