These hideous spectacles wrought quite a revolution in the mind of Napoleon. They effectually arrested the progress of all his tendencies toward democracy. He had been a great admirer of constitutional liberty in England, and a still greater admirer of republican liberty in America. He now became convinced that the people of France were too ignorant and degraded for self-government, that they needed the guidance and control of resistless law. He hated and despised the voluptuousness, the imbecility, and the tyranny of the effete monarchy. He had himself suffered most keenly from the superciliousness of the old nobility who grasped at all the places of profit and honor, merely to gratify their own sensuality, and left no career open to merit. Napoleon had his own fortune to make, and he was glad to see all these bulwarks battered down, which the pride and arrogance of past ages had reared to foster a worthless aristocracy; and to exclude the energetic and the aspiring, unaided by wealth and rank, from all the avenues of influence and celebrity. On the other hand the dominion of the mob appeared to him so execrable that he said, "I frankly declare that if I were compelled to choose between the old monarchy and Jacobin misrule, I should infinitely prefer the former." Openly and energetically, upon all occasions, fearless of consequences, he expressed his abhorrence of those miscreants who were trampling justice and mercy beneath their feet, and who were, by their atrocities, making France a by-word among all nations. This is a key to the character of Napoleon. Those opposing forces guided his future career. He ever, subsequently, manifested the most decisive resolution to crush the Jacobins. He displayed untiring energy in reconstructing in France a throne invincible in power, which should govern the people, which should throw every avenue to greatness open to all competitors, making wealth, and rank, and influence, and power the reward of merit. Napoleon openly avowed his conviction that France, without education and without religion, was not prepared for the republicanism of the United States. In this sentiment La Fayette and most of the wisest men of the French nation fully concurred. With an arm of despotic power he crushed every lawless outbreak. And he gathered around his throne eminent abilities, wherever he could find them, in the shop of the artisan, in the ranks of the army, and in the hut of the peasant. In France at this time, there was neither intelligence, religion, nor morality, among the masses. There was no reverence for law either human or divine. Napoleon expressed his high approval of the constitutional monarchy of England, and declared that to be the model upon which he would have the new government of France constructed. He judged that France needed an imposing throne, supported by an illustrious nobility and by a standing army of invincible power, with civil privileges cautiously and gradually disseminated among the people.