OCR Text |
Show Napoleon and His Family. A Paris letter to an Eastern journal tells of the new history of Napoleon in preparation by M. Frederick Masson, and his efforts to show that the cause of Napoleon's fall was due .to the intriguing, the treachery and the imbecility of his own Immediate Im-mediate relatives. It seems to us that a man might make a better use of his time than in writing twenty volumes on a theme like that. Napoleon Na-poleon served his time and fulfilled his destiny. The tyrannies of fifteen hundred years had been heaped upon Europe. They had to be repressed and the soil soaked with blood, before the tree of liberty could begin to grow, before consciencs could bogin to exercise its power on those in power. So Napoleon was sent, the concentration of brain and energy; his arteries charged with all the savageries of Ancient Rome, with no moral restraints, no pity to temper his ambition, no sense of justice to interfere with his plans. So for twenty years he blazed, not like a meteor, but like a world on fire. Consummate In his genius, with a natural power of command and a magnetism mag-netism that drew those he comamnded to him with a love so strong that they smiled at death when it had to be met in his service, ha blazed a very sun to his people, a bale fire to his enemies, ene-mies, until on the rotten old political status of Europe he worked the changes which one of those upheavals called a geological period works upon the earth's crust. As brilliant with pen as with sword, he blinded men's eyes, to the savants of France he dictated laws as on the field he directed di-rected the fate of armies and empires. As subtile as a serpent, as defiant and bold as th9 sea-eagle that delights when wind and wave are at war to poise his wings over the spot where the combat is going on and to mix his screams with ihz voices of the tempest and ride triumphantly a hurricane. No wonder he drew to him men's hearts. No wonder that to all opposing him he was a terror. But there was another side to him. He was concieuceless, untrue, debased in every moral attribute, at-tribute, a natural tyrant whose tyranny extended to infinite depths of smallness; a quibbler over little things, envious; ' jealous, cold, revengeful. A glorious glo-rious intellect, the strengtji of a domi-god, but a man that was unrestrained by a single moral or naturally manly attribute. He ruled supreme while his grand army lasted; when the last of that army was dying daily under the snows and frosts of a Russian winter, he left It and rushed to Paris. For their sorrows he had no regrets, save as their annihilation reduced his own offensive and de- fensive power; If for their final sacrifice he felt any pity, there is no record of it. When he was first called "The Scourge of God," the man who invented the phrase described him exactly. It is idle to charge his downfall to his family. They as a rule had his views without his Intellect. He gave them thrones and permitted them to call themselves kings and queens, but he really intended that they should only be his deputies to do his will, and he quarreled with them when they sought to enforce their own personalities. He won much glory for Franco but those glories take on a lurid hue when one thinks of them as shining over practically the graves of all her fighting men. His triumphs were superb but they cost the strength of France and draped the women wo-men of the fair domain in mourning robes for twenty years. His fall was as certain as his rise; lie was made in part of iron and part clay and his being broken in pieces was but carrying out the programme decided upon before his birth. |