"Art. 4.--However, the ship-owners who, before the publication of the present decree, shall have fitted out expeditions for the trade may sell the produce in our colonies.
"Our ministers are charged with the execution of the present decree.
(Signed) "NAPOLEON. "The Duke of BASSANO."
Beside these noble examples of good government, many other advantages were bestowed on the French people by their emperor. Their "Code Napoleon," their "Legion of Honour," their "Central Schools," their _new roads_, _bridges_, and _canals_, will be lasting evidences of the gigantic powers of his mind, and of his sincere desire to serve his country, and render himself worthy of the exalted station to which he had been called by her gratitude for his pre-eminent military services. Had Napoleon bounded his ambition to the glory of ruling France upon free and liberal principles, it had been happy for himself, his relations, and his country; but to talk of his foreign despotism, and his _carrying_ tyranny to where, in fact, he _found_ tyranny,--tyranny the most rank and inveterate,--is to use the language of folly or of knavery, and to merit the contempt of every thinking mind.
But if it be even allowed that Napoleon was all that his enemies would make him, where did our ministers get the unheard-of privilege of setting themselves up as cosmopolite censors? By what right did the British government constitute itself a tribunal to judge and punish, in the last resort, delinquent monarchs? Could it by any reasoning have made out a claim to that office, was it just or decent to make a victim of _one_,--a man of unquestioned talent and greatness of soul,--and at the same moment to compliment and make alliances with all the worse tyrants, the maudlin hypocrites, and base violaters of their word? Or did these moral Quixotes and immaculate judges only profess to "do _justice_" upon _one_ sinner "against the spirit of the age,"--and that one a _fallen_ enemy?
The only plausible pretence for the treatment of the abdicated emperor was--that his surpassing genius, and his great hold on the military part of the French character, rendered him a necessary exception to the rule regarding prisoners of war, and made it indispensable to the safety and repose of the world, that he should be prevented from appearing again on the grand stage of European politics. This is confessedly on the dangerous plan of doing positive injustice for the sake of what the doers think safe and necessary. But we deny the necessity. We say the argument is built on utter ignorance of human nature, and a wilful blindness to all history and experience. Napoleon was grand in his views, because he admired and loved greatness for its own sake. He never sullied his conquests by partitioning and dividing the conquered. He could afford not to weaken his enemies by petty violations of national integrity. He encouraged every thing liberal and noble, which did not at the same time interfere with his personal authority. He cherished literature, art, and science; and they, in return, reflected true glory upon him. He never insulted and mocked mankind by pretending an eternal right in himself and his successors to trample them under his feet, because he was an emperor. He had always a respect for liberty, though he so often forgot it in his greater eagerness for power. He never laid claim to _holiness_, but acknowledged himself, in his proudest moments, sovereign, "_by the constitutions of the empire_." He was not vindictive; his long military rule was never sullied by any act which could be compared in infamy with the imprisonment of the unfortunate TRENCK by that Prussian FREDERICK, whom the legitimate abusers of NAPOLEON call "the _Great_." The prominent fault of his career as a leader of a new and revolutionary period, was that, instead of looking forward, he looked backward, and became an imitator instead of an original. He evidently had the glories of former ages strongly in his view; and was to be a great conqueror, not because the times wanted _him_, but because there are medals and statues in the world, and dynasties were founded by CÆSAR. In the height of his prosperity, he was a CHARLEMAGNE--another "Emperor of the West;" and, in his adversity, he forgot the Prince Regent of England so far as to talk to him of THEMISTOCLES[68:A]. And yet there was a romance even in this, which set him above all ordinary conquerors. He had the poetry, as well as the prose, of the military art about him. _He_ would never have sunk into a mere lounger and man of pleasure, or stood behind any commonplace man with a gold stick in his hand.