It was a long stride which Napoleon took when he subsequently conferred the Cross of the Legion of Honor upon an illustrious tragedian. "My object," says Napoleon, "was to destroy the whole of the feudal system as organized by Charlemagne. I sought for true merit among all ranks of the great mass of French people, and was anxious to organize a true and general system of equality. I was desirous that every Frenchman should be admissible to all the employments and dignities of the state, provided he was possessed of talents and character equal to the performance of the duties, whatever might be his family. In a word, I was eager to abolish to the last trace the privileges of the ancient nobility, and to establish a government which, at the same time that it held the reins of government with a firm hand, should still be a _popular government_. The oligarchs of every country in Europe soon perceived my design, and it was for this reason that war to the death was carried on against me by England. The noble families of London, as well as those of Vienna, think themselves prescriptively entitled to the occupation of all the important offices in the state. Their birth is regarded by them as a substitute for talents and capacities." Soon after Napoleon's attainment of the consulship he restored to France the Christian religion, which revolutionary fury had swept away. In consistency with his unvarying principles, he established perfect freedom of opinion and of worship. Some of the reinstated priests began to assume much of their former arrogance. A celebrated actress died in Paris. A priest, adopting the intolerance of the old régime, refused her remains Christian burial. Napoleon caused the following article to be inserted the next day in the Moniteur, expressive of his emphatic denunciation: "The curate of St. Roche, in a moment of hallucination, has refused the rites of burial to Mademoiselle Cameroi. One of his colleagues, a man of sense, received the procession into the church of St. Thomas, where the burial service was performed with the usual solemnities. The Archbishop of Paris has suspended the curate of St. Roche for three months, to give him time to recollect that Jesus Christ commanded us to pray even for our enemies. Being thus called by meditation to a proper sense of his duties, he may learn that all these superstitious observances, the offspring of an age of credulity or of crazed imaginations, tend only to the discredit of true religion, and have been proscribed by the recent Concordat of the French Church."