luences in the political
development of Europe during the Nineteenth Century.

In no age of the world's history have these two impulses worked with so
triumphant an activity. They have not always been endowed with living
force. Among many peoples they lay dormant for ages and were only called
to life by some great event, such as the intolerable oppression of a
despot or of a governing caste that crushed the liberties of the
individual, or the domination of an alien people over one that
obstinately refused to be assimilated. Sometimes the spark that kindled
vital consciousness was the flash of a poet's genius, or the heroism of
some sturdy son of the soil. The causes of awakening have been
infinitely various, and have never wholly died away; but it is the
special glory of the Nineteenth Century that races which had hitherto
lain helpless and well-nigh dead, rose to manhood as if by magic, and
shed their blood like water in the effort to secure a free and
unfettered existence both for the individual and the nation. It is a
true saying of the German historian, Gervinus, "The history of this age
will no longer be only a relation of the lives of great men and of
princes, but a biography of nations."

At first sight, this illuminating statement seems to leave out of count
the career of the mighty Napoleon. But it does not. The great Emperor
unconsciously called into vigorous life the forces of Democracy and
Nationality both in Germany and in Italy, where there had been naught
but servility and disunion. His career, if viewed from our present
standpoint, falls into two portions: first, that in which he figured as
the champion of Revolutionary France and the liberator of Italy from
foreign and domestic tyrants; and secondly, as imperial autocrat who
conquered and held down a great part of Europe in his attempt to ruin
British commerce. In the former of these enterprises he had the new
forces of the age acting with him and endowing him with seemingly
resistless might; in the latter part of his life he mistook his place in
the economy of Nature, and by his violation of the principles of
individual liberty and racial kinship in Spain and Central Europe,
assured his own downfall.

The greatest battle of the century was the tremendous strife that for
three days surged to and fro around Leipzig in the month of October
1813, when Russians, Prussians, Austrians, Swedes, together with a few
Britons, Hanoverians, and finally his own S