phrases which still make his father’s eloquence a living thing to
Englishmen. On the other hand, he possessed some qualities in which
Chatham was utterly wanting. His temper, though naturally ardent and
sensitive, had been schooled in a proud self-command. His simplicity and
good taste freed him from his father’s ostentation and extravagance.
Diffuse and commonplace as his speeches seem, they were adapted as much
by their very qualities of diffuseness and commonplace as by their
lucidity and good sense to the intelligence of the middle classes whom
Pitt felt to be his real audience. In his love of peace, his immense
industry, his dispatch of business, his skill in debate, his knowledge
of finance, he recalled Sir Robert Walpole; but he had virtues which
Walpole never possessed, and he was free from Walpole’s worst defects.
He was careless of personal gain. He was too proud to rule by
corruption. His lofty self-esteem left no room for any jealousy of
subordinates. He was generous in his appreciation of youthful merits;
and the “boys” he gathered round him, such as Canning and Lord
Wellesley, rewarded his generosity by a devotion which death left
untouched. With Walpole’s cynical inaction Pitt had no sympathy
whatever. His policy from the first was one of active reform, and he
faced every one of the problems, financial, constitutional, religious,
from which Walpole had shrunk. Above all, he had none of Walpole’s scorn
of his fellow-men. The noblest feature in his mind was its wide
humanity.
His love for England was as deep and personal as his father’s love, but
of the sympathy with English passion and English prejudice which had
been at once his father’s weakness and strength he had not a trace. When
Fox taunted him with forgetting Chatham’s jealousy of France and his
faith that she was the natural foe of England, Pitt answered nobly that
“to suppose any nation can be unalterably the enemy of another is weak
and childish.” The temper of the time and the larger sympathy of man
with man, which especially marks the eighteenth century as a
turning-point in the history of the human race, was everywhere bringing
to the front a new order of statesmen, such as Turgot and Joseph II,
whose characteristics were a love of mankind and a belief that as the
happiness of the individual can only be secured by the general happiness
of the community to which he belongs, so the welfare of individual
nations can only be secured by the general welfare of the world. Of
these Pitt was one. But he rose high above the rest in the consummate
knowledge, and the practical force which he brought to the realization
of his aims.
Pitt’s strength lay in finance; and he came forward at a time when the
growth of English wealth made a knowledge of finance essential to a
great minister. The progress of the nation was wonderful. Population
more than doubled during the eighteenth century, and the advance of
wealth was even greater than that of population. The war had added a
hundred millions to the national debt, but the burden was hardly felt.
The loss of America only increased the commerce with that country; and
industry had begun that great career which was to make Britain the
workshop of the world. Though England already stood in the first rank of
commercial states at the accession of George III, her industrial life at
home was mainly agricultural. The wool-trade had gradually established
itself in Norfolk, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and the counties of the
southwest; while the manufacture of cotton was still almost limited to
Manchester and Bolton, and remained so unimportant that in the middle of
the eighteenth century the export of cotton goods hardly reached the
value of fifty thousand a year. There was the same slow and steady
progress in the linen trade of Belfast and Dundee and the silks of
Spitalfields. The processes of manufacture were too rude to allow any
large increase of production. It was only where a stream gave force to
turn a mill-wheel that the wool-worker could establish his factory; and
cotton was as yet spun by hand in the cottages, the “spinsters” of the
family sitting with their distaffs round the weaver’s handloom. But had
the processes of manufacture been more efficient, they would have been
rendered useless by the want of a cheap and easy means of transport. The
older main roads, which had lasted fairly through the middle ages, had
broken down in later times before the growth of traffic and the increase
of wagons and carriages.
The new lines of trade lay often along mere country lanes which had
never been more than horse-tracks. Much of the woolen trade, therefore,
had to be carried on by means of long trains of pack-horses; and in the
case of yet heavier goods, such as coal, distribution was almost
impracticable, save along the greater rivers or in districts accessible
from the sea. A new era began when the engineering genius of Brindley
joined Manchester with its port of Liverpool in 1767, by a canal which
crossed the Irwell on a lofty aqueduct; the success of the experiment
soon led to the universal introduction of water-carriage, and Great
Britain was traversed in every direction by three thousand miles of
navigable canals. At the same time a new importance was given to the
coal which lay beneath the soil of England. The stores of iron which had
lain side by side with it in the northern counties had lain there
unworked through the scarcity of wood, which was looked upon as the only
fuel by which it could be smelted.
