urther violence in
Brittany; the towns of Mainz, Valenciennes, and Conde had been
evacuated, and Dunkirk was besieged by the Duke of York. The loss of
Toulon would put a climax to such disasters, destroy the credit of the
republic abroad and at home, perhaps bring back the Bourbons. Carnot
had in the meantime come to the assistance of the Committee of Safety.
Great as a military organizer and influential as a politician, he had
already awakened the whole land to a still higher fervor, and had
consolidated public sentiment in favor of his plans. In Dubois de
Crance he had an able lieutenant. Fourteen armies were soon to move
and fight, directed by a single mind; discipline was about to be
effectively strengthened because it was to be the discipline of the
people by itself; the envoys of the Convention were to go to and fro,
successfully laboring for common action and common enthusiasm in the
executive, in both the fighting services, and in the nation. But as
yet none of these miracles had been wrought, and, with Toulon lost,
they might be forever impossible.

Such was the setting of the stage in the great national theater of
France when Napoleon Buonaparte entered on the scene. The records of
his boyhood and youth by his own hand afford the proof of what he was
at twenty-four. It has required no searching analysis to discern the
man, nor trace the influences of his education. Except for short and
unimportant periods, the story is complete and accurate. It is,
moreover, absolutely unsophisticated. What does it show? A well-born
Corsican child, of a family with some fortune, glad to use every
resource of a disordered time for securing education and money,
patriotic at heart but willing to profit from France, or indeed from
Russia, England, the Orient; wherever material advantage was to be
found. This boy was both idealist and realist, each in the high degree
corresponding to his great abilities. He shone neither as a scholar
nor as an officer, being obdurate to all training,--but by independent
exertions and desultory reading of a high class he formed an ideal of
society in which there prevailed equality of station and purse, purity
of life and manners, religion without clericalism, free speech and
honorable administration of just laws. His native land untrammeled by
French control would realize this ideal, he had fondly hoped: but the
Revolution emancipated it completely, entirely; and what occurred? A
reversion to every