130. And not only must we thus correct our too abstract views of the particular agency of such a man as Napoleon. If we would understand the apparent results of his action, we must bear in mind how much besides his particular agency has really gone to produce them, so far as they were good; how much of unnoticed effort on the part of men obscure because unselfish, how much of silent process in the general heart of man. Napoleon was called the 'armed soldier of revolution,' and it was in that character that he rendered what service he did to men; but the revolution was not the making of him or his likes. Caesar again we have learnt to regard as a benefactor of mankind, but it was not Caesar that made the Roman law, through which chiefly or solely the Roman empire became a blessing. The idiosyncrasy, then, of the men who have been most conspicuous in the production of great changes in the condition of mankind, though it has been an essential element in their production, has been so only so far as it has been overborne by influences and directed to ends, which were indeed not external to the men in question--which on the contrary helped to make them inwardly and spiritually what they really were--but which formed no part of their distinguishing idiosyncrasy. If that idiosyncrasy was conspicuously selfish, it was still not through their selfishness that such men contributed to mould the institutions by which nations have been civilised and developed, but through their fitness to act as organs of impulses and ideas which had previously gained a hold on some society of men, and for the realisation of which the means and conditions had been preparing quite apart from the action of those who became the most noticeable instruments of their realisation.