In the middle of the eighteenth century a process for smelting iron with
coal turned out to be effective; and the whole aspect of the iron trade
was at once revolutionized. Iron was to become the working material of
the modern world; and it is its production of iron which more than all
else has placed England at the head of industrial Europe. The value of
coal as a means of producing mechanical force was revealed in the
discovery by which Watt in 1765 transformed the steam-engine from a mere
toy into the most wonderful instrument which human industry has ever had
at its command. The invention came at a moment when the existing supply
of manual labor could no longer cope with the demands of the
manufacturers. Three successive inventions in twelve years, that of the
spinning-jenny in 1764 by the weaver Hargreaves, of the spinning-machine
in 1768 by the barber Arkwright, of the “mule” by the weaver Crompton in
1776, were followed by the discovery of the power-loom. But these would
have been comparatively useless had it not been for the revelation of a
new and inexhaustible labor-force in the steam-engine. It was the
combination of such a force with such means of applying it that enabled
Britain during the terrible years of her struggle with France and
Napoleon to all but monopolize the woolen and cotton trades, and raised
her into the greatest manufacturing country that the world had seen.
To deal wisely with such a growth required a knowledge of the laws of
wealth which would have been impossible at an earlier time. But it had
become possible in the days of Pitt. If books are to be measured by the
effect which they have produced on the fortunes of mankind the “Wealth
of Nations” must rank among the greatest of books. Its author was Adam
Smith, an Oxford scholar and a professor at Glasgow. Labor, he
contended, was the one source of wealth, and it was by freedom of labor,
by suffering the worker to pursue his own interest in his own way, that
the public wealth would best be promoted. Any attempt to force labor
into artificial channels, to shape by laws the course of commerce, to
promote special branches of industry in particular countries, or to fix
the character of the intercourse between one country and another, is not
only a wrong to the worker or the merchant, but actually hurtful to the
wealth of a state. The book was published in 1776, at the opening of the
American war, and studied by Pitt during his career as an undergraduate
at Cambridge. From that time he owned Adam Smith for his master. He had
hardly become minister before he took the principles of the “Wealth of
Nations” as the groundwork of his policy. The ten earlier years of his
rule marked a new point of departure in English statesmanship. Pitt was
the first English minister who really grasped the part which industry
was to play in promoting the welfare of the world. He was not only a
peace minister and a financier, as Walpole had been, but a statesman who
saw that the best security for peace lay in the freedom and widening of
commercial intercourse between nations; that public economy not only
lessened the general burdens but left additional capital in the hands of
industry; and that finance might be turned from a mere means of raising
revenue into a powerful engine of political and social improvement.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.
BY LOUIS ADOLPHE THIERS.
[Emperor of France, born in Corsica 1769, died a prisoner on the
island of St. Helena in 1821. Educated at the military schools of
Brienne and Paris, Napoleon became a sous-lieutenant of artillery
at the age of sixteen. He had become a captain when the revolution
reached its height in the Reign of Terror. Though never an actor in
the horrors of Jacobin rule, he was supposed to have been a warm
friend of Robespierre. After the fall of the terrorists Napoleon
took the side of the convention, and at the head of its troops
dispersed the infuriated mob of Montagnards with the famous “whiff
of grapeshot” which blew up the last remains of the party of 1793.
After his marriage with Josephine Beauharnais, the young soldier
was appointed to the command of the army of Italy. In two years
Napoleon, in a series of splendid battles, annihilated four
Austrian armies, liberated Italy, and forced Austria to a
humiliating peace. After the failure of the Egyptian expedition
Napoleon returned to France, and by the _coup d’état_ of December,
1799, attained supreme power as first consul. The second Italian
campaign of 1800 was no less brilliant than the first, culminating
in the battle of Marengo. In 1802 Napoleon was made life-consul,
“the swelling prologue of the imperial theme,” for nine months
later he assumed the title of emperor, and was crowned by Pope Pius
VII at Notre Dame. The year 1812 was the beginning of the disasters
which finally dethroned him. The terrible Russian campaign, and the
utter defeat of his arms in Spain by Lord Wellesley, afterward Duke
of Wellington, marked a change in the clock of destiny. The great
European coalition of 1813 brought overwhelming forces against him,
resulting in the great battle of Dresden, lasting three
days--October 16th, 17th, and 18th--which broke the French power.
