This volume scarcely alludes to the Peninsular War, the first decisive check in Napoleon's career, and fatal to the veteran Grand Army. Pasquier concurs in the verdict of the day on Masséna:

'Not one (of the republican generals) conveyed to me so completely as Masséna did the nature of a man born for war, possessing its genius, and endowed with the qualities that assure a victory in the field.'

In 1810 Napoleon appointed Pasquier, with a graceful expression of Imperial confidence, to the office of Prefect of the Police of the capital-an important post of no easy duties. The administrative work of the Prefect was of the most singular kind; it was alike far-reaching and strangely limited; nothing resembling it has been seen in this country. Pasquier had a general superintendence and control over matters of strictly municipal right; for some time he had to look after the lighting of Paris, to take precautions against fire, to visit hospitals, penitentaries, and the like; and the most arduous task was devolved on him of regulating the supply of bread for the city, a mischievous heritage of the Revolution. But his functions were crossed and thwarted in many ways by the officials of the commune of Paris, by the police of the Tuileries, by the gendarmes of the Garrison, by the secret emissaries of despotic power; and altogether his duties were extremely difficult and perplexing, even for the best trained official. He acquitted himself in this part very well, and especially received the thanks of the Emperor for lessening the venality and base corruption inevitably attaching to a bureau of this type. His paramount duty was, of course, shown by his title; and though Savary, one of the most reckless and unprincipled of Napoleon's agents, was his superior as Minister of Police, he contrived to mitigate in his administration, on more than one occasion, the excesses of the Imperial will. As Prefect of Police he witnessed the long quarrel, fought out for the most part in Paris, between Napoleon and Pius VII.; he describes the debates of the Episcopal Council, the opposition of the reluctant prelates, and the exhibitions of the Emperor's anger; but these scenes, illustrating as they did the conflict between material force in its highest development and spiritual power trusting to moral influence, and forming a most instructive page of history, have been fully delineated by many writers. Pasquier gives us this account of the fierce apostrophe of the incensed Emperor to Portalis, one of the most brilliant ornaments of the Conseil d'Etat :

'Having ascertained that M. Portalis was present, Napoleon asked him in the rudest manner of address, "how he dared appear in this hall, after having been guilty of high treason." ... "More shameful perfidy had never been witnessed; he had never, in the course of his life, had experience of such revolting treachery, and this in the case of a person who had enjoyed his peculiar confidence. He had not words. to give utterance to his indignation." I set forth in a few lines a philippic that occupied more than a quarter of an hour. As he went on his voice, his gesture, his countenance became terrific, and when all was over the bystanders were struck dumb and stupefied.'

Pasquier executed many of the arrests that followed. Bishops and noble ladies were sent off to Vincennes; but he performed an odious duty with clemency and good taste, and won golden opinions, even in the Imperial circle, for a respectful protest he addressed to Napoleon:

I had performed, with firmness, a duty prescribed to me by my conscience, as well as by my private feelings. My position was made the better by this, not only in the Council, but among the members of the Government, and even among those who were about the Emperor. From this time it was recognised that the newly made Prefect of Police was a man courageous enough to speak the truth, and to defend what ought to be defended, even in circumstances of difficulty.'

Napoleon attained apparent success, at this conjuncture, in his struggle with the Pope. He terrified the Pontiff, and even the Council; extorted from Pius VII. the means of consecration for the vacant sees which had been the original cause of the dispute; and, finally, as is well known, obtained a surrender of the temporal power of Rome. His conduct, however, was not the less impolitic :

:

'He had restored the Catholic religion in France, the Church owed it to him that she had risen from ruin, and was eager to prove her allegiance. From the Pope to the humblest priests, all, with very few exceptions, accepted his dynasty without reserve; all believed that he could do more for them than anyone else. I am convinced that, had his conduct been less violent, he would easily have found a useful and powerful auxiliary in the religious world. He made a pretence to defend, and even to exaggerate, the liberties of the Gallican Church; and this pretension, like that of extending his Empire beyond all rational proportions, led to the same consequences. He ended in being unable to preserve for France her old boundaries, and he exposed us, almost without the means of defence, to the spirit of Ultramontanism, and to the inroads of Pontifical authority.'

The Empire, if throughout undermined, seemed at the height of its grandeur in 1811. It stretched from the Niemen to the Atlantic; it kept a subject Continent in awe; its military supremacy appeared unshaken; it had silenced

Rome and its sacerdotal thunders; it still gave France order and material greatness. Napoleon's addresses to his Senate, Pasquier remarks, breathed the spirit of overbearing and unreflecting pride, so often the prelude to the fall of despots:

"I have given the Popes," he said, with the most contemptuous irony, "palaces at Rome and in Paris;" if they have the interests of religion at heart, they will take up their abode in the centre of Christendom; St. Peter preferred Rome to the Holy Land. . . . When England shall have been exhausted, when she shall have felt, at last, the evils she has so cruelly spread over the Continent during the last twenty years, and when half of her families shall be in mourning, a thunderstroke shall put an end to the affairs of the Peninsula and to her armies, and Europe and Asia will be avenged after the termination of this second Punic War."

