ie," p.143. (As a
specimen of steps taken in time of war, see the register of Marshal
Bessieres' orders, commandant at Valladolid from April 11 to July 15,
1811.)--"Correspondance du Roi Jerome," letter of Jerome to Napoleon,
Dec. 5, 1811. (Showing the situation of a vanquished people in times of
peace): "If war should break out, all countries between the Rhine and
the Oder will become the center of a vast and active insurrection. The
mighty cause of this dangerous movement is not merely hatred of the
French, and impatience of a foreign yoke, but rather in the misfortunes
of the day, in the total ruin of all classes, in over-taxation,
consisting of war levies, the maintenance of troops, soldiers traversing
the country, and every sort of constantly renewed vexation.... At
Hanover, Magdebourg, and in the principal towns of my kingdom, owners of
property are abandoning their dwellings and vainly trying to dispose
of them at the lowest prices.... Misery everywhere presses on families;
capital is exhausted; the noble, the peasant, the bourgeois, are crushed
with debt and want.... The despair of populations no longer having
anything to lose, because all has been taken away, is to be feared."--De
Pradt, p.73. (Specimen of military proceedings in allied countries.) At
Wolburch, in the Bishop of Cujavie's chateau, "I found his secretary,
canon of Cujavie, decorated with the ribbon and cross of his order, who
showed me his jaw, broken by the vigorous blows administered to him the
previous evening by General Count Vandamme, because he had refused to
serve Tokay wine, imperiously demanded by the general; he was told that
the King of Westphalia had lodged in the castle the day before, and had
carted away all this wine."]

[Footnote 12122: Fievee, "Correspondance et relations avec Bonaparte,
de 1802 a 1813," III., 82. (Dec. 1811), (On the populations annexed
or conquered): "There is no hesitation in depriving them of their
patrimony, their language, their legislatures, in disturbing all their
habits, and that without any warrant but throwing a bulletin des lois at
their heads (inapplicable).... How could they be expected to recognize
this, or even become resigned to it?... Is it possible not to feel that
one no longer has a country, that one is under constraint, wounded in
feeling and humiliated?... Prussia, and a large part of Germany, has
been so impoverished that there is more to gain by taking a pitchfork to
kill a man than to st