Never since the great Spanish monarchy and the Old Roman empire has a conquering State and propagator of a new regime afforded its subjects such gratifications of self-esteem, nor opened so vast a career to their ambitions.
For, having once adopted their career, they know better than the Spaniards under Charles V.or the Romans under Augustus, how far they can go and how fast they can get ahead.

No obstacle impedes them; nobody feels himself confined his post; each considers the one he occupies as provisional, each takes it only to await a better one, anticipating another at a very early date; he dashes onward, springs aloft and occupies in advance the superior post which he means to secure on the first vacancy, and, under this Regime, the vacancies are numerous .-- These vacancies, in the military service and in the grade of officers, may be estimated at nearly four thousand per annum;[3339] after 1808 and 1809, but especially after the disaster of 1812 and 1813, places are no longer lacking but subjects fill them; Napoleon is obliged to accept youths for officers as beardless as his conscripts, eighteen-year-old apprentices who, after a year or six months in the military academy, might finish their apprenticeship on the battle-field, pupils taken from the philosophy or rhetoric classes, willing children (de bonne volonte): On the 13th of December 1808, he draws 50 from his lycees, who don the gold-lace of under-officers at once; in 1809, he calls out 250, to serve in the depot battalions; in 1810, he calls out 150 of the age of nineteen who "know the drill," and who are to be sent on distant expeditions with the commission of second-lieutenant; in 1811, 400 for the school of noncommissioned officers at Fontainebleau, 20 for the Ile-de-Re and 84 who are to be quartermasters; and, in 1812, 112 more and so on.

Naturally, thanks to annually increasing gaps made by cannon and bayonet, the survivors in this body of youth mount the faster; in 1813 and 1814, there are colonels and lieutenant-colonels of the age of twenty-five.
In the civil service, if fewer are killed everybody is almost equally over tasked.

Under this reign one is soon used up, physically and morally, even in pacific employments, and this also supplies vacancies.
Besides, in default of deaths, wounds and violent elimination, there is another elimination, not less efficacious, operating in this direction, and for a long time, in favor of men of ability, preparing places for them and accelerating their advancement.

Napoleon accepts none but competent candidates; now, in 1800, there is a dearth of acceptable candidates for places in the civil service and not, as in 1789, or at the present time, a superabundance and even too great a crowd .-- In the military service especially, capacity is innate; natural endowments, courage, coolness, quick perception, physical activity, moral ascendancy, topographical imagination form its principal elements; men just able to read, write and cipher became, in three or four years, during the Revolution, admirable officers and conquering generals .-- It is not the same in relation to civil capacity; this requires long and continuous study.