The French, in self-defense, were endeavoring to repel their powerful foe, by marching to India, England’s only vulnerable point. Surely, the responsibility of this war rests with the assailants, and not with the assailed. There was a powerful party in the British Parliament and throughout the nation, the friends of reform and of popular liberty, who sympathized entirely with the French in this conflict, and who earnestly protested against a war which they deemed impolitic and unjust. But the king and the nobles prevailed, and as the French would not meekly submit to their demands, the world was deluged with blood. “Nothing was easier,” says Alison, “than to have disarmed the captives and sent them away.” The remark is unworthy of the eloquent and distinguished historian. It is simply affirming that France should have yielded the conflict, and submitted to British dictation. It would have been far more in accordance with the spirit of the events to have said, “Nothing was easier than for England to allow France to choose her own form of government.” But had this been done, the throne of England’s king, and the castles of her nobles might have been overturned by the earthquake of revolution. Alas, for man! Bourrienne, the rejected secretary of Napoleon, who became the enemy of his former benefactor, and who, as the minister and flatterer of Louis XVIII., recorded with caustic bitterness the career of the great rival of the European kings, thus closes his narrative of this transaction: “I have related the truth; the whole truth. I assisted at all the conferences and deliberations, though, of course, without possessing any deliberative voice. But I must in candor declare, that had I possessed a right of voting, my voice would have been for death. The result of the deliberations, and the circumstances of the army, would have constrained me to this. War, unfortunately, offers instances, by no means rare, in which an immutable law, of all times and common to all nations, has decreed that private interests shall succumb to the paramount good of the public, and that humanity itself shall be forgotten. It is for posterity to judge whether such was the terrible position of Bonaparte. I have a firm conviction that it was. And this is strengthened by the fact, that the opinion of the members of the council was unanimous upon the subject, and that the order was issued upon their decision. I owe it also to truth to state, that Napoleon yielded only at the last extremity, and was, perhaps, one of those who witnessed the massacre with the deepest sorrow.” Even Sir Walter Scott, who, unfortunately, allowed his Tory predilections to dim the truth of his unstudied yet classic page, while affirming that “this bloody deed must always remain a deep stain upon the character of Napoleon,” is constrained to admit, “yet we do not view it as the indulgence of an innate love of cruelty; for nothing in Bonaparte’s