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courage, patriotism, discipline, with effective arms both for defense
and for close combat.

Among all the qualities which go to constitute the highest military
excellence, either as a general or as a soldier, none was wanting in
the character of Alexander. Together with his own chivalrous
courage--sometimes indeed both excessive and unseasonable, so as to
form the only military defect which can fairly be imputed to him--we
trace in all his operations the most careful dispositions taken
beforehand, vigilant precaution in guarding against possible reverse,
and abundant resource in adapting himself to new contingencies. Amidst
constant success, these precautionary combinations were never
discontinued. His achievements are the earliest recorded evidence of
scientific military organization on a large scale, and of its
overwhelming effects. Alexander overawes the imagination more than any
other personage of antiquity, by the matchless development of all that
constitutes effective force--as an individual warrior, and as
organizer and leader of armed masses; not merely the blind impetuosity
ascribed by Homer to Ares, but also the intelligent, methodized, and
all-subduing compression which he personifies in Athene. But all his
great qualities were fit for use only against enemies; in which
category indeed were numbered all mankind, known and unknown, except
those who chose to submit to him. In his Indian campaigns, amidst
tribes of utter strangers, we perceive that not only those who stand
on their defense, but also those who abandon their property and flee
to the mountains, are alike pursued and slaughtered.

Apart from the transcendent merits of Alexander as a soldier and a
general, some authors give him credit for grand and beneficent views
on the subject of imperial government, and for intentions highly
favorable to the improvement of mankind. I see no ground for adopting
this opinion. As far as we can venture to anticipate what would have
been Alexander's future, we see nothing in prospect except years of
ever-repeated aggression and conquest, not to be concluded until he
had traversed and subjugated all the inhabited globe. The acquisition
of universal dominion--conceived not metaphorically, but literally,
and conceived with greater facility in consequence of the imperfect
geographical knowledge of the time--was the master-passion of his
soul. At the moment of his death, he was commencing fresh aggression
in the sout