THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 457 



like in its character to that of one who hires a bravo, but unlike by 

 entailing no danger, was quite natural. It was natural, too, that, in 

 addition to countless treacheries and breaches of faith in his dealings 

 with foreign powers, such a man should play the traitor to his own 

 nation, by stamping out its newly-gained free institutions, and substi- 

 tuting his own military despotism. Such being the nature of the 

 man, and such being a few illustrations of his cruelty and unscrupu- 

 lousness, contemplate now his greater crimes and their motives. Year 

 after year he went on sacrificing by tens of thousands and hundreds 

 of thousands the French people and the people of Europe at large, to 

 gratify his lust of power and his hatred of opponents. To feed his in- 

 satiable ambition, and to crush those who resisted his efforts after uni- 

 versal dominion, he went on seizing the young men of France, forming 

 army after army that were destroyed in destroying like armies raised by 

 neighboring nations. In the Russian campaign alone, out of 552,000 

 French left dead or prisoners, but a small portion returned to France ; 

 while the Russian force of more than 200,000 was reduced to 30,000 

 or 40,000 : implying a total sacrifice of considerably more than half 

 a million lives. And when the mortality on both sides by death in 

 battle, by wounds and by disease, throughout all the Napoleonic cam- 

 paigns is summed up, it exceeds, at the lowest computation, two mill- 

 ions. 1 And all this slaughter, all this suffering, all this devastation, 

 was gone through because one man had a restless desire to be despot 

 over all men. 



And now what has been thought and felt in England about the 

 two sets of events above contrasted, and about the actors in them ? 

 For the bloodshed of the Revolution there has been utter detestation, 

 and for those who wrought it unqualified hate. For the immeasurably 

 greater bloodshed which these wars of the Consulate and the Empire 

 entailed, little or no horror is expressed ; while the feeling toward the 



1 M. Lanfrey sets down the loss of the French alone, from 1802 onward, at nearly 

 two millions. This may be an over-estimate ; though, judging from the immense armies 

 raised in France, such a total seems quite possible. The above computation of the losses 

 to European nations in general has been made for me by adding the numbers of killed 

 and wounded in the successive battles, as furnished by such statements as are accessible. 

 The total is 1,50.0,000. This number has to be greatly increased by including losses not 

 specified the number of killed and wounded on one side only, being given in some cases. 

 It has to be further increased by including losses in numerous minor engagements, the 

 particulars of which are unknown. And it has to be further increased by allowance for 

 understatement of his losses, which was habitual with Napoleon. Though the total, 

 raised by these various additions probably to something over two millions, includes killed 

 and wounded, from which last class a large deduction has to be made for the number 

 who recovered, yet it takes no account of the loss by disease. This may be set down 

 as greater in amount than that which battles caused. (Thus, according to Kolb, the 

 British lost in Spain three times as many by diseases as by the enemy ; and in the expe- 

 dition to Walcheren seventeen times as many.) So that the loss by killed and wounded 

 and by disease, for all the European nations during the Napoleonic campaigns, is proba- 

 bly much understated at two millions. 



