in its turn give up drop by drop its blood, its children, and its treasures. Society is exhausted unless war contributions and exactions definitively fill the coffers of the victor. The long hostilities of Europe, and our alternate successes and reverses, have sufficiently taught us this hard lesson. Victor or vanquished, France has never completely crushed her enemies, she has never been crushed by them. All have suffered, all still suffer from this outrage on the welfare of society, which is called a war of conquest. In the beginning of his supreme power, Napoleon thought to find in victory an inexhaustible source of riches. "It was the ideas of the ancients which Napoleon applied to the right of conquest," said Mollien. He learnt even on the morrow of the battle of Austerlitz that victory is not sufficient for the repose and prosperity of a state; the expenses necessitated by the preparations for war, the enormous sums which the treasury had had to pay, the general crisis in the commercial world had induced the minister of the treasury, Barbé Marbois, to have recourse to hazardous enterprises entrusted to unsafe hands. "You are a very honest man," the emperor wrote [Footnote: The "Négociants réunis."] to his minister, "but I cannot help believing that you are surrounded by rogues." Six weeks after the battle of Austerlitz, on the 26th January, 1806, Napoleon arrived at Paris in the night and summoned a council of finance for the following morning. The emperor scarcely permitted a few words to be addressed to him on a campaign so promptly and gloriously terminated. "We have," he said, "questions to deal with which are more serious; it appears that the greatest dangers of the state are not in Austria; listen to the report of the minister of the treasury." "Barbé Marbois commenced the report with the calm of a conscience which has nothing to reproach itself," adds M. Mollien. He soon showed how the receipts, constantly inferior to the indispensable expenses, had obliged the treasury to borrow, first from the receivers-general, then from a new company of speculators at the head of whom was M. Ouvrard, a man of ability, but of doubtful reputation; the brokers as they were called, had in their turn engaged the state in perilous affairs with Spain, and the commissions upon the receivers-general, which had been conceded to them, enormously surpassed their advances. "The State is the sole creditor of the company," Marbois said at last. The emperor got in a passion. His prompt and penetrating mind, always ready to distrust, discovered by instinct, and without penetrating into details, the fraud to which his minister was blind. He called before him the brokers, the principal clerks at the treasury, and confounding them all by the bursts of his anger, he forgot at the same time the respect he owed to the age and character of Marbois, who was suddenly dismissed, and immediately replaced by Mollien.