Napoleon: A Sketch of His Life, Character, Struggles, and AchievementsWatson, Thomas E. (Thomas Edward)
History
Napoleon: A Sketch of His Life, Character, Struggles, and Achievements
Watson, Thomas E. (Thomas Edward)
Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821
Relentlessly selfish in the pursuit of power, it will be admitted by
those who impartially study his career that he used his power, not
for personal and selfish pleasures, but for the future welfare of the
peoples over whose destinies he presided. The laborious manner in which
he worked out the revolutionary principle of lifting the despised Jew
into full citizenship, will always be a striking illustration of the
liberality of his statesmanship.
He loved to tour the country, to see with his own eyes, to hear with
his own ears. He loved to meet the people face to face, to talk with
them familiarly, to get at the real facts about everything. The man
never lived who had such a passion for making things better. Harbors
must be widened, deepened, made more secure. Trade routes must be
improved, rivers linked to rivers, or rivers connected with seas.
Mountains must be conquered by broad, easy-grade roads; and villages
must be planted along the route for the convenience of the traveller.
He tore out old buildings to make way for new ones,--larger, better,
grander. Crooked streets--narrow, nasty, the homes of squalor, of
crime, and of pestilence--he replaced by broad avenues and handsome
buildings. Churches, schools, town-halls, arsenals, dockyards, canals,
highways, bridges, fortifications, manufactories, harbor works, new
industries, sprang up at his touch throughout the realms he ruled.
Had he never been known as a warrior, his work as administrator and
as a legislator would have made his name immortal. Had he never been
heard of as a legislator, his work in Europe as a developer of material
resources would have made it impossible for the world to forget him.
The manufactories which he encouraged were but the beginnings of a
mighty evolution which would have transferred to the Continent the vast
profits England had so long reaped. At every seaport, on every canal,
on all the highways, in every town from Venice to Brest and Cherbourg,
the traveller of the present day sees the footprints of Napoleon the
Great.
He rid Paris of the periodical nuisance of the Seine overflow, and
along the river ran his magnificent embankments. At St. Helena he
expressed a wonder that the Thames had never been thus controlled, and
England afterward embanked her river as the great Emperor suggested.
His natural instinct was to make improvements. The first thing he did
in Spain was to establish free-trade between her provinces, abolish
feudal burdens, suppress one-third of the monasteries where “those lazy
beasts of monks” lived in idleness at public expense, and to give the
people the right to be heard in fixing taxes and making laws. The first
thing the Bourbons did, on their return, was to restore all the abuses
Napoleon had abolished.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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