In the seventh chapter of his _Study of Sociology_, being incidentally concerned to insist on the iniquity and the mischievousness of war, he describes how Europe, during the earlier years of this century, was visited by certain disasters, far-reaching and horrible, from the consequence of which the world has hardly yet recovered. These disasters consisted of slaughter, plunder, pestilence, agony, rape, and ruin; and to say nothing of their results on those whom they left alive, they resulted in some two million violent and unnecessary deaths. And how does Mr. Spencer explain these appalling phenomena? He who declares that we should learn nothing about social causation “_should we read ourselves blind over the biographies_” of all the great rulers of the world, explains them by tracing them to one sole and single cause; and this, he says, was the genius {85} and personality of Napoleon. “_Out of the sanguinary chaos of the Revolution_,” he writes, “_rose a soldier whose immense ability, joined with his absolute unscrupulousness, made him now general, now consul, now autocrat. The instincts of the savage were scarcely at all qualified in him by what we call moral sentiments. . . . And all this slaughter, all this suffering, all this devastation was gone through—_” Let us pause and ask why it was gone through, according to Mr. Spencer. Does he say it was gone through because of “_aggregates of past conditions_” and the influence of antecedent generations? Far from it. He says, “_All this was gone through because one man had a restless desire to be despot over all men._” But perhaps Mr. Spencer may have a defence ready. He may tell us that the influence of Napoleon was merely that of a military leader, which influence he has excepted from his theory of general causes. To this it must be answered in the first place that Napoleon was at all events not a leader in “_early_” or “_primitive_” warfare, to which Mr. Spencer’s exception is specifically and emphatically limited. Mr. Spencer consequently shows us, by his own practical reasoning, that this theoretical limitation of which he made so much cannot be maintained for a moment, and that whatever is true of great leaders in a primitive war, he himself recognises—all his theories notwithstanding—as equally true of them in the most advanced stages of civilisation. But a far more important {86} answer, and one taken from himself, is still in reserve—an answer which clenches the whole matter, and shows us that Mr. Spencer, in his dealings with practical life, really recognises great men as exercising in the arts of peace precisely the same kind of causality which Napoleon exercised in war.