The Saxon campaigns display the completion of the process in which the great strategist, stifled by political anxieties, became the creature of circumstances both as general and statesman. The Russian campaign was nicely calculated, but its proportions and aim were those of the Oriental theocrat, not of the prosaic European soldier. With the aid of the railroad and the electric telegraph, they might possibly have been wrought into a workable problem, but that does not excuse the errors of premature and misplaced ambition. The Saxon campaigns, again, are marked by a boldness of design and a skill in combination characteristic of the best strategy; but again the proportions are monstrous, and, what is worse, the execution is intermittent and feeble. As in Russia, the war organism was insufficient for the numbers and distances involved, while the subordinates of every grade, though supple instruments, seemed mercenary, self-seeking, and destitute of devotion. Bonaparte had ruled men's hearts by his use of a cause, securing devotion to it and to himself by rude bonhomie, by success, and by sufficient rewards; Napoleon, on the other hand, quenched devotion by a lavishness which sated the greediest, and lost the affections of his associates by the demands of his gigantic plans. As the world-conqueror felt the foundations of his greatness quivering, he became less callous and more human. Early in 1813 he said: "I have a sympathetic heart, like another, but since earliest childhood I have accustomed myself to keep that string silent, and now it is altogether dumb." His judgment of himself was mistaken: throughout the entire season he was strangely and exceptionally moved by the horrors of war; his purse was ever open for the suffering; he released the King of Saxony from his entangling engagements; in spite of his hard-set expression on the retreat from Leipsic, he forbade his men to fire the suburbs of the city in order to retard the pursuit of their foes, and before he left Mainz for St. Cloud he showed the deepest concern, and put forth the strongest effort, in behalf of the dying soldiery.