ll they should have surpassed all that
is told of Roman discipline and efficiency; but all such exertions would
have been utterly thrown away had the French Emperor behaved like a
rational being, and not sought to illustrate his famous dogma, that the
impossible has no existence, by seeking to achieve impossibilities. At
the beginning of 1812, Napoleon was literally invincible. He was master
of all Continental Europe, from the Atlantic to the Niemen, and from
Cape North to Reggio. There was not a sovereign in that part of the
world, from the kings of Sweden and Denmark to the Emperor of Austria
and the Turkish Sultan, who did not wear crowns and wield sceptres only
because the sometime General Bonaparte was willing they should wear and
wield the emblems of imperial or royal power. He was at war only with
Great Britain, and Spain, Portugal, and Sicily; and Great Britain was
the sole enemy he was bound to respect. All the more enlightened
Spaniards were all but ready to acknowledge the rule of his brother
Joseph, and would have done so but for French failure in the Russian
war. England's army could have been driven from the Peninsula with ease,
had a third of the men who were worse than wasted in Russia been
directed thither in the early spring of 1812. The Bourbons of Sicily
hated their English protectors so bitterly, that they were ready to
unite with the French to get up a modern imitation of the Sicilian
Vespers at their expense. The war might soon have been confined to the
ocean, and there it would have been fought for France principally by
Americans, as the United States were soon to declare war against
England. Never before was man so strong as Napoleon on New-Year's day,
1812; and in less than four years he was living in lodgings, and bad
lodgings too, in St. Helena! What hope could the Prussians have, a month
before the march to Moscow was resolved upon? None that could encourage
them. Some of the more sanguine spirits, supported by general sentiment,
were still of opinion that something could be effected; but the larger
number of intelligent men were very despondent, and not a few of them
began to think of the world beyond the Atlantic, as English patriots had
thought almost two centuries earlier, when, that "blood and iron man,"
Wentworth (Strafford), was developing his system of _Thorough_ with a
precision and an energy that even Count Bismark has never surpassed. The
bolder Prussians, when their country had to