It was Napoleon who opened the door wide enough to show to the common people of Europe the incandescent rays of the lamp of liberty shining for all humankind. Himself an autocrat. dominated by vaulting ambition. treading like a giant among pygmies. crushing thrones. heaping coals of fire on the ashen breasts of dying despotisms. putting the washerwoman of yesterday at the head of a social regime. making marshals out of peasant soldiers. tossing dynasties into the discard. showing to the astonished world that rulers playing clown under the false colors of a right by divinity were merely plaster casts. this iconoclastic corporal from Corsica changed the manner of human thought. gave pinions to heretofore suppressed ideas of a government of the people. and liberty of conscience and worship. Had it not been for Napoleon there might never have been a revolution in Germany in 1848 and 1849. and the United States of America would have been deprived of the enrichment of its literature and politics and its material wealth by those refugees who fled from tyranny and the black threat of the gibbet and prison cell. From the day the Little Corporal went across the seas to St. Helena to the hour of Bismarck and his iron policy.
Keywords matched
refugees