only in recorded history have these qualities appeared
together and simultaneously in one people, in the Athens of Pericles
and the Islam of Omar.[4]

Revolutionary France was inspired by a dazzling dream, an exalted
purpose, but its imperialism was the creation of the genius or the
ambition of the individual; it was not rooted in the heart of the race.
It was not Clive merely who gained India for England. French
incapacity for the government of others, for empire, in a word, fought
on our side. Napoleon knew this. What a study are those bulletins of
his! After Austerlitz, after Jena, Eyiau, Friedland, one iteration,
assurance and reassurance, "This is the last, the very last campaign!"
and so on till Waterloo. His Corsican intensity, the superhuman power
of that mighty will, transformed the character of the French race, but
not for ever. The Celtic element was too strong for him, and in the
French noblesse he found an index to the whole nation. The sarcasm,
which if he did not utter he certainly prompted, has not lost its
edge--"I showed them the path to glory and they refused to tread it; I
opened my drawing-room doors and they rushed in, in crowds." There is
nothing more tragic in history than the spectacle of this man of
unparalleled administrative and political genius, fettered by the past,
and at length grown desperate, abandoning himself to his weird. The
march into Russia is the return upon the daimonic spirit of its
primitive instincts. The beneficent ruler is merged once more in the
visionary of earlier times, dreaming by the Nile, or asleep on the heel
of a cannon on board the _Muiron_.[5] Napoleon was fighting for a dead
ideal with the strength of the men who had overthrown that ideal--how
should he prosper? Conquest of England, Spain, Austria, the Rhine
frontier, Holland, Belgium, point by point his policy repeats Bourbon
policy, the policy that led Louis XVI to the scaffold and himself to
Ste Helene. Yet his first battles were for liberty, and his last made
the return of mediaeval despotism impossible. Dying, he bequeaths
imperialism to France as Euphorion leaves his vesture in the hands of
Faust and Helena. How fatal was that gift of a spurious imperialism
Metz, Sedan, and Paris made clear to all men.

The Rome of the Caesars presents successively a veiled despotism, a
capricious military tyranny, or an oriental absolutism. The "Serrar
del Consiglio" made Venice and her empire the paragon