Page:Three Years in Europe.djvu/424

374 They crushed Holland and Belgium into one kingdom. They forcibly annexed Norway to Sweden. And they handed over fifteen millions of the people of Poland back to Russia, Austria and Prussia!

The careful student will find in the history of Napoleon, whom the English minister Pitt rightly calls "the child and the champion of democracy," a repetition on a larger scale of the history of Cromwell. The one did for all Europe what the other did for England. Both began as earnest workers for the popular cause. Both were compelled to take all power into their own hands, because popular institutions do not grow in a day. Both failed in their immediate purpose; the Stuarts came back to England, and the Bourbons to France. But the cause which they strove for ultimately succeeded, in England 1688, in Europe between 1830 and 1860. Both Cromwell and Napoleon had their faults, but both were, in spite of their faults, great men and good men, who brought order out of chaos, and nobly advanced a good cause. But the Jacobites of England considered it a part of their loyalty to vilify the motives and character of Cromwell for well nigh two hundred years; and the historians of the nations which fought against Napoleon think it to this day a national duty to blacken his character and vilify his motives. And thus even the Commander-in-Chief of England, Lord Wolsley, who admits Napoleon to be "the greatest of all the great men," must nevertheless call him a "bad man."

The popular cause which the victors of Waterloo had tried to crush, triumphed in the end. France drove