With the views of these spirits, eager for blood and plunder, and scornful of all liberty but the licence of the camp, Napoleon was engaged in the endeavour to reconcile the principles and prejudices of men who had assisted in rebuilding his throne, only because they put faith in the assertions of himself and his friends, that he had thoroughly repented of the despotic system on which he had formerly ruled France—­that ten months of exile and reflection had convinced him how much better it was to be the first citizen of a free state, than the undisputed tyrant of half the world—­in a word, that his only remaining ambition was to atone for the violence of his first reign by the mildness of his second.  As a first step to fasten the goodwill of these easy believers, he, immediately on arriving in Paris, proclaimed the freedom of the press; but he soon repented of this concession.  In spite of all the watchfulness, and all the briberies of his police, he could never bend to his own service the whole of this power.  The pure republicans—­even the pure royalists—­continued to have their organs; and the daily appeals of either to the reason and the passions of a people so long strange to the exercise of such influence, otherwise than in subservience to the government of the time, whatever that might be, produced such effects, that, almost from the time in which he bestowed the boon, he was occupied with devising pretexts for its recall.  He ere long caused, perhaps, more resentment by some efforts to thwart the conduct of the press, than would have resulted from the absolute prolongation of its slavery.  Some even of the decrees of Lyons were hard to be reconciled with the professions of one who disclaimed any wish to interfere with the sacred right of the nation to frame its constitution for itself.  But in almost every act of his government after he reached Paris, he furnished additional evidence how imperfectly his mind had divested itself of the ancient maxims.  Even the edict, emancipating the press from all control, was an assumption on his part of the complete power of legislation.  The same might be said of another decree, abolishing negro slavery and the slave trade, which he published shortly after:  but this second measure exposed him to other comments.  Who could seriously believe that at that moment of tumult, ere France was even in semblance entirely his, and while all Europe was openly arming against him, he had leisure for the affairs of the negroes?  This display of philanthropy was set down universally for a stage-trick; and men quickened their eyes, lest such unsubstantial shows in the distant horizon might be designed to withdraw their attention from the foreground.