One thing at least the new France has done with magisterial style: she has introduced into her political machinery respect for political habit. The French government of to-day is distinctly an outgrowth of conditions, and not of theories. Its constitution has none of the fatal marks of completeness which her other republican constitutions have borne; on the contrary, there never was a period in modern times when to the outsider French institutions seemed as crescive as they do to-day. And they have abundant material on which to work. There are signs that the system of nations as armed camps, for which Napoleon set the example, is breaking by its own weight; modern armies are mostly national schools controlled by scientific inquisitiveness and permeated by a civic spirit; the pacific federal system of the great European powers sometimes seems feeble and rickety, but it is in existence. Alliances are now federations for peace; the Triple Alliance continues to be a federation for peace; so too the Sextuple Alliance, so energetic and persistent in its support of Turkey, has been a federation for peace. Perhaps the day is nearer than we think when the Hague tribunal shall develop a vigorous, practical working system of international understandings, without appeal to war. Then certainly, but long before, let us hope, France may anchor her liberties in a bill of rights, destroy judicial inquisition, begin to slacken the bonds of her prefectoral system, emancipate her universities and academies, regenerate public feeling as to the increase of population by modifying her laws of the family, and go on not only to populate her own fertile fields, but to make the magnificent colonies which she has acquired the future homes of countless children, a field for exerting her superfluous energy--in short, when she may slough off her now superfluous Napoleonic institutions.
It would be utterly unjust, however, to plead a justification of Napoleon solely by such a monumental fact as that he was in all likelihood the forerunner of modern France. Even when the country adopted him, his positive, direct influence for good was great. The Concordat whatever its faults, partly secured a free church and a free state, separating thus what God had never joined together in holy wedlock; his splendid codes--for no matter who pondered and shaped them, they were his in execution--have guaranteed the perpetuity of civil equality not only in France, but, as the sequel has shown, throughout great expanses of Europe; the questions of a nation's right to its chosen ruler and government, agitated in a new form during the Hundred Days, were those with which succeeding generations were concerned until they were answered in the affirmative. The difference between the France of 1802 and that of 1815 is on one side painful, but on another side it is remarkably significant. The former was transitional and chaotic; the latter had that amazing but completed social union, stronger than any ever known in history, which has saved the country in succeeding storm-periods. In it there was respect for persons, for contract, for property; the administration was unitary, homogeneous, and active; the finances, though not regulated, were restored to vigor; and the processes were inaugurated by which the great cities of France have become healthful and beautiful, while at the same time the internal improvements of the country have been systematized and rendered splendid in their efficiency. Revolutionary concepts were so modified and assimilated that the efforts of the dynasties, when put to the test of public opinion, failed because they were felt to be absurd by the masses. It was one of Napoleon's aphorisms that "to have the right of using nations, you must begin by serving them well." Like a good burgher, he made his servants comfortable and happy. His example, moreover, was reflected abroad throughout Europe; and to the millions of plain and not very shrewd inhabitants of other lands, the Revolution, as Napoleon had shaped it, lost many of the horrors with which Jacobinism, to the everlasting damnation of both the thing and its name, had clothed it. It is a question whether there was in existence a strong liberal France, such as idealists depict, that could pacifically have done this wonderful work. Examining and duly weighing the desperation of dynastic absolutism, it looks as if nothing but the counter-poison of Napoleon's militarism could have prevented its annihilating French liberalism. Without Napoleon the conservative liberalism of to-day would have been impossible.