Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/473

Rh like in its character to that of one who hires a bravo, but unlike by entailing no danger, was quite natural. It was natural, too, that, in addition to countless treacheries and breaches of faith in his dealings with foreign powers, such a man should play the traitor to his own nation, by stamping out its newly-gained free institutions, and substituting his own military despotism. Such being the nature of the man, and such being a few illustrations of his cruelty and unscrupulousness, contemplate now his greater crimes and their motives. Year after year he went on sacrificing by tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands the French people and the people of Europe at large, to gratify his lust of power and his hatred of opponents. To feed his insatiable ambition, and to crush those who resisted his efforts after universal dominion, he went on seizing the young men of France, forming army after army that were destroyed in destroying like armies raised by neighboring nations. In the Russian campaign alone, out of 552,000 French left dead or prisoners, but a small portion returned to France; while the Russian force of more than 200,000 was reduced to 30,000 or 40,000: implying a total sacrifice of considerably more than half a million lives. And when the mortality on both sides by death in battle, by wounds and by disease, throughout all the Napoleonic campaigns is summed up, it exceeds, at the lowest computation, two millions. And all this slaughter, all this suffering, all this devastation, was gone through because one man had a restless desire to be despot over all men.

And now what has been thought and felt in England about the two sets of events above contrasted, and about the actors in them? For the bloodshed of the Revolution there has been utter detestation, and for those who wrought it unqualified hate. For the immeasurably greater bloodshed which these wars of the Consulate and the Empire entailed, little or no horror is expressed; while the feeling toward the