Manufactures he encouraged to the utmost of his power, by shutting off foreign competition, by setting the example of using home-made goods, and by direct subsidies. He even went so far as to experiment with the government warehouse plan, advancing money out of the treasury to the manufactures on the deposit of products of the mills. No drone, be he the haughtiest Montmorency, whose ancestor had been in remote ages a murderer and a thief, could hold office under Napoleon. Unless he were willing to work, he could not enter into the hive. For the first time in the political life of the modern French, men became prouder of the fact that they were workers, doers of notable deeds, than that they were the fifteenth cousin of some spindle-shanked duke whose great-great-grandfather had held the stirrup when Louis XIII. had straddled his horse. Having founded the Bank of France, January, 1800, Napoleon jealously scrutinized its management, controlled its operations, and made it useful to the State as well as to the bankers. He watched the quotations of government securities, took pride in seeing them command high prices, and considered it a point of honor that they should not fall below eighty. When they dropped considerably below that figure, some years later, the Emperor went into the market, made “a campaign against the Bears,” and forced the price up again--many a crippled bear limping painfully off the lost field. The First Consul also elaborated a system of state education. Here he was no Columbus, no creator, no original inventor. His glory is that he accomplished what others had suggested, had attempted, but had not done. He took hold, gave the scheme the benefit of his tremendous driving force, and pushed it through. It will be his glory forever that in all things pertaining to civil life he was the highest type of democrat. Distinctions of character, merit, conduct, talent, he could understand; distinctions of mere birth he abhorred. The very soul of his system was the rewarding of worth. In the army, the civil service, the schools, in art and science and literature, his great object was to discover the real men,--the men of positive ability,--and to open to these the doors of preferment. Remembering the sufferings he and his sister had endured at the Bourbon schools where the poor scholars were cruelly humiliated, he founded his training-schools, military and civil, upon the plan which as a boy he had sketched. The young men at his military academies kept no troops of servants, and indulged in no hurtful luxury. They not only attended to their own personal needs, but fed, curried, and saddled their own horses.