A large majority of Napoleon's soldiers and officers severely condemned any treaty of peace with a monarchical government, and were clamorous for the dethronement of the king of Sardinia, and the establishment of a Republic. The people thronged Napoleon with the entreaty that he would lend them his countenance that they might revolutionize the kingdom. They urged that, by the banishment of the king and the nobles, they could establish a free government, which should be the natural and efficient ally of Republican France. He had but to say the word and the work was done. The temptation to utter that word must have been very strong. It required no common political foresight to nerve Napoleon to resist that temptation. But he had a great horror of anarchy. He had seen enough of the working of Jacobin misrule in the blood-deluged streets of Paris. He did not believe that the benighted peasants of Italy possessed either the intelligence or the moral principle essential to the support of a well-organized republic. Consequently, notwithstanding the known wishes of the Directory, the demands of the army, and the entreaties of the populace, with heroic firmness he refused to allow the overthrow of the established government. He diverted the attention of his soldiers from the subject, by plunging them into still more arduous enterprises, and leading them to yet more brilliant victories. Napoleon had no desire to see the reign of terror re-enacted in the cities of Italy. He was in favor of reform, not of revolution. The kings and the nobles had monopolized wealth and honor, and nearly all the most precious privileges of life. The people were merely hewers of wood and drawers of water. Napoleon wished to break down this monopoly and to emancipate the masses from the servitude of ages. He would do this, however, not by the sudden upheaving of thrones and the transfer of power to unenlightened and inexperienced democracy, but by surrounding the thrones with republican institutions, and conferring upon all people a strong and well-organized government, with constitutional liberty. Eloquently he says, "It would be a magnificent field for speculation to estimate what would have been the destinies of France and of Europe, had England satisfied herself with denouncing the murder of Louis XVI., which would have been for the interests of public morality, and listened to the councils of a philanthropic policy, by accepting revolutionized France as an ally. Scaffolds would not then have been erected over the whole country, and kings would not have trembled on their thrones; but their states would all have passed, more or less, through a revolutionary process, and the whole of Europe, without a convulsion, would have become constitutional and free."