ur conduct towards the external world; and if we find this
antagonistic, it is because we are at war with ourselves, with the
essential laws of our mind and our heart. The attitude of Nature
towards us is uninfluenced by the justice or injustice of our
intentions; and yet these will almost invariably govern our attitude
towards Nature. Here once more, as in the case of social justice, we
ascribe to the universe, to an unintelligible, eternal, fatal
principle, a part that we play ourselves; and when we say that justice,
heaven, nature, or events are rising in revolt against us to punish or
to avenge, it is in reality man who is using events to punish man, it
is human nature that rises in revolt, and human justice that avenges.

16

In a former essay I referred to Napoleon's three crowning acts of
injustice: the three celebrated crimes that were so fatally unjust to
his own fortune. The first was the murder of the Duc d'Enghien,
condemned by order, without trial or proof, and executed in the
trenches of Vincennes; an assassination that sowed insatiable hatred
and vengeance in the path of the guilty dictator. Then the detestable
intrigues whereby he lured the too trustful, easy-going Bourbons to
Bayonne, that he might rob them of their hereditary crown; and the
horrible war that ensued, a war that cost the lives of three hundred
thousand men, swallowed up all the morality and energy of the empire,
most of its prestige, almost all its convictions, almost all the
devotion it inspired, and engulfed its prosperous destiny. And finally
the frightful, unpardonable Russian campaign, wherein his fortune came
at last to utter shipwreck amid the ice of the Berezina and the
snow-bound Polish steppes.

"These prodigious catastrophes," I said, "had numberless causes; but
when we have slowly traced our way through all the more or less
unforeseen circumstances, and have marked the gradual change in
Napoleon's character, have noted the acts of imprudence, folly, and
violence which this genius committed; when we have seen how
deliberately he brought disaster to his smiling fortune, may we not
almost believe that what we behold, standing erect at the very
fountain-head of calamity, is no other than the silent shadow of
misunderstood human justice? Human justice, wherein there is nothing
supernatural, nothing very mysterious, but built up of many thousand
very real little incidents, many thousand falsehoods, many thousand
little