But his time was come. His wars had been wholly selfish. To aggrandise his own name, he had covered Europe with blood. To place _himself_ at the head of earthly power, he had broken faith with Turkey, with Russia, with Germany, and with Spain. The blood, the spoil, and the misery of millions were upon his head. His personal crimes concentrated the vengeance of mankind upon his diadem. For the last three years of his political and military existence, he seems to have lain under an actual spell. Nothing but the judicial clouding of his intellect can account for the precipitate infirmities of his judgment. His march to Russia, as we have already observed, was a gigantic absurdity in the eyes of all Europe--his delay at Moscow was a gigantic absurdity in the eyes of every subaltern in his army. But his campaigns in France were only a continuation of those absurdities. With fifty thousand men he was to conquer three hundred thousand, backed by an actual million ready to rush into the province of France. How was resistance possible? Treaty was his only hope: yet he attempted to resist, and refused to treat. He was beaten up to the walls of Paris. The Allies then offered him France: he still fought, and only affected to negociate. At length the long infatuation was consummated in his march _from_ Paris; the Allies marched _to_ Paris; and Napoleon was instantly deposed, outlawed, and undone. Even his second great experiment for power was but the infatuation repeated. Every act was an error: his return from Elba ought to have been delayed for at least a year. His campaign of 1815 ought to have made head against the Prussians and Germans in the south, while he left the English and Prussians to waste their strength against his fortresses. Even in Belgium, he ought to have poured the whole mass of his army on the English at once, instead of violating his own first principle of war, and dividing it into three armies, Ney's at Quatre-Bras, Grouchy's at Wavre, and his own at Ligny. Still, when routed at Waterloo, he had a powerful force in the field, the remnant of his army, with Grouchy's corps. With those he ought to have moved on slowly towards Paris, garrisoning the fortresses, breaking up the roads, throwing every obstacle in the way of the Allies, and finally, at the head of his 60,000 veterans, with the national guard of the capital and the surrounding districts, (amounting to not less than 100,000 men,) at once making a front against the Allies, and negociating. Above all things, he ought _never_ to have separated himself from the army; as he thus stripped his party of all power at the moment, and virtually delivered himself a prisoner to the Bourbonists in the capital. Whatever might be the difficulty of deciding on his conduct at the time, it is now perfectly easy to see, that all these were blunders of the first magnitude, and that every step was direct to his ruin.