“The concentration of thirty or forty millions of Frenchmen was completed and perfected.  That of fifteen millions of Spaniards was nearly accomplished.  Because I did not subdue the Spaniards, it will henceforth be argued that they were invincible, for nothing is more common than to convert accident into principle.  But the fact is that they were actually conquered, and, at the very moment when they escaped me, the Cortes of Cadiz were secretly in treaty with me.  They were not delivered either by their own resistance or by the efforts of the English, but by the reverses which I sustained at different points, and, above all, by the error I committed in transferring my whole forces to the distance of three thousand miles from them.  Had it not been for this, the Spanish government would have been shortly consolidated, the public mind would have been tranquilized, and hostile parties would have been rallied together.  Three or four years would have restored the Spaniards to profound peace and brilliant prosperity.  They would have become a compact nation, and I should have well deserved their gratitude, for I should have saved them from the tyranny by which they are now oppressed, and the terrible agitations which await them.

“With regard to the fifteen millions of Italians, their concentration was already far advanced; it only wanted maturity.  The people were daily becoming more firmly established in the unity of principles and legislation, and also in the unity of thought and feeling—­that certain and infallible cement of human thought and concentration.  The union of Piedmont to France, and the junction of Parma, Tuscany and Rome, were, in my mind, only temporary measures, intended merely to guarantee and promote the national education of the Italians.  The portions of Italy that were united to France, though that union might have been regarded as the result of invasion on our part, were, in spite of their Italian patriotism, the very places that continued most attached to us.

“All the south of Europe, therefore, would soon have been rendered compact in point of locality, views, opinions, sentiments and interests.  In this state of things, what would have been the weight of all the nations of the North?  What human efforts could have broken through so strong a barrier?  The concentration of the Germans must have been effected more gradually, and therefore I had done no more than simplify their monstrous complication.  Not that they were unprepared for concentralization; on the contrary, they were too well prepared for it, and they might have blindly risen in reaction against us before they had comprehended our designs.  How happens it that no German prince has yet formed a just notion of the spirit of his nation, and turned it to good account?  Certainly if Heaven had made me a prince of Germany, amid the critical events of our times I should infallibly have governed the thirty millions of Germans combined; and, from what I know of them, I think I may venture to affirm that if they had once elected and proclaimed me they would not have forsaken me, and I should never have been at St. Helena.