In forming an opinion about Napoleon, it must be remembered that when he first came upon the scene he found these conditions already in existence,--Europe in league against republican France. With the creation of those conditions he had had nothing to do. Not his was the beginning of the Revolution; not his the execution of Louis XVI.; not his the quarrel with England. If Great Britain and her allies afterward concentrated all their abuse, hatred, and hostility upon him, it was because he had become France; he had become, as Pitt himself said, “the child and champion of democracy”; he had become as Toryism throughout the world said, the “embodiment of the French Revolution.” This is the great basic truth of Napoleon’s relations with Europe; and if we overlook it, we utterly fail to understand his career. In an evil hour for France, as well as for him, the allied kings succeeded in making the French forget her past. It was not till the Bourbons had returned to France, to Spain, to Italy; it was not till feudalism had returned to Germany with its privilege, its abuses, its stick for the soldier, its rack and wheel for the civilian; it was not till Metternich and his Holy Alliance had smashed with iron heel every struggle for popular rights on the Continent; it was not till Napoleon, dead at St. Helena, was remembered in vivid contrast to the soulless despots who succeeded him, that liberalism, not only in France, but throughout the world, realized how exceeding great had been the folly of the French when they allowed the kings to divorce the cause of Napoleon from that of the French people. CHAPTER X The French Revolution was no longer guided by the men of ideals. With the downfall of Robespierre had come the triumph of those who bothered themselves with no dreams of social regeneration, but whose energies were directed with an eye single to their own advantage. Here and there was left a relic of the better type of revolutionist, “a rose of the garden left on its stalk to show where the garden had been”; but to one Carnot there were dozens of the brood of Barras.