The allies entered Paris, March 31, 1814, and Napoleon abdicated on
April 11th. His exile in Elba lasted less than ten months, and on
his return to France two hundred thousand men rallied to him at his
call. The battle of Waterloo, fought on June 15, 1815, ended in his
overwhelming defeat at the hands of the Duke of Wellington,
assisted by Marshal Blücher. Napoleon’s second abdication was
followed by his surrender to the English, and his exile to St.
Helena for the rest of his life.]
Napoleon was endowed by nature with a clear, penetrating, vast,
comprehensive, and peculiarly active mind, nor had he less decision of
character than clearness of intellect. He always seized at once the
decisive argument, in battle the most effective movement. To conceive,
resolve, and perform were with him but one indivisible act, so wonderful
was his rapidity, that not a moment was spent in reflection between
perception and action. Any obstacle presented to such a mind by a
trifling objection, by indolence, weakness, or disaffection, served but
to cause his anger to spring forth and cover you with its foam. Had he
chosen some civil profession where success can only be attained by
persuading men and winning them over, he might have endeavored to subdue
or moderate his fiery temperament, but flung into the career of arms,
and endowed with the sovereign faculty of seeing the surest means of
conquest at a glance, he became at one bound the ruler of Italy, at a
second the master of the French Republic, at a third the sovereign of
Europe.
What wonder that a nature formed so impetuous by God should become more
so from success; what wonder if he were abrupt, violent, domineering,
and unbending in his resolutions! If apart from the battle-field he
exercised that tact so necessary in civil business, it was in the
council of state, though even there he decided questions with a sagacity
and clearness of judgment that astonished and subdued his hearers,
except on some few occasions when he was misled for a moment by passion
or want of sufficient knowledge of the subject under discussion. Both
nature and circumstances combined to make him the most despotic and
impetuous of men.
In contemplating his career, it does not appear that this fiery,
despotic nature revealed itself at once or altogether. In his youth he
was lean, taciturn, and even sad--sad from concentrated ambition that
feeds upon itself until it finds an outlet and attains the object of its
desires. As a young man he was sometimes rude, morose, until becoming
the object of universal admiration he became more open, calm, and
communicative--lost the meagerness that made his countenance so
expressive, and, as one may say, unfolded himself. Consul for life,
emperor, conqueror at Marengo and Austerlitz, still exercising some
little restraint on himself, he seemed to have reached the apogee of his
moral existence; and his figure, then moderately stout, was radiant with
regular and manly beauty. But soon, when nations submitted and
sovereigns bowed before him, he was no longer restrained by respect for
man or even for nature. He dared, attempted all things; spoke without
restraint; was gay, familiar, and often intemperate in language. His
moral and physical nature became more developed, nor did his extreme
stoutness diminish his Olympian beauty; his fuller countenance still
preserved the eagle glance; and when descending from his accustomed
height from which he excited admiration, fear, and hatred, he became
merry, familiar, and almost vulgar, he could resume his dignity in a
moment, for he was able to descend without demeaning himself. And when
at length, in advancing life, he is supposed to be less active or less
daring, because of his increasing _embonpoint_, or because Fortune had
ceased to smile on him, he bounds more impetuously than ever on his
charger, and shows that for his ardent mind matter is no burden,
misfortune no restraint.
Such were the successive developments of this extraordinary nature. It
is not easy to estimate Napoleon’s moral qualities, for it is rather
difficult to discover goodness in a soldier who was continually strewing
the earth with dead, or friendship in a man who never knew an equal, or
probity in a potentate in whose power were the riches of the universe.
Still, though an exception to all ordinary rules, we may occasionally
catch some traits of the moral physiognomy of this extraordinary man.
