court never permitted between the officers and himself. They performed,
under his eye, that which no others could do. The best document of his
relation to his troops is the order of the day on the morning of the
battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon promises the troops that he
will keep his person out of reach of fire. This declaration, which is
the reverse of that ordinarily made by generals and sovereigns on the
eve of a battle, sufficiently explains the devotion of the army to
their leader.

But though there is in particulars this identity between Napoleon and
the mass of the people, his real strength lay in their conviction that
he was their representative in his genius and aims, not only when he
courted, but when he controlled, and even when he decimated them by
his conscriptions. He knew, as well as any Jacobin in France, how to
philosophize on liberty and equality; and, when allusion was made to
the precious blood of centuries, which was spilled by the killing of
the Duc d'Enghien, he suggested, "Neither is my blood ditch-water" The
people felt that no longer the throne was occupied, and the land sucked
of its nourishment, by a small class of legitimates, secluded from all
community with the children of the soil, and holding the ideas and
superstitions of a long-forgotten state of society. Instead of that
vampire, a man of themselves held, in the Tuilleries, knowledge and
ideas like their own, opening, of course, to them and their children,
all places of power and trust. The day of sleepy, selfish policy, ever
narrowing the means and opportunities of young men, was ended, and a
day of expansion and demand was come. A market for all the powers and
productions of man was opened: brilliant prizes glittered in the eyes
of youth and talent. The old, iron-bound, feudal France was changed
into a young Ohio or New York; and those who smarted under the immediate
rigors of the new monarch, pardoned them as the necessary severities