tism of Prussia, and meets the awful
resistance of the Slav at Eyiau and Friedland. Then, turning to the
West, it is in the name of Liberty that he sends Junot, Marmont, Soult,
and Massena across the Pyrenees to restore honour and law to Spain,
and, as he had ended the mediaeval Empire of the Hapsburgs, to end
there in Madrid the Inquisition and the priestly domination. The
Inquisition, which in 300 years had claimed 300,000 victims, is indeed
suppressed, but Spain, to his amazement, is in arms to a man against
its liberators! But Napoleon cannot pause, his fate, like Hamlet's,
calling out, and whilst his Marshals are still baffled by the lines of
Torres Vedras, he musters his hosts, and, conquering the new Austrian
Empire at Wagram, marches Attila-like across a subjugated Europe
against the Empire and capital of the White Czar.

Napoleon's fall made the purpose of his destiny clear even to the most
ardent of French Royalists, and to the most contented of the servants
of Francis II or Frederick William III. At Vienna the gaily-plumaged
diplomatists undid in a month all that the fifteen years of
unparalleled action and suffering unparalleled had achieved; whilst the
most matter-of-fact of all British Cabinets invested the prison of the
fallen conqueror with a tragic poetry which made the rock in the
Atlantic but too fitting an emblem of the peak in the Caucasus and the
lingering anguish of Prometheus. And if not one man of supreme genius
then living or in after ages has condemned Napoleon, if the poets of
that time, Goethe and Manzoni, Poushkine, Byron, and Lermontoff, made
themselves votaries of his fame, it was because they felt already what
two generations have made a commonplace, that his hopes had been their
hopes, his disillusion their disillusion; that in political freedom no
more than in religious freedom can the peace of the world be found;
that Girondinism was no final evangel; that to man's soul freedom can
never be an end in itself, but only the means to an end.

The history of Europe for the thirty-three years following the
abdication at the Elysee is a conflict between the two principles of
Absolutism and Liberty, represented now by the cry for
constitutionalism and the Nation, now by a return to Girondinism and
the watchword of Humanity. In theory the divine right of peoples was
arrayed against the divine right of kings. The conflict was waged
bitterly; yet it was a conflict without a battle. The