In all things promptness was his distinctive characteristic. He would
become angry, but would recover his calmness with wonderful facility,
almost ashamed of his excitement, laughing at it if he could do so
without compromising his dignity, and would again address with
affectionate words or gestures the officer he had overpowered by his
burst of passion. His anger was sometimes affected for the purpose of
intimidating subalterns who neglected their duty. When real, his
displeasure passed like a flash of lightning; when affected, it lasted
as long as it was needed. When he was no longer obliged to command,
restrain, or impel men, he became gentle, simple, and just, just as
every man of great mind is who understands human nature, and appreciates
and pardons its weaknesses because he knows that they are inevitable. At
St. Helena, deprived of all external prestige, his power departed,
without any other ascendant over his companions than that derived from
his intellect and disposition, Napoleon ruled them with absolute sway,
won them by unchanging amiability; and that to such a degree that having
feared him for the greater part of their lives, they ended by loving him
for the remainder. On the battle-field he had acquired an insensibility
that was almost fearful; he could behold unmoved the ground covered with
a hundred thousand lifeless bodies, for none had ever caused so much
human blood to flow as he.
This insensibility was, so to speak, a consequence of his profession.
Often in the evening he would ride over the battle-field, which in the
morning he had strewed with all the horrors of war, to see that the
wounded were removed, a proceeding that might be the result of policy,
but was not; and he frequently sprang from his horse to assure himself
whether in an apparently lifeless body the vital spark did not still
linger. At Wagram he saw a fine young man, in the uniform of the
cuirassiers, lying on the ground with his face covered with clotted
blood; he sprang at once from his horse, supported the head of the
wounded youth on his knee, restored him by the aid of some spirituous
remedy, and said, smiling: “He will recover, it is one more saved!”
These are no proofs of want of feeling.
In everything connected with finance he was almost avaricious, disputing
even about a centime, while he would give millions to his friends,
servants, or the poor. Having discovered that a distinguished _savant_
who had accompanied him to Egypt was in embarrassed circumstances, he
sent him a large sum, blaming him at the same time for not having told
him of his position. In 1813, having expended all his ready money, and
learning that a lady of high birth, who had once been very rich, was in
want of the necessaries of life, he immediately appointed her a pension
of twenty-four thousand francs, as much as fifty thousand at the present
time, and being told that she was eighty-four years of age, “Poor
woman,” he said, “let her be paid four years in advance.” These, we must
repeat, are no indications of want of kindness of disposition.
Having but little time to devote to private friendships, removed from
them by his superiority to other men, but still, under the influence of
time and habit, he did become attached to some, so strongly attached as
to be indulgent even to weakness to those he loved. This was the case
with regard to his relatives, whose pretensions often provoked his
anger; yet, seeing them annoyed, he relented, and to gratify them, often
did what he knew to be unwise. Although the admiration he had felt for
the Empress Josephine passed away with time, and though she had, by many
thoughtless acts, lowered herself in the esteem he always entertained
for her, he had for her, even after his divorce, the most profound
affection. He wept for Duroc, but in secret, as though it were a
weakness.
As to his probity, we know not by what standard to estimate such a
quality in a man who from the very commencement of his public career had
immense riches at his command. When he became commander-in-chief of the
army in Italy and was master of all the wealth of the country, he first
supplied his army abundantly, and then sent assistance to the army on
the Rhine, reserving nothing for himself, or at most only a sum
sufficient to purchase a small house, Rue de la Victoire, a purchase for
which one year’s pay would have sufficed; and had he died in Egypt, his
widow would have been left destitute. Was this the result of pride,
disdain of vulgar enjoyments, or honesty? Perhaps there was a little of
all in this forbearance, which was not unexampled among our generals,
though certainly as rare then as it has ever been. He punished
dishonesty with extreme severity, which might be attributed to his love
of order; but, what was still better, and seemed to indicate that he
possessed the quality of honesty himself, was the positive affection he
showed for honest people, carried so far as to take keen pleasure in
their society.
