It was, therefore, as a military despot that the First Consul promulgated beneficent codes, founded an enduring jurisprudence, created an efficient magistracy, and established social order. In this process he completed the work of the Revolution by exalting the third estate to ascendancy in the nation. The whole work, therefore, was not only recognized as his in the house of every French burgher: he was considered at every fireside to be the consummator of the Revolution for which France had so long suffered in an agony of bloody sweat. Was it therefore any wonder that not only he himself, but even the most enlightened leaders of European thought, considered the safety and renovation of European society to depend upon the extension of his work? It is hard for us to appreciate this, because in France Napoleon's institutions have remained almost as he left them, and well-nigh stationary, while for a century the processes of ruthless reform have been continuously working in other European lands, and some neighboring peoples have outstripped the French in the matter of a national unity consistent with local freedom. The First Consul felt that in order to become great he had been forced to become strong; we can understand that he could easily deceive himself into concluding that in order to be greater he must become stronger. It was in these days that he exclaimed, in the intimacy of familiar intercourse: "I feel the infinite in me." Thereafter democracy in any form, even the mildest, was offensive. Such men as Roederer were sent to Naples, Berg--anywhere out of France. The times were not far removed from those of the beneficent despots, except that this one ruled, not by hereditary divine right, but by military force. Bonaparte's imperfect training in politics and history made it possible for such visions as those which now arose to haunt his brain. The beneficence he had displayed already; for despotism he had had the finest conceivable training, first among the sluggish populations of the Italian states which he had reorganized, then in the myth of Egyptian conquest which he had created and felt bound to maintain, and lastly in the national disorders of a France shuddering at the possibility of a return either to the hideous excesses of the Terror or to the intolerable abuses of ecclesiasticism and absolute monarchy.