Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1920-01-24
NEW LEGAL MACHINERY
CAN CLAIM THE EX-kAlSER
Regularity" Was Less Evident in Day
of Napoleon, Whose Fate Provoked
Debate Which Has Never
Quite Died Out


! MOT the least of the striking contrasts
in the career of supreme military
genius and that of supreme muddler,
both of whom drenched Europe in blood,
is the reversal of the role played by the
little nation of the Netherlands.
After the crushing blow at Leipsic in
1918 Napoleon Bonaparte refused to sur
render Holland. The Allies of century
ago offered to the great captain the
natural boundaries of France, the
Alps, the Rhine, the Pyrenees and the
ocean. embracing more territory in de-
feat than, victorious, she holds today.
But the emperor was obdurate. His
ministers at st. Cloud were informed that
he would never give up Holland Such
perversity, said, however, to have been
capitalized in advance by Metternich,
eventually provoked his utter downfall.
Exile in Elba followed the decisive
termination of the brilliant, hopeless 1914
campaign and after Waterloo the ban
ishment to st. Helena jolted precedent
and suggested new standards in interna-
tional political dealing.
In the contemporary situation Holland
herself takes the position of obstinacy. If
the past is any clue to the present here
is an augury of a revolution in diplo-
matte procedure. Furthermore, the
change foreshadowed involves principles
that can be stabilized
There is impressive legal machinery
already in existence favorable to the ex-
tradition of William Hohenzollern and
the determination of his fate by nations
which he recklessly challenged to
combat.
The case of the First Napoleon offers,
on the whole, fewer analogies than dis
PARTIES. His removal to St. Helena was
the result of no solemn peace treaty, but
rather of hurried conferences and quick,
novel decisions.
If the legal aspects of the crisis be
not too closely scrutinized, speed in the
circumstances is hardly to be disparaged.
The news Of Napoleon's escape from Elba
provoked diplomatic panic in the pro-
tracted sessions of the Congress of
Vienna When the delegates had partly
recovered from their amazement they
officially proclaimed their seemingly ir-
repressibe foe an outlaw. 1t was this
status winch Napoleon occupied IN the
minds Of his enemies throughout the
subsequent Waterloo campaign. Blucher
openly expressed the hope of executing
him On the spot where the hapless Duke
of Enghien had met his grossly unde-
served death. Capture of the CorSican on
the fields of Flanders would have been
very delicious to many of his implacable
opponents.
As it was, even after the second evacu-
alton of Paris, the situation became en-
barrassngly complex. Hale's Philip
Nolan has been proved a fiction, but had
ne existed, Napoleon Bonaparte, on the
curiously leisurely flight from Paris to
Rochefort in 1915, would have surpassed
him in qualifications for "man without
a country"
The reactionary White Terror was in
full sway in France. Fouche had informed
the ex-emperor that the provisional gov
ernment could no longer be responsible
for his safety. His hope to reach the
United States was rebuked by the refusal
of Wellington to grant the necessary
passports.
In the five days of doubt in the little
French seaport the former master of con-
tinental Europe occupied a position in
stinct with tragic anomaly. In the ab-
sence of captors he could not strictly be
classified as a prisoner of war. Yet that
in fact was what he was and it was on
such a basis that the British could lay
claim to some authority in the vexed
problems ahead.
True to the last to his feeling for the
picturesque, Napoleon addressed letter
to the prince regent of Great Britain.
81 have terminated declared the ex-
conqueror, my public career and | come,
like Themstocles, to seat myself at the
hearth of the British people" But this
missive was a mere gesture. Themis-
tocles, moreover, did not menace the
Persians when he fled to the nation which
received him with such chivalry.
The letter was unanswered, and, Sc
cretly realizing that it would be, Napo-
leon contemplated escape on a small Dan
ish ship which lay in Rochefort harbor
Aware, however, that the vessel, if turned
toward America, would be compelled to
take OH its final supplies in Spain or
Portugal, where the name of Bonaparte
was anathema, he abandoned this project
and instructed General Lallemand to
communicate with an American ship then
anchored in the nearby Glronde. Her
captain replied that he would be proud
and happy" to grant the requested
asylum.
The Quixotism of such an enterprise
was hardly debatable. The United States,
weak from the effects of an inconclusive
war with Great Britain, was scarcely in
a position to defy the combined might of
Europe. The decision to rely on "the
generosity of England" followed.
Napoleon boarded the British cruiser
Bellerophon, not as the familiar painting
suggests, posed heroically en- route to st.
Helena, but to be carried to the shores of
the seafaring nation so largely respon-
sibe for his fall. Torbay was reached.
The pleasant intercourse with the re-
spectful Captain Maitland was ended. At
Plymouth the prisoner, as he then actu-
ally Eas was transferred to the