(2) In an answer to a correspondent in regard to the best English histories _you omit the favorite_—my favorite—and I think the best—John Richard Green’s _Shorter History of the English People_. _Why did you omit it?_ Another interesting article. (3) I can’t understand what you mean by saying that the “cry of the people ground down by their masters, was what brought Napoleon back from Elba.” I have read your history of Napoleon, too. _Was it not solely his ambition, and he saw in the disaffection of the people a chance to swell his armies?_ Let me congratulate you on Clarence Darrow’s story. It has the element that made Burns and Wordsworth. Please accept my congratulations. Wishing you a Merry Christmas and you and your Magazine a Happy and Prosperous New Year. Yours very truly, ⸺ ⸺. ANSWER. (1) I call Napoleon a democrat because he made war upon caste and privilege, upon Kings and aristocracies, and because he favored universal education, equal opportunities for all, and equal rights for all. In judging any man, great or small, you must allow for environment. Born in Corsica, and coming to France to be educated for the army in a royal school, Napoleon could hardly be the kind of democrat the average American boy so naturally becomes. France was ruled by a King and aristocracy, just as other European nations were. Monarchical institutions, hundreds of years old, stood on every hand. The Revolution crashed through them all, and prostrated them all, but the Revolution could not sustain itself. Reaction set in, and there was danger of a Bourbon restoration. Napoleon struck in at “the psychological moment,” and became the people’s King. Personally he became despotic, but _his work_ was always democratic. I call him a democrat because he made it possible for the poorest boy in France to advance to the highest pinnacle of glory; because he lifted the boycott against men of obscure birth and made _merit_ the test of distinction; because he abolished the outrageous privileges of feudal nobility in every part of Europe which came under his control; because he rebuked the bigotry of priesthood and punished a clerical Ass who had insulted the corpse of an actress; because he scornfully repulsed the flatterers who wished to “make up” a fine ancestral tree for him, and proudly dated _his_ nobility from the date of his first great achievement; because he studied to improve the condition of the common people; because he tried to make school-teaching practical—that is he tried to have his schools fit every boy for the career which _that_ boy’s talent was suited for; because he equalized taxation; because he based his administration and his Code upon the broad righteous principle of “Equal Rights for all and special privileges for none.”