Like a good general he secures his rear.

At strife with all Europe, he so arranges it as not to allow in the France he drags along after him refractory souls or bodies which might form platoons in his rear.

Consequently, and through precaution, he suppresses in advance all eventual rallying points or centers of combination Henceforth, every wire which can stir up and bring a company of men together for the same object terminates in his hands; he holds in his firm grasp all these combined wires, guards them with jealous care, in order to strain them to the utmost.

Let no one attempt to loosen them, and, above all, let no one entertain a thought of getting hold of them; they belong to him and to him alone, and compose the public domain, which is his domain proper.
But, alongside of his proper domain, he recognizes another in which he himself assigns a limit to the complete absorption of all wills by his own; he does not admit, of course in his own interest, that the public power, at least in the civil order of things and in common practice, should be illimitable nor, especially, arbitrary.[2324]--This is due to his not being an utopian or a theorist, like his predecessors of the Convention, but a perspicacious statesman, who is in the habit of using his own eyes.

He sees things directly, in themselves; he does not imagine them through book formulae or party phrases, by a process of verbal reasoning, employing the gratuitous suppositions of humanitarian optimism or the dogmatic prejudices of Jacobin nonsense.