“You owe all the evils which overwhelm you to one man, to him who every year, by the conscription, decimates your families. Who amongst us has not lost a brother, a son, relatives, friends? And why have all these brave men fallen? For him alone, and not for the country. In what cause have they fallen? They have been immolated to the mad ambition of leaving behind him the name of the most dreadful oppressor that ever weighed on the human race.... It is he that has closed against us the seas of the two worlds. To him we are indebted for the hatred of the people of all nations, without having deserved it; for, like them, we have been the unhappy victims as well as the sad instruments of his madness. What matters it that he has sacrificed but few to his private hatred, if he has sacrificed France,—we should not say, France only, but all Europe, to his boundless ambition? Look at the vast continent of Europe, everywhere strewed with the mingled bones of Frenchmen, and people with whom we had no disputes, no causes of mutual hatred, who were too distant from us to have any cause of quarrel, but whom he precipitated into all the horrors of war, solely that the earth might be filled with the noise of his name. Why boast of his past victories? What good have those dreadful triumphs brought us? The hatred of other nations, the tears of our families, our daughters forced to remain unmarried, our matrons plunged into premature widowhood, the despair of fathers and mothers, to whom there remains, out of a numerous progeny, but the hand of an infant to close their eyes: behold! these are the results of all those victories, which have brought foreign armies within our very walls.... In the name of our most sacred duties, we abjure all obedience to the usurper; we return to our legitimate rulers.” “How just,” adds a French historian, “are these accusations, although they were made by men who a little before had been prodigal of flattery and incense to the author of all these public calamities[92]!” With such a man as Napoleon is here described, whose towering military genius no one can call in question, and whose influence had so long, and so fatally fascinated the gallant French people, whose eyes were at length opened to the real character of his rule, it must not be wondered at, that we went to war; nor should our triumph over him ever be regarded as a triumph over the French nation: between that high-minded people and the rest of the civilized world, may the peace, which is already of unexampled duration, and which we bought so dearly, continue forever!