against him, this multitude of avenging arms ready to be raised, filled
his ambitious spirit with involuntary apprehension. Looking around him,
he was alarmed to find himself solitary, and conceived the idea of
strengthening his power by moderating it. Then it was that he thought of
creating an hereditary peerage, and reconstructing his monarchy on more
secure foundations. But Napoleon saw without illusion to the bottom of
things. The nation, wholly and continually 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, and he overleaped it in Russia. Had he then escaped
destruction, his inflexible presumption would have caused him to find
elsewhere a Baylen and a Moscow-- _History of the War in the
Peninsula, from the French of General Foy._

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