nation had won at the Revolution, Napoleon united in himself,
not only the power, but the whole will of France; and that
power and will were guided by a genius for war such as Europe
had never seen since Caesar. The effect was absolutely magical.
In November 1799, he was made First Consul; he found France
humbled by defeats, his Italian conquests lost, his allies
invaded, his own frontier threatened. He took the field in May
1800, and in June the whole fortune of the war was changed, and
Austria driven out of Lombardy by the victory of Marengo. Still
the flood of the tide rose higher and higher, and every
successive wave of its advance swept away a kingdom. Earthly
state has never reached a prouder pinnacle than when Napoleon,
in June 1812, gathered his army at Dresden--that mighty host,
unequalled in all time, of 450,000, not men merely, but
effective soldiers, and there received the homage of subject
kings. And now, what was the principal adversary of this
tremendous power? by whom was it checked, and resisted, and put
down? By none, and by nothing, but the direct and manifest
interposition of God. I know of no language so well fitted to
describe that victorious advance to Moscow, and the utter
humiliation of the retreat, as the language of the prophet with
respect to the advance and subsequent destruction of the host
of Sennacherib. 'When they arose early in the morning, behold
they were all dead corpses,' applies almost literally to that
memorable night of frost, in which twenty thousand horses
perished, and the strength of the French army was utterly
broken. Human instruments, no doubt, were employed in the
remainder of the work; nor would I deny to Germany and to
Prussia the glories of the year 1813, nor to England the honour
of her victories in Spain, or of the crowning victory of
Waterloo. But at the distance of thirty years, those who lived
in the time of danger and remember its magnitude, and now
calmly review what there was in human strength to avert it,
must acknowledge, I think, beyond all controversy, that the
deliverance of Europe from the dominion of Napoleon was
effected neither by Russia, nor by Germany, nor by England, but
by the hand of God alone."

The question, whether some races of men possess an inherent superiori