text:  The conqueror who beat down in succession all the great military names of Europe must have been a soldier; the negotiator who vanquished all existing diplomacy and the statesman who remodelled the laws curbed the fiery temper and reduced to discipline the fierce insubordination of a people whose first victory had crushed the state and heaped the ruins of the throne on the sepulchre of their king--must have been a negotiator and a statesman of the first rank