hundred years since, and that for its day it wrought so beneficently that Bonaparte, First Consul, remains one of the foremost among all lawgivers and statesmen. And that, too, precisely for the reasons which some cite as condemning him. He took the revolutionary ideas of political, civil, and religious emancipation: with these he commingled both his own sound sense and the experience of advisers from every class, realizing as much of civil liberty and good order as appears to have been practical at the moment. But in one respect he failed miserably, and that failure vitiated much of the substantial gain which seemed to have been made. He failed in curbing his own ambition. The majestic ridge of his achievement was the verge of the precipice over which he fell. In the first place, his signal success as a lawgiver was due entirely to the dazzling splendors of his victories. Marengo was the climax to a series of such achievements as had not so far been wrought on the tented field within the bounds of French history. It is easy to assert that the French were intoxicated because they were French: there is not the slightest reason to suppose that any other nation under similar circumstances would have behaved differently. The Seven Years' War turned the heads of the English people completely, and they lost their American colonies in consequence; Rome lost her political liberty when she became mistress not only of the Latin, but of the Greek and Oriental shores of the Mediterranean; the distant military expeditions of Alexander the Great prepared the fall of his ill-assorted empire. In each case the careful student will admit that social exaltation was the forerunner of division and of subsequent despotism in some form. Even in the little states of Greece and southern Italy the tyrants always arose from the disintegration of legal government, and by the assertion of some form of power--mind, money, or military force.