thought there was something in his character and exploits to give a
color to his--blasphemous pretensions. The empire of the world seemed
to him to be in a measure his due, for nothing short of it corresponded
with his conceptions of himself; and he did not use mere verbiage,
but spoke a language to which he gave some credit, when he called his
successive conquests "the fulfilment of his destiny." This spirit
of self-exaggeration wrought its own misery, and drew down upon him
terrible punishments; and this it did by vitiating and perverting his
high powers. First, it diseased his fine intellect, gave imagination the
ascendency over judgment, turned the inventiveness and fruitfulness of
his mind into rash, impatient, restless energies, and thus precipitated
him into projects, which, as the wisdom of his counsellors pronounced,
were fraught with ruin. To a man, whose vanity took him out of the rank
of human beings, no foundation for reasoning was left. All things seemed
possible. His genius and his fortune were not to be bounded by the
barriers which experience had assigned to human powers. Ordinary rules
did not apply to him. He even found excitement and motives in obstacles
before which other men would have wavered; for these would enhance the
glory of triumph, and give a new thrill to the admiration of the world.

To us there is something radically and increasingly shocking in the
thought of one man's will becoming a law to his race; in the thought of
multitudes, of vast communities, surrendering conscience, intellect,
their affections, their rights, their interests, to the stern mandate of
a fellow-creature. When we see one word of a frail man on the throne
of France, tearing a hundred thousand sons from their homes, breaking
asunder the sacred ties of domestic life, sentencing myriads of the
young to make murder their calling, and rapacity their means of support,
and extorting from nations their treasures to extend this ruinous sway,
we are ready to ask ourselves, Is not this a dream? and, when the sad