Dr. O'Meara, the Emperor's body-physician, was a warm-hearted Irishman, faithful, able, and devoted. That he received substantial gratuities from his patient is no longer questioned, and these transfers of money have been called by a harsh name; yet it is easy for a loyal but illogical devotee to confuse salary, gifts, fees, bribes, each with each, and one with the other; the crime was not quite so heinous with a man of his character as it would have been in persons of severer quality and mold. It seems equally certain that the stern pedant acting as governor would gladly have employed the same inducements to secure him as a spy. At least he did not qualify as the channel of a double espionage, and for that reason fell under the grave suspicion of authority. The diagnosis of Napoleon's malady as very grave, which he had made, was confirmed in January, 1819, by Stokoe, the ship's surgeon of the _Conqueror_, the British flag vessel then in the harbor. But from O'Meara it was not accepted; he was dismissed from service and on July twenty-fifth, 1818, sailed homeward. On August seventeenth the London "Morning Post" began to print communications sent from St. Helena by him, and shortly after he landed, in October, there appeared a pamphlet by him attacking Sir Hudson Lowe. His voluminous "Voice from St. Helena" was not published until after Napoleon's death. Like the rest of the contemporary memoirs and memorials, the value of his writings lies in their effect on the liberal sentiment of the world. The Metternich system of repression and intervention, which worked its will in dynastic government for a generation after Napoleon, engendered a newer liberalism which forgot the tyranny of Napoleonic imperialism and remembered the Consulate as expressing a well-organized form of government, adapted superbly for crushing systems, dynastic or aristocratic or plutocratic, which oppressed mankind by denying the only possible equality, equality of opportunity, the Napoleonic "carriere ouverte aux talents." By all sympathetic nationalists, constitutionalists, and radicals these books were literally devoured, and in France particularly their effect was lasting. There could never have been a second Napoleon except as he was thought likely to reproduce the Consulate; when his rule had proved to be imperialistic the country was disenchanted. Liberty with order is so ardently desired! but too often the devices to secure it beget license with chaos. The literal correctness of O'Meara's reporting, like that of the rest, cannot be controverted by any rebutting testimony, but the nature portrayed is the same morbid, sensational, notoriety-seeking, unwholesome, and pathological specimen as that furnished by the others.