strength of will, which, as is often the case with these powerful natures,
not infrequently degenerated into sheer obstinacy. He had made up his mind
that England was to support Turkey and fight with Russia, and inasmuch as
Louis Napoleon, for the sake of personal glory, had similar opinions,
France as well as England was dragged into a costly and quite useless war.
Napoleon III has already figured among those aspiring monarchs who wish
"to sit in the chair of Europe." It was his personal will once more which
sent the unhappy Maximilian to his death in Mexico, and his personal
jealousy of Prussia which launched him in the fatal enterprise "à Berlin"
in 1870. In the latter case we find another personal influence, still more
sinister--that of the Empress Eugénie, whose capricious ambition and
interference in military matters directly led to the ruinous disaster of
Sedan. The French people, who had to suffer, discovered it too late.
"Quicquid delirant reges plectuntur Achivi." Or take another more recent
instance. Who was responsible for the Russo-Japanese war? Not Kuropatkin,
assuredly, nor yet the Russian Prime Minister, but certain of the Grand
Dukes and probably the Tsar himself, who were interested in the forests of
the Yalu district and had no mind to lose the money they had invested in a
purely financial operation. The truth is that modern Europe has no room
for "prancing Pro-consuls," and no longer takes stock in autocrats. They
are, or ought to be, superannuated, out of date. To use an expressive
colloquialism they are "a back number." The progress of the world demands
the development of peoples; it has no use for mediæval monarchies like
that of Potsdam. One of the things we ought to banish for ever is the
horrible idea that whole nations can be massacred and civilisation
indefinitely postponed to suit the individual caprice of a bragging and
self-opinionated despot who calls himself God's elect. Now that we know
the ruin he can cause, let us fight shy of the Superman, and the whole
range of ideas which he connotes.