The Celebrated Bills of St. Domingo.—Inspectors of the Reviews, &C.—Plans of Administration, &C.—Gaudin, Mollien, Defermont, Lacuee, &C.—Minister of the Treasury.—Minister Secretary of State.—Importan

21st.—Admiral Malcolm called upon me to-day. He came to take leave of us all; he was to sail the next day for the Cape, and would be two months absent.

We are sorry to lose the Admiral; his manners, always polite, and a kind of tacit sympathy existing between us, contrast him continually in our mind with Sir Hudson Lowe, who is so unlike him.

The Admiral had seen the Emperor, who is also partial to him. They had taken together some turns in the garden, and the Admiral told me had collected some excellent information respecting the Scheldt and the Nievendip, a maritime establishment in Holland which was entirely unknown to him, and which was founded by Napoleon.

After dinner, the conversation turned upon what the Emperor termed the celebrated bills of St. Domingo. It gave rise to the following curious details.—“The administrator of St. Domingo,” said the Emperor, “took it into his head one day to draw from the Cape, without authority, for the sum of sixty millions, in bills, on the treasury in Paris, which bills were all payable on the same day. France was not then, and had, perhaps, never been, rich enough to meet such a demand. Besides, where and by what means had the administration of St. Domingo acquired such a credit? The First Consul could not command any thing like it in Paris; it was as much as M. Necker could have done at the time of his greatest popularity. Be that as it may, when these bills appeared in Paris, where they arrived before the letters of advice, the First Consul was applied to from the treasury, to point out what was to be done. ‘Wait for the letters of advice,’ said he, ‘in order to learn the nature of the transaction. The treasury is like a capitalist; it possesses the same rights, and should follow the same course. These bills are not accepted, they are, consequently, not payable.’ However, the necessary information, and the vouchers, arrived. These bills stated value received, but the receipts of the officers in charge of the chest, into whose hands the money had been paid, were for only one tenth, one fifth, one third of the amount of the respective bills. The treasury, therefore, would only acknowledge and refund the sum really and bona fide paid; and the bills in their tenour were declared to be false. This raised a great clamour, and produced a terrible agitation amongst the merchants. A deputation waited upon the First Consul, who, far from endeavouring to avoid it, opened the business at once, and asked ‘whether they took him for a child, whether they thought he would sport thus with the purest blood of the people, or that he was so indifferent a guardian of the public interest? What he refused to give up,’ he said, ‘did not affect him personally, did not trench upon his civil list, but it was public property, of which he was the guardian, and which was the more sacred in his eyes on that account.’ Then, addressing the two persons at the head of the deputation, he said: ‘You, gentlemen, who are merchants, bankers, men of business, give me a positive answer. If one of your agents abroad were to draw upon you for very large sums contrary to your expectations and to your interests, would you accept, would you pay his bills?’ They were obliged to admit they would not. ‘Then,’ said the First Consul, ‘you, who are simple proprietors, and in the right of your majority responsible for your own actions only, you would wish to possess a right which you refuse to allow to me, proprietor in the name of all, and who am in that quality always a minor and subject to revision! No, gentlemen, I shall enjoy your privileges in the name and for the benefit of all; the actual amount received for your bills shall be repaid you and no more. I do not ask the merchants to take the bills of my agents: it is an honour, a mark of credit, to which I do not aspire; if the merchants do take them, it must be at their own risk and peril; I only acknowledge and consider as sacred the acceptance of my Minister of the Treasury.’ Upon this they again expostulated, and a great deal of idle talk ensued. They should be obliged, they said, to declare themselves bankrupts; they had received these bills, for ready money; their agents abroad had committed the error of taking them, through respect for, and confidence in, the government. ‘Very well,’ said the First Consul, ‘become bankrupts. But they did not,’ observed the Emperor, ‘they had not received these bills for ready money, and their agents had not committed any error.’

“The members of the deputation left the First Consul, convinced in their own minds of the validity of his reasons; nevertheless, they filled Paris with their clamours and with falsehoods, misrepresenting the affair altogether.

“This transaction,” said the Emperor, “and its details, explain many other transactions which have been much spoken of in Paris under the Imperial administration.

“The commercial world had particularly said, and repeated, that this proceeding was unexampled; that such a violation of credit was a thing hitherto unheard of; but to that the First Consul replied that he would set the question at rest by quoting precedents, and he recalled to their minds the Bills of Louis XIV., the liquidations of the Regent, the Mississippi Company,Company, the liquidations of the wars of 1763 and of 1782, &c.; and proved to them that what they contended to be a thing unexampled had been the constant practice of the monarchy.”

