876. BONAPARTE (N.), No Moral Sense.—
O'Meara's book proves that nature
had denied Bonaparte the moral sense, the first
excellence of well organized man. If he could
seriously and repeatedly affirm that he had
raised himself to power without ever having
committed a crime, it proves that he wanted
totally the sense of right and wrong. If he
could consider the millions of human lives
which he had destroyed, or caused to be destroyed,
the desolations of countries by plunderings,
burnings and famine, the destitutions
of lawful rulers of the world without the
consent of their constituents, to place his
brothers and sisters on their thrones, the cutting
up of established societies of men and
jumbling them discordantly together again at
his caprice, the demolition of the fairest hopes
of mankind for the recovery of their rights
and amelioration of their condition, and all
the numberless train of his other enormities;
the man I say, who could consider all these
as no crimes, must have been a moral monster,
against whom every hand should have
been lifted to slay him.—
To John Adams. Washington ed. vii, 275.
(M.
1823)
