. It would have been far more in accordance
with the spirit of the events to have said, "Nothing was easier than for
England to allow France to choose her own form of government." But had
this been done, the throne of England's king, and the castles of her
nobles might have been overturned by the earthquake of revolution. Alas,
for man!

Bourrienne, the rejected secretary of Napoleon, who became the enemy of
his former benefactor, and who, as the minister and flatterer of Louis
XVIII., recorded with caustic bitterness the career of the great rival of
the European kings, thus closes his narrative of this transaction: "I have
related the truth; the whole truth. I assisted at all the conferences and
deliberations, though, of course, without possessing any deliberative
voice. But I must in candor declare, that had I possessed a right of
voting, my voice would have been for death. The result of the
deliberations, and the circumstances of the army, would have constrained
me to this. War, unfortunately, offers instances, by no means rare, in
which an immutable law, of all times and common to all nations, has
decreed that private interests shall succumb to the paramount good of the
public, and that humanity itself shall be forgotten. It is for posterity
to judge whether such was the terrible position of Bonaparte. I have a
firm conviction that it was. And this is strengthened by the fact, that
the opinion of the members of the council was unanimous upon the subject,
and that the order was issued upon their decision. I owe it also to truth
to state, that Napoleon yielded only at the last extremity, and was,
perhaps, one of those who witnessed the massacre with the deepest sorrow."
Even Sir Walter Scott, who, unfortunately, allowed his Tory predilections
to dim the truth of his unstudied yet classic page, while affirming that
"this bloody deed must always remain a deep stain upon the character of
Napoleon," is constrained to admit, "yet we do not view it as the
indulgence of an innate love of cruelty; for nothing in Bonaparte's
history shows the existence of that vice; and there are many things which
intimate his disposition to have been naturally humane."

Napoleon now prepared to march upon Acre, the most important military post
in Syria. Behind its strong ramparts Achmet the Butcher had gathered all
his troops and military stores, determined upon the most desperate
resistance. Colonel Philippeaux, an emissary of the Bourbons,