LYCURGUS AND BONAPARTE.
It is, therefore, to Lycurgus and to Bonaparte, more than to any others, to whom we must look as the master-minds in government; as those who instituted sweeping changes in the political institutions of the world, and in this sense they are the greatest of all the great who live in profane history. Many slight reforms have been effected; but they alone conceived and reduced to a system the changes that revolutionized and replaced the old beneficently to the people.
Bonaparte himself recognized that his greatness consisted in this, for, when he asked his friends to which of his achievements he would owe his life in history, and they replied, naming some campaign or battle, he corrected them and said; “I shall go down in history with my Code Napoleon in my hands.” So it was not Marengo, not Wagram, not Austerlitz, not Dresden, not any nor all his great victories to which he looked as his best achievement; but it was the code of laws by which he made France the happiest country in Europe. It is not to be wondered at that his name lives in the hearts of the French and moves them as no other name ever moved a people.
Great as Bismarck may be, he is not great in the true sense of greatness, for he is building up a power that the next fifty years will have to overthrow. True greatness works in the direction of and not against progress, and its works live. Compared with him, Disraeli may after all, should his intentions toward India have a humanitarian tendency, turn out to be the greater man.
In this view of greatness, to whom shall we look among our statesmen for any of its evidences? Beyond the legislation that the abolition of slavery forced upon us, the homestead act and one recently introduced by Gen. Banks, enlarging its scope in the interests of the settler, and some concessions to the people, like the eight hour law, we may search the legislation of the country through in vain for any evidence of humanitarian tendencies in our legislators. On the contrary, the inspiration of the privileged classes, the power and use of wealth will be found everywhere; ’tis true that we have a Republican Government in name and form, but it is also true that money rules, that it elects the officers and controls the legislation. The people who are outside of the privileged classes, outside of the offices and the press, are powerless to help themselves. The machinery of the government is in the hands of those who want things to continue as they are, while the few in power who are devoted to the public welfare, beat the air in vain attempts to strike either the causes of, or the remedy for existing evils.