even be ready to grant that had
he been in the place of these great Generals he might have made much
greater mistakes; he merely sees this error from the chain of events,
and he thinks that it should not have escaped the sagacity of the
General.

This is, therefore, an opinion formed through the connection of events,
and therefore through the RESULT. But there is another quite different
effect of the result itself upon the judgment, that is if it is used
quite alone as an example for or against the soundness of a measure.
This may be called JUDGMENT ACCORDING TO THE RESULT. Such a judgment
appears at first sight inadmissible, and yet it is not.

When Buonaparte marched to Moscow in 1812, all depended upon whether the
taking of the capital, and the events which preceded the capture, would
force the Emperor Alexander to make peace, as he had been compelled to
do after the battle of Friedland in 1807, and the Emperor Francis in
1805 and 1809 after Austerlitz and Wagram; for if Buonaparte did not
obtain a peace at Moscow, there was no alternative but to return--that
is, there was nothing for him but a strategic defeat. We shall leave out
of the question what he did to get to Moscow, and whether in his advance
he did not miss many opportunities of bringing the Emperor Alexander
to peace; we shall also exclude all consideration of the disastrous
circumstances which attended his retreat, and which perhaps had their
origin in the general conduct of the campaign. Still the question
remains the same, for however much more brilliant the course of the
campaign up to Moscow might have been, still there was always an
uncertainty whether the Emperor Alexander would be intimidated into
making peace; and then, even if a retreat did not contain in itself the
seeds of such disasters as did in fact occur, still it could never be
anything else than a great strategic defeat. If the Emperor Alexander
agreed to a peace which was disadvantageous to him, the campaign of 1812
would have ranked with those of Austerlitz, Friedland, and Wagram.
But these campaigns also, if they had not led to peace, would in all
probability have ended in similar catastrophes. Whatever, therefore,
of genius, skill, and energy the Conqueror of the World applied to the
task, this last question addressed to fate(*) remained always the same.
Shall we then discard the campaigns of 1805, 1807, 1809, and say on
account of the campaign of 1812 that they were acts of imprud