It is, therefore, to Lycurgus and to Bonaparte, more than to any others,
to whom we must look as the master-minds in government; as those who
instituted sweeping changes in the political institutions of the world,
and in this sense they are the greatest of all the great who live in
profane history. Many slight reforms have been effected; but they alone
conceived and reduced to a system the changes that revolutionized and
replaced the old beneficently to the people.
Bonaparte himself recognized that his greatness consisted in this, for,
when he asked his friends to which of his achievements he would owe his
life in history, and they replied, naming some campaign or battle, he
corrected them and said; “I shall go down in history with my _Code
Napoleon_ in my hands.” So it was not Marengo, not Wagram, not
Austerlitz, not Dresden, not any nor all his great victories to which he
looked as his best achievement; but it was the code of laws by which he
made France the happiest country in Europe. It is not to be wondered at
that his name lives in the hearts of the French and moves them as no
other name ever moved a people.
Great as Bismarck may be, he is not great in the true sense of
greatness, for he is building up a power that the next fifty years will
have to overthrow. True greatness works in the direction of and not
against progress, and its works live. Compared with him, Disraeli may
after all, should his intentions toward India have a humanitarian
tendency, turn out to be the greater man.
In this view of greatness, to whom shall we look among our statesmen for
any of its evidences? Beyond the legislation that the abolition of
slavery forced upon us, the homestead act and one recently introduced by
Gen. Banks, enlarging its scope in the interests of the settler, and
some concessions to the people, like the eight hour law, we may search
the legislation of the country through in vain for any evidence of
humanitarian tendencies in our legislators. On the contrary, the
inspiration of the privileged classes, the power and use of wealth will
be found everywhere; ’tis true that we have a Republican Government in
name and form, but it is also true that money rules, that it elects the
officers and controls the legislation. The people who are outside of the
privileged classes, outside of the offices and the press, are powerless
to help themselves. The machinery of the government is in the hands of
those who want things to continue as they are, while the few in power
who are devoted to the public welfare, beat the air in vain attempts to
strike either the causes of, or the remedy for existing evils.