Under the alleged necessity of the case, want of food to feed them, or vessels to send them away, a council of war unanimously decided that they should be shot. With great reluctance, and after delaying until the murmurs of the troops became mutinous, Napoleon yielded, and the prisoners were marched to the beach and massacred. That this was a horribly cruel deed no one can deny; but the barbarity was in the situation and the system, not the individual. Napoleon himself was neither blood-thirsty nor inhumane. The last thing he had done before quitting France had been to denounce the cruelty of the authorities in dealing with émigrés who were non-combatants. His proclamation, which really invited soldiers to disobey a cruel law, closed with the ringing statement, “The soldier who signs a death-warrant against a person incapable of bearing arms is a coward!” In passing judgment upon Napoleon, we must adopt some standard of comparison; we must know what military precedents have been, and what the present practice is. Three days after the battle of Culloden the Duke of Cumberland, being informed that the field was strewn with wounded Highlanders who still lived,--through rain and sun and the agony of undressed wounds,--marched his royal person and his royal army back to the field and, in cold blood, butchered every man who lay there. A barn, near the battle-field, was full of wounded Scotchmen; the royal Duke set it on fire, and all within were burned to death. During the conquest of Algiers, in 1830, a French commander, a royalist, came upon a multitude of Arabs--men, women, children--who had taken refuge in a cave. He made a fire at the cavern’s mouth and smoked them all to death. In the year 1900, Russians, Germans, and other Christians invaded China to punish the heathen for barbarities practised upon Christian missionaries. A German emperor (Christian, of course) said, “Give no quarter.” Germans and Russians killed everything that was Chinese--men and women and children. Armed or not armed, working in fields or idle, walking in streets or standing still, giving cause or giving none, the heathen were shot and bayoneted and sabred and clubbed, until the streets were choked with dead Chinese, the rivers were putrid with dead Chinese, the very waters of the ocean stank with dead Chinese. Prisoners were made to dig their own graves, were then shot, tumbled into the hole, and other prisoners made to fill the grave. Girls and matrons were outraged in the presence of brothers, sons, husbands, fathers; and were then shot, or stabbed to death with swords or bayonets. Were it not for examples such as these, the reader might feel inclined to agree with the anti-Bonaparte biographers who say that the Jaffa massacre was the blackest in the annals of civilized warfare.