been perpetrated.

The good Sir Walter and the unctuously pious biographer of Sir Hudson
are obviously overcome by the coincidence of the storm and Napoleon's
death coming simultaneously. To them it is the voice of God shouting
forth gladness that the enemy of the British race is being made to pay
the penalty of all the evil he has wrought. This is a very comforting
conclusion to arrive at after having kept your victim on the rack for
six years and made war on him for twenty, but did it never occur to
them that the greatest sacrifice ever offered culminated in just such
natural disturbances and that at the same time "the veil of the temple
was rent in twain"?

Happily for the fair fame of human rights, many writers of Napoleonic
history have got over national prejudices and timidity, and are
chronicling very different views from those of Sir Walter and the
uninteresting defender of Lowe; and the more impartial the minds who
inquire into the first as well as the last phase of this extraordinary
career, the more will it appear that he was not an enemy, but a
powerful reforming agency of mankind. He vowed over and over again
that he "never conquered unless in his own defence, and that Europe
never ceased to make war upon France and her principles." And again he
asserted: "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 in the world. All my exertions were directed to
illuminate the mass of the nation instead of brutifying them by
ignorance and superstition." These ideals are in striking contrast to
the policy of the oligarchy of Europe, who were fighting to suppress
knowledge and to re-establish the worst form of superstition and
despotism.

It is a deplorable thought that the nations (and especially Great
Britain) who allied themselves against this man of the people and sent
him to an inhuman death might have saved themselves the eternal
condemnation of future ages had they made their peace with him, as the
sagacious Charles James Fox would have done had he lived. Had they
been wise, they would have made use of his matchless gifts and
well-balanced mind to help forward the regeneration of the human chaos
which was both the