ed to the discomfiture of her
continental rival. The plans of Napoleon for the acquisition of Van
Diemen's Land and the middle of Australia had an effect like that
which the ambition of Montcalm, Dupleix, Lally, and Perron has exerted
on the ultimate destiny of many a vast and fertile territory.

Still, in spite of the destruction of his fleet at Trafalgar, Napoleon
held to his Australian plans. No fact, perhaps, is more suggestive of
the dogged tenacity of his will than his order to Peron and Freycinet
to publish through the Imperial Press at Paris an exhaustive account
of their Australian voyage, accompanied by maps which claimed half of
that continent for the tricolour flag. It appeared in 1807, the year
of Tilsit and of the plans for the partition of Portugal and her
colonies between France and Spain. The hour seemed at last to have
struck for the assertion of French supremacy in other continents, now
that the Franco-Russian alliance had durably consolidated it in
Europe. And who shall say that, but for the Spanish Rising and the
genius of Wellington, a vast colonial empire might not have been won
for France, had Napoleon been free to divert his energies away from
this "old Europe" of which he professed to be utterly weary?

His whole attitude towards European and colonial politics revealed a
statesmanlike appreciation of the forces that were to mould the
fortunes of nations in the nineteenth century. He saw that no
rearrangement of the European peoples could be permanent. They were
too stubborn, too solidly nationalized, to bear the yoke of the new
Charlemagne. "I am come too late," he once exclaimed to Marmont; "men
are too enlightened, there is nothing great left to be done." These
words reveal his sense of the artificiality of his European conquests.
His imperial instincts could find complete satisfaction only among the
docile fate-ridden peoples of Asia, where he might unite the functions
of an Alexander and a Mahomet: or, failing that, he would carve out an
empire from the vast southern lands, organizing them by his unresting
powers and ruling them as oekist and as despot. This task would possess
a permanence such as man's conquests over Nature may always enjoy, and
his triumphs over his fellows seldom or never. The political
reconstruction of Europe was at best one of an infinite number of such
changes, always progressing and never completed; while the peopling of
new lands and the founding of States bel