he paid his army, and rewarded eminent men, whom he enlisted in his service.  So stable was the government, and so wise were the laws, and so free were all channels of industry, that prosperity returned to the distracted country.  The middle classes were particularly benefited,—­the shopkeepers and mechanics,—­and they acquiesced in a strong rule, since it seemed beneficent.  The capital was enriched and adorned and improved.  A treaty with the Pope was made, by which the clergy were restored to their parishes.  A new code of laws was made by great jurists, on the principles of the Justinian Code.  A magnificent road was constructed over the Alps.  Colonial possessions were recovered.  Navies were built, fortifications repaired, canals dug, and the beet-root and tobacco cultivated.

But these internal improvements, by which France recovered prosperity, paled before the services which Napoleon rendered as a defender of his country’s nationality.  He had proposed a peace-policy to England in an autograph letter to the King, which was treated as an insult, and answered by the British government by a declaration of war, to last till the Bourbons were restored,—­perhaps what Napoleon wanted and expected; and war was renewed with Austria and England.  The consulate was now marked by the brilliant Italian campaign,—­the passage over the Alps; the battle of Marengo, gained by only thirty thousand men; the recovery of Italy, and renewed military eclat.  The Peace of Amiens, October, 1801, placed Napoleon in the proudest position which any modern sovereign ever enjoyed.  He was now thirty-three years of age,—­supreme in France, and powerful throughout Europe.  The French were proud of a man who was glorious both in peace and war; and his consulate had been sullied by only one crime,—­the assassination of the heir of the house of Conde; a blunder, as Talleyrand said, rather than a crime, since it arrayed against him all the friends of Legitimacy in Europe.

Had Napoleon been contented with the power he then enjoyed as First Consul for life, and simply stood on the defensive, he could have made France invincible, and would have left a name comparatively reproachless.  But we now see unmistakable evidence of boundless personal ambition, and a policy of unscrupulous aggrandizement.  He assumes the imperial title,—­greedy for the trappings as well as the reality of power; he openly founds a new dynasty of kings; he abolishes every trace of constitutional rule; he treads liberty under his feet, and mocks the very ideas by which he had inspired enthusiasm in his troops; his watchword is now not Liberty, but Glory; he centres in himself the interests of France; he surrounds himself, at the Tuileries, with the pomp and ceremonies of the ancient kings; and he even induces the Pope himself to crown him at Notre Dame.  It was a proud day, December 2, 1804, when, surrounded by all that was brilliant and imposing in France, Napoleon proceeded