the
conscription, the administration, the civil code, and systems of
accounts like those of Paris. Even in the independent or allied States,
in Prussia, in Poland, in the confederation of the Rhine, there are,
at intervals or permanently, Frenchmen in position and in authority to
command contingent forces, to garrison fortresses, to receive supplies
and secure the payment of war contributions. Even with the corporal and
custom-house inspector on duty on coast at Dantzig and at Reggio, the
sentiment of victorious priority equals the possession of rank; in their
eyes the natives of the country are semi-barbarians or semi-savages,
a backward or prejudiced lot, not even knowing how to speak their
language; they feel themselves superior, as formerly the senor soldado
of the sixteenth century, or the civis romanus. Never since the great
Spanish monarchy and the Old Roman empire has a conquering State and
propagator of a new regime afforded its subjects such gratifications of
self-esteem, nor opened so vast a career to their ambitions.

For, having once adopted their career, they know better than the
Spaniards under Charles V. or the Romans under Augustus, how far they
can go and how fast they can get ahead. No obstacle impedes them; nobody
feels himself confined his post; each considers the one he occupies
as provisional, each takes it only to await a better one, anticipating
another at a very early date; he dashes onward, springs aloft and
occupies in advance the superior post which he means to secure on
the first vacancy, and, under this Regime, the vacancies are
numerous.--These vacancies, in the military service and in the grade
of officers, may be estimated at nearly four thousand per annum;[3339]
after 1808 and 1809, but especially after the disaster of 1812 and 1813,
places are no longer lacking but subjects fill them; Napoleon is
obliged to accept youths for officers as beardless as his conscripts,
eighteen-year-old apprentices who, after a year or six months in the
military academy, might finish their apprenticeship on the battle-field,
pupils taken from the philosophy or rhetoric classes, willing children
(de bonne volonte): On the 13th of December 1808, he draws 50 from his
lycees, who don the gold-lace of under-officers at once; in 1809, he
calls out 250, to serve in the depot battalions; in 1810, he calls out
150 of the age of nineteen who "know the drill," and who are to be sent
on distant expeditions with the c