did
not suit their policy of legitimacy. Countless thousands of human
beings were slaughtered to satisfy the aversion of kings and nobles to
the plan of one man who towered above them, and insisted on breaking
up the nefarious system of feudalism and kingship by divine right.
They loathed both him and his system. They plotted for his
assassination, and intrigued with all the ferocity of wild animals
against his humane and enlightened government. He trampled over all
their satanic dodges to overthrow the power that had been so often
enthusiastically placed in his hands by the sovereign people. He
constructed roads and canals, and introduced new methods of creating
commerce. He introduced a great scheme of expanding education,
science, art, literature. Every phase of enlightenment was not only
initiated, but made compulsory so far as he could enforce its
application. He re-established religion, and gave France a new code of
laws that are to this day notoriously practical, comprehensive, and
eminently just.

He not only re-established religion, but he upheld the authority of
the Pope as the recognised head of the Roman Church. He built his
"pyramids in the sea," established a free press, and declared himself
in favour of manhood suffrage. He included in his system a unification
of all the small continental States, and was declaimed against as a
brigand for doing it. Wherever his plans were carried out the people
were prosperous and happy, so long as they were allowed to toil in
their own way in their fields and in other industrial pursuits.

It was the perpetual spirit of war that overshadowed the whole of
Europe which prevented his rule from solving a great problem. He, in
this, was invariably the aggrieved. The plan which he had carried into
practical solution was wrecked by the allies, and in less than a
century after the great reformer had been removed from the sphere of
enmity and usefulness, Prince Bismarck forced these small States into
unification with the German Empire, thereby carrying into effect the
very system Napoleon was condemned for bringing under his suzerainty.
What satire, what malignity of fate, that Bismarck, a positive
refutation of genius in comparison with the French Emperor, should
succeed in resurrecting the fabric that the latter had so proudly
built up for France, only to be in a few short years the prize of
Germany, recognised by the very Powers who fought with such embittered
aggressivenes