The copper country evening news. [volume] (Calumet, Mich.) 18??-1907, 1897-12-14
A GREAT CRIMINAL.
AN ENGLISH WRITER'S HARSH esT-
MATE OF eoNAPARTE.
Attributes the Napoieonic Craze to she
ContAgion of Hero worship-"A Judi
ciai View. Calm and Dispassionate,
Based ON Plain Evidence"

Il
Based ON Plain Evidence"
The Napoleonic legend is topic full OF
vitality and absorbing interest. 1t holds
the mind with force and tenacity that
seem TO deepen with illustration. The
more men hear of Napoleon the more they
desire to know In his adopted country
for he was really no Frenchman-the cult
has been carried 20 absurd lengths His
personality and his epoch, his transcendent
talents and what they achieved, his court
surroundings, the beginnings and end of
his romantic and adventurous career from
the first rocketlike rise TO his tragic down
fall, his apogee and his perigee, have re-
ceived universal even fulsome, atten-
ton in France Art and literature, So
ciety and the stage all alike do him great
| honor Painters seek their inspiration in
the chief incidents in his history. Writers
of every caliber have dealt with his life
and times, in diaries and memoirs, paste
and scissors records and thoughtful philo-
sophie essays toward full appreciation of
his character. The fashions of the directory,
the consulate and the empire have. long
| been in favor with the fair sex. Furniture
and decorations of the period are largely
initiated.
Nor docs the craze run riot in France
| alone. 1t reaches more extravagant heights
beyond the Atlantic-Amcrica worships
the Napoleonic idea. 1t is the best draw"
possible in a free country with a free peo-
pie, who overlook the fact that he was the
most despotic ruler the world has ever
known. In England, too, the country of
his peculiar and persistent aversion, which
he never dared attack, but would have
ruined insidiously by his commercial sys-
btem, Napoleon enjoys unbounded popu-
larity. Every book about him is read with
avidity. New works calculating new
phases in his many sided character appear
continually and are welcomed widely.
The walls of the academy year after year
bear witness to the hold he has on the
artistic imagination.
1t is easier TO state these facts than to
explain them. They are largely due, no
doubt, to the contagion of hero worship,
the ready admiration accorded by the
crowd of smaller men TO one of the great
giants of the human race; tribute rem
dered with ungrudging enthusiasm, yet
little inconsiderately, even blindly, for
getting that its object more often deserves
detestation than respect. The effect of all
this eulogy and pancgyric laid on so
thickly and with such n large brush is to
obscure the truth, to cover up the faults,
the shortcomings, the really malignant
nature of the man himself. He is present.
ed to us as the mighty conqueror, the in
comparable statesman, the farseeing, large
minded administrator; we hear of his I'M
erring gencralship, his mastery manipu-
lation of his fellowmen from kings to con-
scripts; of his capacious brain, in which
details innumerable were stored ready for
immediate use; of his kindly, winning
smile, his unfailng generosity TO migrate
full relatives-everything in short, to his
credit, nothing of his crimes
For If he were a great genius, the great
est perhaps the world has seen, he was
also one of the greatest criminals. 1t may
seem TO pass the bounds of historical crit
icism to call him II murderer brigand
and n thief, yet the indictment can be
maintained that he was all these, and on
the largest scale. He sent men wholesale
to their deaths; n couple of million French
men, as many more of other races-allies
or enemies-were butchered to create,
maintain or defend his power. He re-
morselessly slew the Due d'Enghien to
clear his way to the throne. He began
his robberics in his first Italian campaign;
after the spoliation of specie and cash he
stole territories and crowns. He was a
scourgc to Europe; his path was bloodshed
and rapine as Devastating as the cholera
or the black death. And all this for per-
sonal ACKNOWLEDGEMENT, the qualification
of his greed and lust of power, of his in
satiable hunger for conquest, his cravings
for military renown. He was no patriot;
he had no country of his own. Since Cor
sica had discarded him, he fought for his
TO-, e.,
which he had raised for short space to
pinnacle of great glory, he left torn and
bleeding, depopulated, impoverished.
This is the truer estimate of one who
was, under some aspects, q devil incarnatc
"a monster in human form, as he has
been described in the pages of Taine, Ian
frey, Seeley and a few more. This is the
judicial view, calm and dispassionate,
based on the plain evidence of acts and
conduct, rising superior to sentiment.
Taine explains Napoleon as a fifteenth
century survival a throw back" to an
other race in an earlier epoch He is "a
freak of nature reproducing the great
Italian tyrants, the all powerful condot-
teri, the soldiers of fortune who, striking
out boldly at great stakes, raised them
selves TO thrones or persisted in the at
tempt. Napoleon was one by inheritance,
an Italian of clear straight descent, a
child of the land that produced the Sforzas,
the Viscontis, the Borgias, "a posthumous
brother of Dante and Michael Angelo"
ranking with them in mental qualities.
"His genius" says Taine, lis of the same
stature, the same structure He is one of
the three sovereign minds OF the Ital-
ian renaissance, except that while the
first two work on paper or marble the last
operates on the living being, on the sensi-
tive, suffering flesh of humanity" 1t is
this which constitutes Napoleon an evil
doer. Crime has been well defined as q
refusal to abide by rules that men, for
their general protection, agree to call
binding Napoleon accepted no such obli
cation. He set all such rules ut defiance;
his arrogant, all embracing egotism was
above the law. The eternal moi, the linn
itless selfishness, cold blooded and calcu-
lating, that gathered in everything to his
support, needed in his opinion no explana-
ton or justification. Illustrated
Magazine