eliverer of but fifteen years ago!

What tragedy of a lost leader equals this of Napoleon? What marvel
that it still troubles the minds of men more profoundly than any other
of modern ages. Yet Napoleon did not betray Liberty, nor was France
false to the Revolution. Man's action at its highest is, like his art,
symbolic. To Camille Desmoulins and the mob behind him the capture of
a disused fortress and the liberation of a handful of men made the fall
of the Bastille the symbol and the watchword of Liberty. To the Europe
of Napoleon, the monarchs of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Spain, the
princes of Germany and Italy, the Papal power, "the stone thrust into
the side of Italy to keep the wound open"--these were like the Bastille
to the France of Desmoulins, a symbol of oppression and wrong,
injustice and tyranny. And in Bonaparte, whether as Consul or Emperor,
the peoples of Europe for a time beheld the hero who led against the
tyrants the hosts of the free. What were his own despotisms, his own
rigour, his cruelty, the spy-system of Fouche, the stifled Press, the
_guet-apens_ of Bayonne, the oppression of Prussia, and one sanguinary
war followed by another--what were these things but the discipline, the
necessary sacrifice, the martyrdom of a generation for the triumph and
felicity of the centuries to come? Napoleon at the height of Imperial
power, with thirty millions of devoted subjects behind him, and legions
unequalled since those of Rome, did but make Rousseau's experiment.
"The emotions of men," Rousseau argued, "have by seventeen hundred
years of asceticism and Christianism been so disciplined, that they can
now be trusted to their own guidance." The hour of his death, whether
by a pistol bullet or by poison, or from sheer weariness, was also the
hour of Rousseau's deepest insight into the human heart. That hour of
penetrating vision into the eternal mystery made him glad to rush into
the silence and the darkness. Napoleon, trusting to the word and to
the ideal Liberty, to man's unstable desires and to his own most fixed
star, yokes France in 1800 to his chariot wheels. But at the outset he
has to compromise with the past of France, with the ineradicable traits
of the Celtic race, its passion for the figures on the veil of Maya,
its rancours, and the meditated vengeance for old defeats. Yet it is
in the name of Liberty rather than of France that he greets the sun of
Austerlitz, breaks the ramrod despo