scale, and, in his hands, experience daily furnishes fresh
verifications of the theory. At his first nod the French prostrate
themselves obediently, and there remain, as in a natural position; the
lower class, the peasants and the soldiers, with animal fidelity, and
the upper class, the dignitaries and the functionaries, with Byzantine
servility.- The republicans, on their side, make no resistance; on the
contrary, among these he has found his best governing instruments -
senators, deputies, state councilors, judges, and administrators of
every grade.[42] He has at once detected behind their sermonizing on
liberty and equality, their despotic instincts, their craving for
command, for leadership, even as subordinates; and, in addition to
this, with most of them, the appetite for money or for sensual
pleasures. The difference between the delegate of the Committee of
Public Safety and the minister, prefect, or subprefect under the
Empire is small; it is the same person in two costumes: at first in
the carmagnole, and later in the embroidered coat. If a rude, poor
puritan, like Cambon or Baudot, refuses to don the official uniform,
if two or three Jacobin generals, like Lecourbe and Delmas, grumble at
the coronation parade, Napoleon, who knows their mental grasp, regards
them as ignoramuses, limited to and rigid inside a fixed idea. - As to
the cultivated and intelligent liberals of 1789, he consigns them with
a word to the place where they belong; they are "ideologists"; in
other words, their pretended knowledge is mere drawing-room prejudice
and the imagination of the study. "Lafayette is a political ninny,"
the eternal "dupe of men and of things."[43] With Lafayette and some
others, one embarrassing detail remains namely:

* impartiality and generosity,
* constant care for the common good,
* respect for others,