Make what deductions you may, distort and twist as you like the unimportant trivialities, the main facts related by O’Meara have never been really shaken.  What is more, he is backed up by Napoleon himself in Lowe’s personal interviews with him, and more particularly by his letters to the Governor—­to say nothing of the substantial backing he gets from Las Cases, Montholon, Marchand, and Gourgaud—­that shameless, jealous, lachrymose traitor to his great benefactor.

And then there is Santini, whose wish to kill the Governor was not altogether without good reason, and who was deported from the island for this and other infringements of the regulations.  The publication of his pamphlet, previously mentioned, created a great sensation, and it sold like wildfire.  It was said to be fabrications, but it was not all fabrications.  Montholon reports that Napoleon criticised the work, and remarked that some one must have assisted him.  Well, so it was.  The story was related to Colonel Maceroni, an Italian, by Santini, and put into readable form by him, but this does not detract from that which is really true in it, and a good deal of what O’Meara contends is confirmed therein.

Then O’Meara’s successor, Antommarchi, has even a worse story to relate.  These chronicles vary only in phrase and detail, and even in these there is wonderful similarity.  But when we come down to the bedrock foundation of their complaints, i.e., the policy and treatment by Lowe and his myrmidons, incited by the Home Government and their followers, each record bears the stamp of truth—­the indictment is the same though it may be related differently.

Some writers have cast doubt on the authenticity of the St. Helena chroniclers without having a peg to hang their contentions on.  The answer to all this is, that if never a line had been written by these men, the State papers, cunningly devised and crafty though most of them are, would have been ample evidence from which to draw unfavourable conclusions.  Indeed, without State papers being brought into it at all, there is facing you always the glaring fact of a determined assassination perpetrated in the name of humanity, and if I felt any desire to be assured of this, I would take as an authority William Forsyth’s three volumes written in defence of Sir Hudson Lowe.  No author has so completely failed to prove his case.  Moreover, no valid reason has ever been given, or ever can be, for doubting the veracity of O’Meara and other gentlemen of Napoleon’s suite who have written their experiences of the St. Helena period.

In the first place, those sceptical writers who deal with the different books that have been published relative to this part of Napoleon’s history were not only not there to witness all that went on, but some of them were not born for many years after Napoleon and his contemporaries had passed on.  So that it really narrows itself down to this:  the knowledge the sceptics have attained is taken from