was always obliged to be on the defensive, and, as he stated, never once declared war.  The continental Great Powers always made war on him, but not without his thrashing them soundly until they pleaded in their humility to be allowed to lick his boots.  You may search English State papers in any musty hole you like, and you will find no authoritative record that comes within miles of justifying the opinions or the charges that have been stated or written against him.  Let us not commit the sacrilege, if he is ever made prisoner and is not shot for the murders and cruelties he and his subjects have committed on British men and women at sea and on land, of deporting the Kaiser to St. Helena to desecrate the ground made sacred for all time because of the great Emperor who was an exile there.  Force of circumstances made Louis Philippe declare the truth to the world’s new generations (doubtless to save his own precious skin) that “he was not only an emperor, but a king from the very day that the French nation called upon him to be their ruler.”  The kingly Louis would have given worlds not to have been compelled to say this truth of him, but his crown was at stake.

The Senate voted with enthusiasm that he should be First Consul for ten years, and he replied to the vote of confidence that “Fortune had smiled upon the Republic; but Fortune was inconstant; how many men,” said he, “upon whom she has heaped her favours have lived too long by some years, and that the interest of his glory and happiness seemed to have marked the period of his public life, at the moment when the peace of the world is proclaimed.”  Then with one of those spasmodic impulses that compel attention, he darts an arrow right on the spot; “If,” he says, “you think I owe the nation a new sacrifice, I will make it; that is, if the wishes of the people correspond with the command authorized by their suffrages.”  Always the suffrages, you observe, and never the miserable, slandering, backbiting dodges of the treasonists.

The mind of this remarkable man was a palatial storehouse of wise, impressive inspirations.  Here is one of countless instances where a prejudiced adversary bears testimony to his power and wisdom.  A few Republican officers sought and were granted an audience, and the following is a frank admission of their own impotence and Napoleon’s greatness:  “I do not know,” their spokesman says, “from whence or from whom he derives it, but there is a charm about that man indescribable and irresistible.  I am no admirer of his.”  Such persons always preface any statement they are about to make by asserting their own superiority in this way, and the officers, who, with others, had many imaginary grievances against Napoleon, determined to empty their overburdened souls to him.  This gallant person emphasizes the fact that he dislikes “the power to which he (Napoleon) had risen,” yet he cannot help confessing (evidently with reluctance) that there is something in him which