Nor did he bring peace with foreign countries. England, which again and again incited Europe against him, and his own warlike temperament did not allow it. But he has the great merit of having been the domestic peacemaker of France. He consolidated the nation, which was divided, created national cohesion anew. The sense of law and legality had been lost; he gave it back to the French. He could not establish domestic peace by granting liberty. He could only do it by firm authority. Therefore he, who made his army go into mourning for the death of Washington, did not become a Washington. Nor did he become a Cæsar, however often he may be called one. He had nothing of Cæsar's distinction and ease, nothing of his charm and elegance. He became Napoleon, new of his kind, alone of his kind.

VII.

By relentless energy, then, Napoleon suppressed domestic risings and tumults. He united France. He accomplished equality. He secured the results of the economic changes of the Revolution, and he spread its ideas over Europe.

By what qualities? By his intuition of the real, the concrete, which expressed itself as an eye for what was decisive, for the essence of things.

With him it was primarily the eye of the artilleryman. He saw the importance of being the stronger at the decisive point and at the decisive moment.

As a quite young officer he comes to Toulon, when the town is hostile to the Revolution and the English Fleet is protecting it against the French. At the first glance he sees that the elevated point of "L'Eguillette" is the decisive point for capturing the town, the point which commands the large and small roadsteads of Toulon. He demands its capture. The attempt is made by the reluctant Commander-in-Chief with only three hundred men. It fails, and the English then drag a whole park of artillery up to it. He nevertheless again demands its capture and carries it through.

That is the eye of a genius in his capacity of General. He has the same as a law-giver, as an administrator, and, as a rule, as a judge of character, the eye for the essence of things. For a long time he overcomes all resistance by the realism of his intelligence (which was only darkened when continual prosperity had gone to his head), by the astonishing extent and restless vigilance of his intelligence, the scope and clearness of his memory, his power of comprehensive judgments and conclusions.

As First Consul he had in his study at the Tuileries-which

was really his laboratory, his workshop with his tools-a bookcase, which contained his Etats de situation (reports of the actual military and financial situation), his bundles of documents, his account-books and notebooks. To give an idea of his great store of knowledge, it has been said that he had all these in his head. (It was the contents of these notebooks that the spy Michel, who was not found out till 1812, disclosed to Russia during a period of ten years.) There were in the mind of Napoleon, Taine has said, three collections of surveys. Each consisted of a score of stout ledgers which were always kept up to date.

The first collection was military, and included an enormous atlas of topographical maps with indications of all the departments of the army and fleet, their actual employment and equipment; the regiments, batteries, line-of-battle ships and frigates, arsenals, store-houses and their contents: horses, carriages, arms, and provisions.

The next series was civil, and comprised the finances in their actual state, all general and extraordinary income and expenditures, the taxes in France, the levying of war taxes abroad, the national debt, salaries and pensions, public works, the whole administration; senators, deputies, ministers, prefects, judges, the whole official list.

The third series was a gigantic encyclopædia with biographies and characterisations, where every nation he governed or made war upon, every class and group of mankind, every prominent individual of the thousands and thousands he knew, was registered and characterised.

In 1812 he ruled personally 295,000 square miles of country, the greater part of Europe, and had the whole of it with an immensity of details ever present before him. (His enormous correspondence is evidence of it, and from the thirtytwo volumes of his letters, which were published at the instance of Napoleon III., all those the publication of which was considered to be of no political interest are omitted.)

Amongst hundreds of traits which show his omnipresence of mind, this little anecdote is characteristic. When occupied by much business, he sends an officer to Belgium to investigate the military stores there. The officer hands in his report. Napoleon gives him the document back with these words: "There are two guns missing at Ostend." And there were really two missing.

On October 15th, 1812, he issued in Moscow the regulations for the Théâtre Français, which in all essentials are in force at the present day, with the rules for the duties and rights of the different classes of actors, for the distribution of parts, when leave of absence is to be granted, on what terms débuts may be

arranged, how the profits are to be distributed, and how pensions are to be fixed.

The only change is that the imperial authority, which was represented by commission, has now become the Government authority and is represented by an administrator.

