the greatest man of action that the world has ever produced. Roederer
relates in his journal that on one occasion Napoleon said to him:

Il n'y a pas un homme plus pusillanime que moi quand je fais un
plan militaire; je me grossis tous les dangers et tous les maux
possibles dans les circonstances; je suis dans une agitation tout à
fait pénible; je suis comme une fille qui accouche. Et quand ma
résolution est prise, tout est oublié, hors ce qui peut la faire
réussir.

Within reasonable limits, caution is, indeed, altogether commendable. On
the other hand, it cannot be doubted that, carried to excess, it is at
times apt to paralyse all effective and timely action, to disqualify
those who exercise it from being pilots possessed of sufficient daring
to steer the ship of state in troublous times, and to exclude them from
the category of men of action in the sense in which that term is
generally used. In spite of my great affection for Alfred Lyall, I am
forced to admit that, in his case, caution was, I think, at times
carried to excess. He never appeared to me to realise sufficiently that
the conduct of public affairs, notably in this democratic age, is at
best a very rough unscientific process; that it is occasionally
necessary to make a choice of evils or to act on imperfect evidence; and
that at times, to quote the words which I remember Lord Northbrook once
used to me, it is even better to have a wrong opinion than to have no
definite opinion at all. So early as 1868, he wrote to his mother,
"There are many topics on which I have not definitely discovered what I
do think"; and to the day of his death he very generally maintained in
respect to current politics the frame of mind set forth in this very
characteristic utterance. Every general has to risk the loss of a
battle, and every active politician has at times to run the risk of