It would be utterly unjust, however, to plead a justification of Napoleon solely by such a monumental fact as that he was in all likelihood the forerunner of modern France. Even when the country adopted him, his positive, direct influence for good was great. The Concordat whatever its faults, partly secured a free church and a free state, separating thus what God had never joined together in holy wedlock; his splendid codes--for no matter who pondered and shaped them, they were his in execution--have guaranteed the perpetuity of civil equality not only in France, but, as the sequel has shown, throughout great expanses of Europe; the questions of a nation's right to its chosen ruler and government, agitated in a new form during the Hundred Days, were those with which succeeding generations were concerned until they were answered in the affirmative. The difference between the France of 1802 and that of 1815 is on one side painful, but on another side it is remarkably significant. The former was transitional and chaotic; the latter had that amazing but completed social union, stronger than any ever known in history, which has saved the country in succeeding storm-periods. In it there was respect for persons, for contract, for property; the administration was unitary, homogeneous, and active; the finances, though not regulated, were restored to vigor; and the processes were inaugurated by which the great cities of France have become healthful and beautiful, while at the same time the internal improvements of the country have been systematized and rendered splendid in their efficiency. Revolutionary concepts were so modified and assimilated that the efforts of the dynasties, when put to the test of public opinion, failed because they were felt to be absurd by the masses. It was one of Napoleon's aphorisms that "to have the right of using nations, you must begin by serving them well." Like a good burgher, he made his servants comfortable and happy. His example, moreover, was reflected abroad throughout Europe; and to the millions of plain and not very shrewd inhabitants of other lands, the Revolution, as Napoleon had shaped it, lost many of the horrors with which Jacobinism, to the everlasting damnation of both the thing and its name, had clothed it. It is a question whether there was in existence a strong liberal France, such as idealists depict, that could pacifically have done this wonderful work. Examining and duly weighing the desperation of dynastic absolutism, it looks as if nothing but the counter-poison of Napoleon's militarism could have prevented its annihilating French liberalism. Without Napoleon the conservative liberalism of to-day would have been impossible.