Every new institution of importance so far created by Bonaparte might, with no great ingenuity, be turned into a prop of autocratic government. The Legion of Honor was a measure easily manageable in the interest of any government which might control it. Priests and emigrants were now his natural allies, the constitution had been virtually superseded, the troublesome senators, tribunes, and legislators had been either dismissed or else called to order, and the surrounding nations, one of them a kingdom, were, in relation to France, like the sheaves bowing to Joseph's sheaf. Roederer declared that the great deeds of the nation made it essential to revive the sentiment of honor. Though the Convention abolished all titles it nevertheless provided that "arms of honor" might be granted to soldiers who had won distinction. An article of the new constitution guaranteed, in the name of the French people, a recompense to its armies. This simple phrase was the sanction chosen for the erection of a corporation which, like the orders of absolutism, might intermediate between the people and their magistrate in order to lend him the same mystery which ever surrounds any monarch who is the "fountain of honor." In well-considered and weighty words the First Consul declared that truly great generals must possess a high degree of civil virtue. That men in civil life were concerned in the main, not with force as were mere soldiers, however brave, but with reason and truth, with the general welfare and the discussion of principles: this was the conclusive evidence to him of their right to drink at this fountain, a right more imperative than that of military men. They could not therefore be excluded. The republicans saw the trap, and resisted sturdily, but to no purpose. The law having passed on May nineteenth, 1802, the ranks were at once constituted, and the decorative badges determined. Every member swore devotion to the service of the republic and resistance to any effort toward the restoration of feudalism in all its attributes: consciences were thus quieted. Right and left the men of science, of art, and of literature appeared with their ribbons and rosettes; the nation applauded, and Bonaparte's opinion was justified. "You call these toys! Well, you manage men with toys," he had declared. The event justified him.