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444 "La France n'a étendu ses conquêtes que pour enlever des tributaires à l'Angleterre."

The practised observer of history is apparent in many places. The Constitution Civile is described as the ruin of the Revolution ; but the Concordat is set forth as a contrivance to dissociate the clergy from both of the preceding orders of things, and make it subserve the new. So close a student of Marmont could not miss the defect in Napoleon's generalship, the forward eagerness that would not provide for ill-fortune. But it is a merit in a biographer of Stein to recognise as he does the prodigious success of Metternich's ministry during the war of liberation. He is not blinded by the glare of Russian snowfields, and knows what Jomini explained long ago, that the army was destroyed by its commander, and not by the cold. He does not fall into the extinct error of thin king that the Congress of Vienna was going to pieces when Napoleon escaped ; but he does not make it clear that the emperor started for France in that belief, and that the settled concord of Europe was a surprise to him. The spirit of nationality, the propeller of so much later history, is derived by Mr. Seeley from the imperial wars ; but he is not careful to distinguish national from liberal opposition, or the effect of resistance to Napoleon in Spain from the direct influence upon his Italian countrymen of his political forecast : "L'ltalie est une seule nation. L'unité de moeurs, de langage, de litérature, doit, dans un avenir plus ou moins éloigné, reunir enfin ses habitants sous un seul gouvernement. — Rome est, sans contredit, la capitale que les Italiens choisiront un jour." In other ways he at least does him strict justice, showing that the destruction of popular liberties had been the nation's own act, and that the emperor was continually forced to defend himself against aggression. More stress might have been laid on the policy of making Europe pay the deficit of France which Napoleon disclosed when, in answer to a minister pleading that his finances wanted repose, he said : "Au contraire, elles s'embarrassent ; il leur faut la guerre."