absolute master of his army. This moral power became fatal to him,
because he strove to avail himself of it even against the ascendancy of
material force, and because it led him to despise positive rules, the
long violation of which will not remain unpunished. When pride was
bringing Napoleon towards his fall, he happened to say, "France has more
need of me than I have of France." He spoke the truth: but why had he
become necessary? Because he had committed the destiny of France to the
chances of an interminable war: because, in spite of the resources of
his genius, that war, rendered daily more hazardous by his staking the
whole of his force and by the boldness of his movements, risked, in
every campaign, in every battle, the fruits of twenty years of triumph:
because his government was so modelled that with him every thing must be
swept away, and that a reaction, proportioned to the violence of the
action, must burst forth at once both within and without. But Napoleon
saw, without illusion, to the bottom of things. The nation, wholly
occupied in prosecuting the designs of its chief, had previously not had
time to form any plans for itself. The day on which it should have
ceased to be stunned by the din of arms, it would have called itself to
account for its servile obedience. It is better, thought he, for an
absolute prince to fight foreign armies than to have to struggle against
the energy of the citizens. Despotism had been organized for making war;
war was continued to uphold despotism. The die was cast--France must
either conquer Europe, or Europe subdue France. Napoleon fell--he fell,
because with the men of the nineteenth century he attempted the work of
an Attila and a Genghis Khan; because he gave the reins to an
imagination directly contrary to the spirit of his age; with which,
nevertheless, his reason was perfectly acquainted; because he would not
pause on the day when he felt conscious of his inability to succeed.
Nature has fixed a boundary, beyond which extravagant enterprises cannot
be carried with prudence. This boundary the Emperor reached in Spain,