ctators most and he understood what words would make the deepest
impression. Whether he spoke in the Egyptian desert, before the backdrop
of the Sphinx and the pyramids, or addressed his shivering men on the
dew-soaked plains of Italy, made no difference. At all times he was
master of the situation. Even at the end, an exile on a little rock
in the middle of the Atlantic, a sick man at the mercy of a dull and
intolerable British governor, he held the centre of the stage.

After the defeat of Waterloo, no one outside of a few trusted friends
ever saw the great Emperor. The people of Europe knew that he was living
on the island of St. Helena--they knew that a British garrison guarded
him day and night--they knew that the British fleet guarded the garrison
which guarded the Emperor on his farm at Longwood. But he was never out
of the mind of either friend or enemy. When illness and despair had at
last taken him away, his silent eyes continued to haunt the world. Even
to-day he is as much of a force in the life of France as a hundred years
ago when people fainted at the mere sight of this sallow-faced man who
stabled his horses in the holiest temples of the Russian Kremlin, and
who treated the Pope and the mighty ones of this earth as if they were
his lackeys.

To give you a mere outline of his life would demand couple of volumes.
To tell you of his great political reform of the French state, of his
new codes of laws which were adopted in most European countries, of his
activities in every field of public activity, would take thousands of
pages. But I can explain in a few words why he was so successful during
the first part of his career and why he failed during the last ten
years. From the year 1789 until the year 1804, Napoleon was the great
leader of the French revolution. He was not merely fighting for the
glory of his own name. He defeated Austria and Italy and England and
Russia because he, himself, and his soldiers were the apostles of the
new creed of "Liberty, Fraternity and Equality" and were the enemies of
the courts while they were the friends of the people.

But in the year 1804, Napoleon made himself Hereditary Emperor of the
French and sent for Pope Pius VII to come and crown him, even as Leo
III, in the year 800 had crowned that other great King of the Franks,
Charlemagne, whose example was constantly before Napoleon's eyes.

Once upon the throne, the old revolutionary chieftain became an
unsuccessful imi