Napoleon’s ordinance, which forbade the surrender of a fortress without having stood at least one assault, has been strongly censured by English writers upon slender grounds. The obstinate defences made by French governors in the Peninsula were the results, and to condemn an enemy’s system from which we have ourselves suffered will scarcely bring it into disrepute. But the argument runs, that the besiegers working by the rules of art must make a way into the place, and to risk an assault for the sake of military glory or to augment the loss of the enemy is to sacrifice brave men uselessly; that capitulation always followed a certain advance of the besiegers in Louis the Fourteenth’s time, and to suppose Napoleon’s upstart generals possessed of superior courage or sense of military honour to the high-minded nobility of that age was quite inadmissible; and it has been rather whimsically added that obedience to the emperor’s orders might suit a predestinarian Turk but could not be tolerated by a reflecting Christian. From this it would seem, that certain nice distinctions as to the extent and manner reconcile human slaughter with Christianity, and that the true standard of military honour was fixed by the intriguing, depraved and insolent court of Louis the Fourteenth. It may however be reasonably supposed, that as the achievements of Napoleon’s soldiers far exceeded the exploits of Louis’s cringing courtiers they possessed greater military virtues. But the whole argument seems to rest upon false grounds. To inflict loss upon an enemy is the very essence of war, and as the bravest men and officers will always be foremost in an assault, the loss thus occasioned may be of the utmost importance. To resist when nothing can be gained or saved is an act of barbarous courage which reason spurns at; but how seldom does that crisis happen in war? Napoleon wisely insisted upon a resistance which should make it dangerous for the besiegers to hasten a siege beyond the rules of art, he would not have a weak governor yield to a simulation of force not really existing; he desired that military honour should rest upon the courage and resources of men rather than upon the strength of walls: in fine he made a practical application of the proverb that necessity is the mother of invention.