reas, _here_, each single
point requires to be _established_ separately, since no one of them
authenticates the rest. Supposing there be a state-prisoner at St.
Helena, (which, by the way, it is acknowledged many of the French
disbelieve,) how do we know who he is, or why he is confined there?
There have been state-prisoners before now, who were never guilty of
subjugating half Europe, and whose offences have been very imperfectly
ascertained. Admitting that there have been bloody wars going on for
several years past, which is highly probable, it does not follow that
the events of those wars were such as we have been told;--that
Buonaparte was the author and conductor of them;--or that such a
person ever existed. What disturbances may have taken place in the
government of the French people, we, and even nineteen-twentieths of
_them_, have no means of learning but from imperfect hearsay evidence;
and how much credit they themselves attach to that evidence is very
doubtful. This at least is certain: that a M. Berryer, a French
advocate, has published memoirs, professing to record many of the
events of the recent history of France, in which, among other things,
he states his conviction that Buonaparte's escape from Elba was
DESIGNED AND CONTRIVED BY THE ENGLISH GOVERNMENT.[22] And we are
assured by many travellers that this was, and is, commonly reported in
France.

Now that the French should believe the whole story about Buonaparte
according to this version of it, does seem utterly incredible. Let any
one suppose them seriously believing that we maintained for many years
a desperate struggle against this formidable emperor of theirs, in the
course of which we expended such an enormous amount of blood and
treasure as is reported;--that we finally, after encountering enormous
risks, succeeded in subduing him, and secured him in a place of safe
exile;--and that, in less than a year after, we turned him out again,
like a bag-fox,--or rather, a bag-lion,--for the sake of amusing
ourselves by again staking all that was dear to us on the event of a
doubtful and bloody battle, in which defeat must be ruinous, and
victory, if obtained at all, must cost us many thousands of our best
soldiers. Let any one force himself for a moment to conceive the
French seriously believing such a mass of absurdity; and the inference
must be that such a people must be prepared to believe anything. They
might fancy their own country to abound not on