straint, and without any conscience.[1227] "I respected
nothing and feared nobody; I beat one and scratched another; I made
everybody afraid of me. I beat my brother Joseph; I bit him and
complained of him almost before he knew what he was about." A clever
trick, and one which he was not slow to repeat. His talent for
improvising useful falsehoods is innate; later on, at maturity, he
is proud of this; he makes it the index and measure of "political
superiority," and "delights in calling to mind one of his uncles who,
in his infancy, prognosticated to him that he would govern the world
because he was fond of lying."[1228]

Remark this observation of the uncles--it sums up the experiences of a
man of his time and of his country; it is what social life in Corsica
inculcated; morals and manners there adapted themselves to each other
through an unfailing connection. The moral law, indeed, is such because
similar customs prevail in all countries and at all times where the
police is powerless, where justice cannot be obtained, where public
interests are in the hands of whoever can lay hold of them, where
private warfare is pitiless and not repressed, where every man goes
armed, where every sort of weapon is fair, and where dissimulation,
fraud, and trickery, as well as gun or poniard, are allowed, which
was the case in Corsica in the eighteenth century, as in Italy in the
fifteenth century.--Hence the early impressions of Bonaparte similar to
those of the Borgias and of Macchiavelli; hence, in his case, that first
stratum of half-thought which, later on, serves as the basis of complete
thought; hence, the whole foundation of his future mental edifice and of
the conceptions he subsequently entertains of human society. Afterwards,
on leaving the French schools and every time he returns to them and
spends any time in them, the same impressions, often renewed, intensify
in his mind the same final conclusion. In this country, report the
French commissioners,[1229] "the people have no idea of principle in the
abstract," nor of social interest or justice. "Justice does not exist;
one hundred and thirty assassinations have occurred in ten years....
The institution of juries has deprived the country of all the means for
punishing crime; never do the strongest proofs, the clearest evidence,
lead a jury composed of men of the same party, or of the same family
as the accused, to convict him; and, if the accused is of the opposite
party, t