He had postponed the signing of the decree. But he sat there in Moscow, threatened by winter and by the Russians, soon to be surrounded by the flames of the burning city, and he had enough calmness and sense of the imposing to sign the regulations of a theatre under these circumstances.

VIII.

His character was not equal to his genius. The egotism which his genius involved, the lust of power which was his fundamental passion, beguiled him at times to injustice, to unwise actionsnay, the vertigo attributed to omnipotence even darkened for a short time his genius.

Three periods in his history may be distinguished. The first, in which his own interest and that of France are identical, at least in essentials; for the expedition to Egypt, which entailed the loss of the Fleet, was instituted chiefly for his own sake, although France would not now disavow it. As a young General and at the beginning of the Consulate, he was a brilliant figure, the fortune of France.

The second period is that in which his interests and those of France do not always coincide, although his policy is coherent from first to last. The unfortunate campaign in Russia was not elicited by Napoleon's ambition, but by the faithlessness of Alexander I., which again was due to unreasonable distrust of Napoleon's honesty towards him, and to a changeable monarch's dislike of a "usurper," of whose friendship he had lately been proud.

The interests of the dynasty and the welfare of the French nation-two very different things, which sometimes, of course, coincided—became one to Napoleon during his campaigns between 1808 and 1813. Then there is the last period, in which his own interests and those of France are once more the same; this was in the years 1814 and 1815, when in reality he was only the Generalissimo of France.

It is when he is in possession of supreme powers and continual prosperity that the ugly sides of his nature come out, his sheer despotism, his fondness for oppression, his hostility to liberty. He again becomes attractive when, instead of being a conqueror, he becomes a defender; instead of a sacrificer, a victim. And in

this last period he is as he was at first, as, for that matter, he always was, but then more clearly than ever-the chosen of the people-yes, even more than he was at the beginning. For in 1799 the sovereignty of the people, as it was called, which gave the power to an individual, expressed in reality not the free choice of the nation, but the will of the army. In 1814, on his return from Elba, when he stands there again, beaten, exiled, with empty hands, he is elected by a nation. It cannot be said with full truth that here only his destiny is new; his nature has remained the same. Napoleon is no exception to the rule that a man's nature is altered by his destiny.

Translated by C. A. Bang.

GEORGES BRANDES, LL.D.

(To be continued.)

LIFE IN EASTERN GALICIA.

THERE are few places in Europe less known to the ordinary traveller than Eastern Galicia-where the great plains of Russia meet, across the Dneister, the Carpathian wall that semicircles Hungary. Here it may be said that Austria ends. Galicia is the largest province, and has the severest climate, in that most conglomerate of empires. It has long and bitter winters, short and wet springs, burning summers, and tranquil autumns. Its inhabitants are nearly one-half Poles and the remainder mostly Ruthenians. These latter predominate as. the Russian frontier is approached. This is the land, and these are the people, I would here picture.

The train from Husiatyn to Lemberg (Lwów) is unquestionably primitive and exceedingly deliberate in action. The Konduktor blows his whistle, the engine shrieks hysterically, the Konduktor blows a louder blast, the engine emits a series of weird noises and gives various signs of an intention to start, while intending passengers, not to be hurried by any number of whistles and shrieks, pick their way slowly towards the carriages over the sleeping prostrate forms of scores of peasants who are reposing at full length on the platform and in the waiting rooms. These people have a talent for sleep, and one of the most arduous tasks of a Russian policeman is to protect street sleepers, to awaken them if the fierce heat of summer or the low temperature of winter, sometimes 30° below zero, threatens them with death, and to see that those who have drunk themselves into a comatose condition come to no harm. The Slavs have great belief in the efficacy of sleep. They hate to interrupt slumber, and the roughest isvoschik will drive his droshky most tenderly in and out amongst the hundreds of dozing work-people who fling themselves down during the hour following their mid-day meal, in the gutters, and even in the very centre of the busiest thoroughfares. Huge are the bundles carried by Slavonic travellers. Even the upper classes, when obliged to break a journey at any of the smaller towns, bring an inordinate amount of baggage, for they have a rooted objection to strange bed linen, pillows, and towels -not without reason-and in consequence are forced to carry these articles wherever they go, along with any number of bulky cushions and rugs, for use during the long drives over vile roads which they may have to undertake. And probably this is