fortune. With incomparable force of intellect, Napoleon wanted grandeur of mind. It has become the custom of later years to deny him even superiority of intellect; but the man who, in a contest open to all, goes before all – who converts a republic, with all its ardour, haughtiness, and passion, into a monarchy at once as rigid and as magnificent as an Oriental despotism – who, in a country of warriors, makes himself the leading warrior – who, among the circle within circle of the subtlest political intrigues, baffles all intrigues, converts them into the material of his own ascendency, and makes the subtlest and the boldest spirits his instruments and slaves – has given sufficient evidence of the superiority of his talents. The conqueror who beat down in succession all the great military names of Europe, must have been a soldier; the negotiator who vanquished all existing diplomacy, and the statesman who remodelled the laws, curbed the fiery temper, and reduced to discipline the fierce insubordination of a people, whose first victory had crushed the state, and heaped the ruins of the throne on the sepulchre of their king – must have been a negotiator and a statesman of the first rank. Or, if those were not the achievements of intellect, by what were they done? If they were done without it, of what value is intellect? Napoleon had then only found the still superior secret of success; and we deny his intellect, simply to give him attributes higher than belong to human nature. – No man before him dreamed of such success, no man in his day rivalled it, no man since his day has attempted its renewal. "But he was fortunate!" What can be more childish than to attempt the solution of the problem by fortune? Fortune is a phantom. Circumstances may arise beyond the conception of man; but where the feebler mind yields to circumstances, the stronger one shapes, controls, and guides them.
This man was sent for a great purpose of justice, and he was gifted with the faculties for its execution. An act of imperial guilt had been committed, of which Europe was to be purged by penalty alone. The fall of Poland was to be made a moral to the governments of the earth; and Napoleon was to be the fiery brand that was to imprint the sentence upon the foreheads of the great criminals. It is in contemplations like these, that the Spirit of history ministers to the wisdom of mankind. Whatever may be the retribution for individuals beyond the grave, justice on nations must be done in this world; and here it will be done.
The partition of Poland was the most comprehensive and audacious crime of the modern world. It was a deliberate insult, at once to the laws of nations and to the majesty of the great Disposer of nations. And never fell vengeance more immediate, more distinct, or more characteristic. The capital of Austria twice entered over the bodies of its gallant soldiery; Russia ravaged and Moscow burnt; the Prussian army extinguished by the massacre of Jena, and Prussia in a day fettered for years – were the summary and solemn retribution of Heaven. But, when the penalty was paid, the fate of the executioner instantly followed. Guilt had punished guilt, and justice was to be alike done upon all. Napoleon and his empire vanished, as the powder vanishes that explodes the mine. The ground was broken up; the structures of royalty on its surface were deeply fractured; the havoc was complete; but the fiery deposit which had effected the havoc was itself scattered into air.
His re-establishment of Poland would have been an act of grandeur. It would have established a new character for the whole Revolution. It would have shown that the new spirit which had gone forth summoning the world to regeneration, was itself regeneration; that it was not a tempter, but a restorer; that all conquest was not selfish, and all protestation not meant to deceive. If Napoleon had given Poland a diadem, and placed it on the brow of Kosciusko, he would, in that act, have placed on his own brow a diadem which no chance of the field could have plucked away; an imperishable and dazzling answer to all the calumnies of his age, and all the doubts of posterity. He might even have built, in the restoration of the fallen kingdom, a citadel for his own security in all the casualties of empire; but, in all events, he would have fixed in the political heaven a star which, to the last recollection of mankind, would have thrown light on his sepulchre, and borne his name.
The fall of the Foxite ministry opened the way to a new cabinet, and I resumed my office. But we marched in over ruins. In the short period of their power, Europe had been shattered. England had stood aloof and escaped the shock; but to stand aloof then was her crime – her sympathy might have saved the tottering system. Now, all was gone. When we looked over the whole level of the Continent, we saw but two thrones – France and Russia; all the rest were crushed. They stood, but their structure was shattered, stripped of its adornments, and ready to crumble down at the first blow. England was without an ally. We had begun the war with Europe in our line of battle; we now stood alone. Yet, the spirit of the nation was never bolder than in this hour, when a storm of hostility seemed to be gathering round us from every quarter of the world. Still, there were voices of ill omen among our leading men. It was said, that France and Russia had resolved to divide the world between them – to monopolize the East and the West; to extinguish all the minor sovereignties; to abolish all the constitutions; to turn the world into two vast menageries, in which the lesser monarchies should be shown, as caged lions, for the pomp of the two lords-paramount of the globe. I heard this language from philosophers, from orators, even from statesmen; but I turned to the people, and I found the spirit of their forefathers unshaken in them still – the bold defiance of the foreigner, the lofty national scorn of his gasconading, the desire to grapple more closely with his utmost strength, and the willingness, nay, the passionate desire, to rest the cause of Europe on their championship alone. I never heard among the multitude a sound of that despair which had become the habitual language of Opposition. They had answered the call to arms with national ardour. The land was filled with voluntary levies, and the constant cry of the people was – conflict with the enemy, any where, at any time, or upon any terms. More fully versed in their national history than any other European people, they remembered, that in every war with France, for a thousand years, England had finished with victory; that she had never suffered any one decisive defeat in the war, that where the forces of the two nations could come fairly into contact, their troops had always been successful; and that from the moment when France ventured to contest the empire of the seas, all the battles of England were triumphs, until the enemy was swept from the ocean.
The new cabinet formed its plans on the national confidence, and executed them with statesmanlike decision. The struggle on the Continent was at an end; but they resolved to gird it with a chain of fire. Every port was shut up by English guns; every shore was watched by English eyes. Outside this chain, the world was our own. The ocean was free; every sea was traversed by our commerce with as much security as in the most profound peace. The contrast with the Continent was of the most striking order. There all was the dungeon – one vast scene of suffering and outcry; of coercion and sorrow; the conscription, the confiscation, the licensed plunder, the bitter and perpetual insult. The hearts of men died within them, and they crept silently to their obscure graves. Wounds, poverty, and ferocious tyranny, the heart-gnawing pangs of shame, and the thousand thorns which national and conscious degradation strews on the pillow of men crushed by the insolence of a soldiery, wore away the human race; provinces were unpeopled, and a generation were laid prematurely in the grave.
The recollections of the living world will long point to this period as the most menacing portion of all history. The ancient tyrannies were bold, presumptuous, and remorseless monopolies of power; but their pressure scarcely descended to the multitude. It crushed the senator, the patrician, and the man of opulence; as the tempest smites the turrets of the palace, or shatters the pinnacles of the mountain range. But the despotism of France searched the humblest condition of man. It tyrannized over the cottage, as fiercely as it had swept over the thrones. The German or Italian peasant saw his son torn away, to perish in some distant region, of which he knew no more than that it was the grave of the thousands and tens of thousands of his fellow shepherds and vintagers. The despotism of France less resembled the domination of man, from which, with all its vigilance, there is some hope of escape, than the subtlety of a demon, which has an evil and a sting for every heart, and by which nothing can be forgotten, and nothing will be spared. In the whole immense circle of French dominion, no man could lay his head down to rest, with a security that he might not be roused at midnight, to be flung into a captivity from which he was never to return. No man could look upon his property, the earnings of his manhood, the resource for his age, or the provision for his children, without the knowledge that it was