The absence of Talleyrand at the Foreign Office-the only influence that restrained Napoleon-had at this conjuncture disastrous effects. Bassano, an abettor of the fatal policy of 1813, had become blind to facts and to the real interests of France :

'Instead of convincing me, the enthusiasm of the Duc de Bassano aroused my distrust; I perceived that his admiration perverted his judgement. The marriage of the Emperor with an Archduchess, especially since the birth of the King of Rome, had dazzled him; he would not admit that Napoleon could be exposed to any conceivable dangers.'

This volume contains very curious details respecting the provisioning of Paris with bread-one of the duties, we have seen, of the Prefect of Police. It had been made a charge against Louis XV. that he had traded in corn and starved the city; the popular cry of the 'Pacte de Famine' had been worse than that of the 'Parc aux Cerfs,' and Louis XVI. had been acclaimed as the 'Baker' when he had been removed from Versailles to the Tuileries. The National Assembly, much to its credit, had left the feeding of the capital to free commerce; but the Maximum of the Reign of Terror had followed; and Napoleon, imitating in this the Cæsars, had made it part of his system of government to give the Parisians not only pageants but bread. The winter of 1811, however, was one of dearth; the elaborate precautions which had been taken to enable bakers to sell at a regulated price, and to secure a supply of bread for the populace, had proved, to a considerable extent, a failure, and the neighbourhood of Paris especially was exposed to want. Napoleon, who had the despot's dislike of commercial as well as of

other liberty, and who deemed forestallers and regraters' thieves, convoked a special Council to examine this question; and arrangements of the most singular kind were made to provide an adequate supply of corn and flour, not only for Paris, but for the adjoining districts. The trade was taken out of the hands of merchants; the export of flour from Paris was strictly forbidden, after the delivery of a fixed amount to the neighbouring villages, and the holders of grain in the northern provinces were enjoined to send what they had to the markets at hand, and to sell it at a patriotic price :

The principal farmers, and possessors of grain in their departments, shall be assembled on Saturday, and shall meet as a jury to determine the quantity of corn or of flour which each can place on the market. They must sign a contract to provide the amount of wheat necessary to feed the department, and to send it to market. When this shall have been done, and when an account shall have been rendered of what they can supply, the Prefect will give them to understand that it would please the Emperor if they would undertake in no case to sell at a higher rate than 100 francs the sack.'

These measures, it is unnecessary to say, were abortive:

'The dearth became severe; in some departments it was terrible. In Normandy, where troops of starving beggars marched through the country, a dangerous popular movement was set on foot; near Caen there were scenes of rising and pillage, and many mills were burnt; in such circumstances the blind fury of the multitude destroys what it is most important it should preserve. This rising was only put down after the arrival on the spot of a regiment of the Imperial Guard sent by post; the repression of it had been very severe; even women were not spared in the executions that followed.'

Ample evidence from many sources exists that Napoleon. was perfectly aware beforehand of the enormous risks involved in the war with Russia. In an interview with Pasquier relating to the still pressing dearth, the Emperor let fall these significant words :

'When I had done, he remained silent and walked from the window to the mantelpiece, his arms crossed behind his back, the attitude of a man in deep thought. I was following, when he turned quickly round and uttered these words: "Yes, what you say is true, it will be a difficulty the more; it will be an addition to the difficulties I shall encounter in the greatest and most arduous enterprise I ever undertook. But what has been begun must be carried out."

But the campaign of Russia and its effect on France would lead us beyond our limits, and we must defer our notice of these events to our next number.

ART. II.-1. The Economy of High Wages. By J. SCHOENHOF. New York: 1892.

2. Ueber das Verhältniss von Arbeitslohn und Arbeitszeit zur Arbeitsleistung. Von L. BRENTANO. Leipzig: 1895. AMONG questions of the day a certain prominence is given

by general agreement to those which are concerned with the wages of labour. True, this is no new fact. The position and prospects of the working class have formed the subject of treatises innumerable any time during the last hundred years. The economist has been busy with them, sometimes confining himself to facts observed and recorded, seeking their explanation, marking connexions between them, weaving hypothesis after hypothesis as to their relations, until he can claim to have discovered the laws according to which they rise and fall; sometimes, again, starting with broad general assumptions, and arguing from them independently of the facts, or, at most, seeking in the facts an illustration of their truth; and so he has sometimes elucidated great masses of unintelligible material, and sometimes, it must be owned, has but added to the confusion, and led men further from the road by which truth could be reached. The philanthropist, looking with a single, if somewhat unscientific, eye at the good of his fellow-men, is always seeking to raise wages. If he be carried away by that 'wild passion for action which is his besetting sin, he attempts to effect his purpose by panaceas which are fantastic and doomed to failure; if his head work together with his heart, he chooses methods which are less showy to the eye, but the good results of which are long-lived in proportion. Living as he does in a state of war against the misery around him, he sees its origin fh low wages. Earnestly desiring that all should have the chance, not merely of living, but of making the best of themselves and of their lives, the great obstacle to the realisation of his wishes and hopes is found in the fact that the earnings of a large part of the working population are incompatible with any such ideal. And lastly, the statesman, who combines the zeal of the philanthropist with the carefulness of the economist, who is being constantly prompted to legislative action by the one and held back from it by the other, who has to consider the welfare not merely of a class, but of the whole communitythe statesman cannot but watch with anxious eyes the results of experience and the course of discussion, The interests VOL, CLXXIX. NO. CCCLXVII.

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