[lxxxiv. 79]

1821 Decr 25

Codification Proposal

?.5. Admission Universal

III Aptitude and Inaptitude

Napoleon

Of those /men/ by whom on a throne or elsewhere great power was /has been/ exercised, no one perhaps was with relation to the work of legislation more compleatly destitute of /lower in the scale of/ appropriate moral aptitude than Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet in virtue of the appropriate intellectual aptitude which with relation to that work he possessed, he has by means of that body of law of his called the Cinq Codes rendered to France not only very /a prodigiously/ great service, but greater service by far than was ever rendered by any of those Monarchs whose disposition was least adverse to the happiness of their fellow citizens, a Lewis the 16th for example or an Alexander the first. Lewis in his simplicity never thought of giving them a tangible and an all©comprehensive rule of action: Alexander at one time tried at it, and as will presently be seen failed. Napoleon had in his hand the plan of an all comprehensive body of law having for its end in view the greatest happiness of the greatest number with a rationale. Tallyrand had the merit of putting that plan into his hand His appropriate intellectual aptitude made him applaud it: c'est un ouvrage de genie were his words. His want of appropriate moral aptitude made him put it aside. It would have suited the purposes of those over whom he ruled: but it would not have suited his individual /own/ purposes. The hands he looked for were hands to /such as could and would and could/ frame a body of law that should suit his individual purposes: and no difficulty of course could he find in meeting with such hands.

Hence, instead of the clear and steady light he might have had, in the shape of an interwoven rationale, deduced all along from the principle of utility, from the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, he had on each occasion in the shape of a detached dissertation or set of detached dissertations, an ”ignis fatuus•, composed of vague generalities consisting of vague©generality gas, twinkling aloft in a region or regions of unmeasurable altitude