From this affair the Emperor turned to different branches of the administration. He defended the institution of the post of Inspectors of Reviews. “It was only through them that the actual number of men present could be ascertained; through them alone had this advantage been obtained, and it was one of immense importance in the active operations of war. And these inspectors were not less useful in an administrative point of view; for, whatever trifling abuses might exist in the details, and however numerous these abuses might be, it is on a general principle that such things should be considered; and, in order to estimate fairly the utility of this institution, it should be asked what other abuses would have taken place if it had not existed? For myself,” said Napoleon, “I must say that, checking the expenditure, by trying how much the total number of troops ought to have cost according to their fixed rates of pay, I have always found the sum paid by the treasury to fall short of my estimate. The army, therefore, cost less than it ought to have cost: what result more beneficial could be required?”

The Emperor quoted the administration of the navy as having been the most regular and the most honest; it had become a master-piece. “In that,” said he, “consisted the great merit of Decrès.” The Emperor considered that France was too large to have only one minister for the administration of the war department. “It was,” he said, “a task beyond the powers of one man. Paris had been made the centre of all decisions, contracts, supplies, and organizations; whilst the correspondents of the minister had been subdivided amongst a number of persons equal to the number of regiments and corps. The contrary ought to have been the case; the correspondences should have been entered, and the resources subdivided, by raising them on the spot where they were required. I had long meditated a plan to establish in France twenty or twenty-five military districts, which would have composed so many armies. There would have been no more than that number of accountants; these would have been twenty under-ministers; it would have been necessary to find twenty honest men. The minister would have had only twenty correspondents; he would have centralised the whole and made the machine move with rapidity.

“Messieurs Gaudin and Mollien,” said the Emperor, “were of opinion that it was necessary that the receivers-general, public financiers and contractors, should have very large fortunes, that they should have it in their power to make considerable profits, and openly avow them, in such a manner as to retain a degree of consideration which they might be careful not to endanger; and a character of honour, which they might be anxious not to compromise. This could not be otherwise,” he said, “in order to obtain from them support, service, and credit, in case of need.

“Another set of men, Defermont, Lacuée, and Marbois, thought, on the contrary, that it was impossible to be too watchful, too economical, and too strict. For my own part, I was inclined to be of the opinion of the first, considering the views of the last to be narrow, and such as were applicable to a regiment, but not to an army; to the expenses of a private household, but not to the expenditure of a great empire. I called them the Puritans and the Jansenists of the profession.”

The Emperor observed that the minister of the treasury, and the minister secretary of state, were two of his institutions on which he most congratulated himself, and from which he had derived the greatest assistance. “The minister of the treasury concentrated all the resources, and controlled all the expenses of the empire. From the minister secretary of state all acts emanated. He was the minister of ministers, imparting life to all intermediate acts; the grand notary of the empire, signing and authenticating all documents. Through the first I knew, at every moment, the state of my affairs; and through the second I made known my decisions and my will in all directions and every where. So that, with my minister of the treasury and my minister secretary of state alone, and half-a-dozen clerks, I would have undertaken to govern the empire from the remotest parts of Illyria, or from the banks of the Niemen, with as much facility as in my capital.”

The Emperor could not conceive how affairs could go on with the four or five secretaries of state of our kings. “And, indeed, how did they go on?” said he. “Each imagined, executed, and controlled his own operations. They might act in direct opposition one to another; for as the kings only affixed their sign on the margin of the plans proposed, or authenticated only the rough draft of their ordinances, the secretaries of state could fill them up, or act as they pleased, without fear of any great responsibility. Add to this that the secretaries of state had the griffe, a contrivance, which they wanted to make me adopt, but which I rejected as a tool appropriated to the Rois faineans. Amongst these ministers, some might have money for which they had no employment, and others might be unable to proceed for want of a farthing. There was no common centre to combine their movements, provide for their wants, and direct the execution of their measures.”

The Emperor said that a minister secretary of state was exactly suited for kings without talents, but vain, who would want the assistance of a prime minister and not like to own it. “Had my minister secretary of state been made president of the council of state,” said he, “he would have been from that moment a real prime minister, in the fullest acceptation of the term; for he would have carried his plans to the council of state to have them digested into laws, and would have signed for the Prince. There can be no doubt that, with the manners and habits of the first race of our kings, or with princes like them, my minister secretary of state would have become in a very short time a Mayor of the Palace.”Palace.”