CHAPTER XVI. THE ERA OF NAPOLEON The French Republic under the Consulate, 1799-1804 The French Empire and its Territorial Expansion Destruction of the French Empire Significance of the Era of Napoleon INTRODUCTION The story of modern times is but a small fraction of the long epic of human history. If, as seems highly probable, the conservative estimates of recent scientists that mankind has inhabited the earth more than fifty thousand years [Footnote: Professor James Geikie, of the University of Edinburgh, suggests, in his _Antiquity of Man in Europe_ (1914), the possible existence of human beings on the earth more than 500,000 years ago!], are accurate, then the bare five hundred years which these volumes pass in review constitute, in time, less than a hundredth part of man's past. Certainly, thousands of years before our day there were empires and kingdoms and city-states, showing considerable advancement in those intellectual pursuits which we call civilization or culture,--that is, in religion, learning, literature, political organization, and business; and such basic institutions as the family, the state, and society go back even further, past our earliest records, until their origins are shrouded in deepest mystery. Despite its brevity, modern history is of supreme importance. Within its comparatively brief limits are set greater changes in human life and action than are to be found in the records of any earlier millennium. While the present is conditioned in part by the deeds and thoughts of our distant forbears who lived thousands of years ago, it has been influenced in a very special way by historical events of the last five hundred years. Let us see how this is true. Suppose we ask ourselves in what important respects the year 1900 differed from the year 1400. In other words, what are the great distinguishing achievements of modern times? At least six may be noted: (1) _Exploration and knowledge of the whole globe_. To our ancestors from time out of mind the civilized world was but the lands adjacent to the Mediterranean and, at most, vague stretches of Persia, India, and China. Not much over four hundred years ago was America discovered and the globe circumnavigated for the first time, and very recently has the use of steamship, telegraph, and railway served to bind together the uttermost parts of the world, thereby making it relatively smaller, less mysterious, and in culture more unified.