Napoleon insisted on the greatest freedom of speech in the discussions on the laws, just as he did on “going straight to the point and not wasting time on idle talk.” This clearheadedness, energy, and grasp of subject, exercised over a body of really remarkable men, developed the Council until its discussions became famous throughout Europe. One of its wisest members, Chancellor Pasquier, says of Napoleon’s direction that “it was of such a nature as to enlarge the sphere of one’s ideas, and to give one’s faculties all the development of which they were capable. The highest legislative, administrative, and sometimes even political matters were taken up in it (the Council). Did we not see, for two consecutive winters, the sons of foreign sovereigns come and complete their education in its midst?” It was the genius of the head of the state, however, which was the most impressive feature of the Council of State. De Molleville, a former minister of Louis XVI., said once to Las Cases: “It must be admitted that your Bonaparte, your Napoleon, was a very extraordinary man. We were far from understanding him on the other side of the water. We could not refuse the evidence of his victories and his invasions, it is true; but Genseric, Attila, Alaric had done as much; so he made more of an impression of terror on me than of admiration. But when I came here and followed the discussions on the civil code, from that moment I had nothing but profound veneration for him. But where in the world had he learned all that? And then every day I discovered something new in him. Ah, sir, what a man you had there! Truly, he was a prodigy.” The modern reader who looks at France and sees how her University, her special schools, her hospitals, her great honorary legion, her treaty with the Catholic Church, her code of laws, her Bank—the vital elements of her life, in short—are as they came from Napoleon’s brain, must ask, with De Molleville, How did he do it—he a foreigner, born in a half-civilized island, reared in a military school, without diplomatic or legal training, without the prestige of name or wealth? How could he make a nation? How could he be other than the barbaric conqueror the English and the _émigrés_ first thought him. Those who look at Napoleon’s achievements, and are either dazzled or horrified by them, generally consider his power superhuman. They call it divine or diabolic, according to the feeling he inspires in them; but, in reality, the qualities he showed in his career as a statesman and lawgiver are very human ones. His stout grasp on subjects; his genius for hard work; his power of seeing everything that should be done, and doing it himself; his unparalleled audacity, explain his civil achievements.