Still this man, whom God had made so great and so good, was not a
virtuous man, for virtue consists in a fixed idea of duty, to which all
our inclinations, all our desires, moral and physical, must be
subjected, and which could not be the case with one who, of all that
ever lived, put least restraint upon his passions. But if wholly
deficient in what is abstractly understood as virtue, he possessed
certain special virtues, particularly those of a warrior and statesman.
He was temperate, not prone to sensual gratifications, and, it not
exactly chaste he was not a libertine, never, except on occasions of
ceremony, remained more than a few minutes at table; he slept on a hard
bed though his constitution was rather weak than strong, bore, without
even perceiving it, an amount of fatigue that would have exhausted the
most vigorous soldiers; and was capable of prodigious exertion when
mentally occupied with some great undertaking.
He did more than brave danger, he seemed unconscious of its existence,
and was ever to be found wherever he was needed to see, direct, or
command. Such was his character as a soldier; as a general he was not
inferior.
Never had the cares of a vast military command been borne with more
coolness, vigor, or presence of mind. If he were occasionally excited
or angry, the officers who knew him best said that all _was going on
well_. When the danger became serious, he was calm, mild, encouraging,
not wishing to add the excitement attendant on his displeasure to that
which naturally arose from the circumstances; he remained perfectly
calm, a power acquired by the habit of restraining his emotions in great
emergencies, and, calculating the extent of the danger, turning it
aside, and thus triumphing over fortune. Formed for great emergencies
and familiarized by habit to every species of peril, he stood by, in
1814, a calm spectator of the suicidal destruction of his own power, a
destruction achieved by his ambition; and still he hoped when all around
despaired, because he perceived resources undivined by anybody else, and
under all vicissitudes, soaring on the wings of genius above the shock
of circumstances, and with the resignation of a self-judged mind he
accepted the deserved punishment of his faults.
Such, in our opinion, was this man, so strange, so self-contradicting,
so many-sided. If among the principal traits of his character there is
one more prominent than the rest, it is a species of moral intemperance.
A prodigy of genius and passion, flung into the chaos of a revolution,
his nature unfolds and develops itself therein. He masters that wild
confusion, replaces it by his own presence, and displays the energy,
audacity, and fickleness of that which he replaced. Succeeding to men
who stopped at nothing, either in virtue or crime, in heroism or
cruelty, surrounded by men who laid no restraints on their passions, he
laid none on his; they wished to convert the world into a universal
republic, he would have it an equally boundless monarchy; they turned
everything into chaos, he formed an almost tyrannical unity; they
disorganized everything, he re-established order; they defied
sovereigns, he dethroned them; they slaughtered men on the scaffold, he
on the battle-field, where blood was shrouded in glory. He immolated
more human beings than did any Asiatic conqueror, and within the narrow
precincts of Europe, peopled with opposing nations, he conquered a
greater space of territory than Tamerlane or Genghis Khan amid the
deserts of Asia.
It was reserved for the French revolution, destined to change the aspect
of European society, to produce a man who would fix the attention of the
world as powerfully as Charlemagne, Cæsar, Hannibal, and Alexander. He
possessed every qualification that could strike, attract, and fix the
attention of mankind, whether we consider the greatness of the part he
was destined to perform, the vastness of the political convulsions he
caused, the splendor, extent, and profundity of his genius, or his
majestic gravity of thought. This son of a Corsican gentleman, who
received the gratuitous military education that ancient royalty bestowed
on the sons of the poor nobility, had scarcely left school when in a
sanguinary tumult he obtained the rank of commander-in-chief, then left
the Parisian army for that of Italy, conquered that country in a month,
successively destroyed all the forces of the European coalition, wrested
from them the peace of Campo-Formio, and then becoming too formidable to
stand beside the government of the republic, he went to seek a new
destiny in the East, passed through the English fleet with five hundred
ships, conquered Egypt at a stride, then thought of following
Alexander’s footsteps in the conquest of India. But suddenly recalled to
the West by the renewal of the European war, after having attempted to
imitate Alexander, he imitated and equaled Hannibal in crossing the
Alps, again overpowered the coalition, and compelled it to accept the
peace of Luneville, and at thirty years of age this son of a poor
Corsican nobleman had already run through a most extraordinary career.