nce, since his
crimes were overruled in the hatred of despotism among his own subjects,
and a still greater hatred of despotism as exercised by those kings who
finally subdued him, and who vainly attempted to turn back the progress
of liberal sentiments by their representatives at the Congress
of Vienna.

The fall of Napoleon taught some awful and impressive lessons to
humanity, which would have been unlearned had he continued to be
successful to the end. It taught the utter vanity of military glory;
that peace with neighbors is the greatest of national blessings, and war
the greatest of evils; that no successes on the battlefield can
compensate for the miseries of an unjust and unnecessary war; and that
avenging justice will sooner or later overtake the wickedness of a
heartless egotism. It taught the folly of worshipping mere outward
strength, disconnected from goodness; and, finally, it taught that God
will protect defenceless nations, and even guilty nations, when they
shall have expiated their crimes and follies, and prove Himself the kind
Father of all His children, even amid chastisements, gradually leading
them, against their will, to that blessed condition when swords shall be
beaten into ploughshares, and nations shall learn war no more.

What remains to-day of those grand Napoleonic ideas which intoxicated
France for twenty years, and which, revived by Louis Napoleon, led to a
brief glory and an infamous fall, and the humiliation and impoverishment
of the most powerful state of Europe? They are synonymous with
imperialism, personal government, the absolute reign of a single man,
without constitutional checks,--a return to Caesarism, to the
unenlightened and selfish despotism of Pagan Rome. And hence they are
now repudiated by France herself,--as well as by England and
America,--as false, as selfish, as fatal to all true national progress,
as opposed to every sentiment which gives dignity to struggling States,
as irreconcilably hostile to the civilization which binds nations
together, and which slowly would establish liberty, and peace, and
industry, and equal privileges, and law, and education, and material
prosperity, upon this fallen world.

AUTHORITIES.

So much has been written on Napoleon, that I can only select some of the
standard and accessible works. Bourrienne's Memoirs of Napoleon I.; L.
P. Junot's Memoirs of Napoleon, Court, and Family; Las Casas' Napoleon
at St. Helena; Thiers' History of th