What he thus accomplished has been told. The foundations he then laid
rest solid to-day; the now antiquated edifice he erected on them,
though altered and repaired, still retains its identity. The
Revolution had overthrown the old regime completely, and the ruins of
society were without form and void. From this chaos Napoleon painfully
gathered the substantial materials of a new structure, and out of
these reconstructed the family, the state, and the church. He revived
the domestic spirit, made marriage a solid institution, and
reestablished parental authority while destroying parental despotism.
In civil society he restored the right of property and fixed the
sanctity of contract, thus assuring respect for the individual and the
ascendancy of the law. The finances he reformed by an equitable system
of taxation, and by the establishment of an ingenious treasury system
comparable to that devised by Alexander Hamilton for the United
States. In the Concordat he went as far, probably, as France could
then go in emancipating religion and the church; Protestantism has
prospered under the regulations he laid down, and by his treatment of
the Jews they have been changed from despised and down-trodden social
freebooters into prosperous and patriotic citizens. Upon every class
of men then living he imposed by an iron will a system of his own. The
leading survivors of Jacobinism, extreme royalists, moderate
republicans, proscribers and proscribed, men of the bourgeoisie--all
bowed to his sway and accepted his rewards. It is said that they
yielded to the superior force of his police and his pretorians. Be it
so. The fivefold police system he established was a system of checks
and counter-checks within itself, within the administration, and even
within the army--a body without which, as he firmly believed, the
beginnings of social transformation could not be made. He professed,
and no doubt honestly, that he would divest himself of this police
service as opportunity served, and deluded both himself and his
followers into the belief that the process was almost complete before
the close of his era. Through the perspective of a century we can see
the faults of Napoleon's plan. The Gallic Church is still Roman, in
spite of his intention that the Roman Church should become French; the
extreme centralization of his administrative system still throttles
local free government and makes both oligarchic rule and political
revolution easier in France than in any other free land; the
educational scheme which he formed, although more fully changed than
any other of his institutions, and but recently embarked, let us hope,
on a course for ultimate independence, nevertheless suffers in its
present complete dependence on state support, and in the consequent
absence of private personal enthusiasm which might make its separate
universities and schools rich in opportunities and strong in the
loyalty of their sons. But we must remember that the Consulate was a