nistered by city councils.

It was not in worlds such as ours that the geniuses of the past sped
their flights, but in anxious, tortured, corrupt, starving worlds,
worlds of heaping ambition and often tottering fortune. Napoleon lived
in one of those periods of reconstruction, when the earth bears new
life, restores what the earth has just destroyed, a period very like
this war (a hopeful sign, though I make no prophecies); but if Napoleon
is remembered, it is not only as a conqueror, for other men have won
battles and the dust of their fame is mingled with the dust of their
bones. His genius does not lie in his military skill, in his capacity to
pin a wing while piercing a centre, nor in his original idea that guns
should be taken from battalions and massed into artillery brigades. The
genius of Napoleon lies in the generality of his mind, in his
understanding of the benefits the State would derive from the tobacco
monopoly, in his conception of war as the victory of the transport
officer, in his conception of peace as the triumph of law, which is the
French Civil Code. It manifested itself when Napoleon in the middle of
flaming Moscow, in a conquered country, surrounded by starving troops
and massing enemies, could calmly peruse the law establishing the French
state-endowed theatres and sign it upon a drumhead. That is typical, for
genius is both general and particular. It is the quality to which
nothing that is human can be alien, whether of mankind or of man.
Lincoln was a man such as that; his passionate advocacy of the negro,
his triumph at Cooper Union, his Gettysburg dedication, his
administrative capacity, all that is little by the side of his one
sentiment for the conquered South: 'I will treat them as if they had
never been away.'

The detail, which is the prison house of the little man, is the
exercising ground of the great one. Such men as Galileo showed what
brand it was they would set upon history's face; the soul of Galileo is
not in the telescope, or in the isochronism of the pendulum oscillation,
or even in the discovery (which was rather an intuition) of the
movement of the earth. All of Galileo is in one phrase, when poor,
imprisoned, tortured and mocked, heretic and recusant, he was able to
murmur to those who bade him recant: 'Still she moves.' It is in all of
them, this general and this particular, in Leonardo, together painter,
mathematician, architect, and excellent engineer, but above all fath