led to their fate. The avenues to promotion, distinction, wealth,
honour, nobility, even royal dignity, were all open before the devoted
and successful soldiers of Napoleon; and the presence of so many youths
of good condition and education, among the ranks of the private
soldiery, could not fail, first, to render the situation immeasurably
less irksome than it otherwise could have been to each individual of
the class, and secondly, to elevate the standard of manners and
acquirements among the soldiery generally. There never was an army in
whose ranks intelligence so largely abounded, nor in which so many
officers of the highest rank had originally carried a musket.

The taxation rendered necessary by the constant wars of Napoleon was
great; and the utter destruction of the foreign commerce and marine of
France, which the naval supremacy of England effected, made the burden
the more intolerable for various important classes of the community. On
the other hand the taxes were levied fairly on the whole population,
which presented a blessed contrast to the system of the old _regime_;
and the vast extension and improvement of agriculture consequent on the
division of the great estates at the Revolution, enabled the nation, at
large to meet the calls of the government with much less difficulty than
could have been anticipated at any former period of French history.
Napoleon's great public works, too, though undertaken chiefly for the
purpose of gratifying his own vanity and that of the nation, could not
be executed without furnishing subsistence to vast bodies of the
labouring poor, and were thus serviceable to more important ends. From
his vain attempts to supply the want of English manufactured goods and
colonial produce, by new establishments and inventions (such especially
as that of manufacturing a substitute for sugar out of beetroot),
partial good, in like manner, resulted.

The evils of the conscription, of a heavy taxation, of an inquisitorial
police, and of a totally enslaved press--these, and all other evils
attendant on this elaborate system of military despotism, were endured
for so many years chiefly in consequence of the skill with which
Napoleon, according to his own favourite language, knew "to play on the
imagination," and gratify the vanity of the French people. In the
splendour of his victories, in the magnificence of his roads, bridges,
aqueducts, and other monuments, in the general pre-eminence to which