went even so far as to sever his friendship of years with Fox, who, on May 6th, 1791, was speaking in high praise of the Revolutionary Constitution.
France was then depopulated. There remained only widows and orphans; trade and manufactures were ruined. French liberty was confiscated; much of the glory of war was hers, but with a policy that may be characterized as insane and gambling. Such was this first Napoleonic orgie which victory cannot justify; the march from Cadiz to Moscow, from Thabor to Antwerp, strewing the road with the wounded and the dead, cannot be balanced even by the creation of an Empire which vanished in a quarter of an hour, only leaving an onerous and awkward tradition behind. Skill and luck had served him in his early career. He would tempt Providence and dared presume he always could expect the same advantages, because the magnates of all lands bowed before him as if he were Pharaoh. "Events are in the saddle and they ride mankind." The realities of life fought against Bonaparte's enthusiastic rashness, and the French of to-day are not more Imperialist than they are Catholic. Man is great in his likeness to God only when he creates, that is, when he makes something out of what is insignificant; and when from the hundred and twenty counties of 18 12 he leaves nothing but a bronze column, a depopulated country, ruined and robbed of the frontiers it formerly possessed, such a man may be a great leader, a successful soldier, but History will not style him a great king nor a clever politician. Then comes one of those despicable praetorian revolutions held up to scorn by Tacitus. The first Bonaparte thought to save his dynasty in reviving Jacobinism. The bloody spectre could protect neither uncle nor nephew, nor even that heroic, virtuous, generous and good young man who fell in a gallant struggle, single-handed, against a band of Zulu warriors, the enemies of his English home! Unhappy child, offspring of that marvellous adventure that wedded a soldier to the daughter of the Cæsars, and whose fate is, after the National misfortunes of 1870-71, the most strange amongst all these extraordinary events. We are not stating this as our opinion, but we may be allowed to say that he might, and most likely would, have done great things for France; but France has never been an easy nation to
