I need not narrate the history of the Reign of Terror, which was even worse than the terror which the Bolsheviks established in Russia. Not even Lenin and Trotsky devised anything so atrocious as the _noyades_--wholesale drownings--in the Loire, or the _mariages républicains_ on the banks of that river, and it is difficult to believe that the teaching of Marat had nothing to do with that frightful outbreak of bestiality, lust, and murder. The evil that men do lives after them. There was little good to be buried in Marat’s grave, doctor though he was. Napoleon I There is not, and may possibly never be, an adequate biography of this prodigious man. It is a truism to say that he has cast a doubt on all past glory; let us hope that he has rendered future glory impossible, for to judge by the late war it seems impossible that any rival to the glory of Napoleon can ever arise. In the matter of slaying his fellow-creatures he appears to have reached the summit of human achievement; possibly also in all matters of organization and administration. Material things hardly seemed to affect him; bestriding the world like a colossus he has given us a sublime instance of Intellect that for many years ruthlessly overmastered Circumstance. That Intellect was finally itself mastered by disease, leaving behind it a record which is of supreme interest to mankind; a record which, alas, is so disfigured by prejudice and falsehood that it is difficult to distinguish between what is true and what is untrue. Napoleon himself possessed so extraordinary a personality that nearly every one whom he met became a fervent adorer. With regard to him we can find no half-tones, no detached reporters; therefore it is enormously difficult to find even the basis for a biography. Fortunately, that is not now our province. It is merely necessary that we shall attempt to make a consistent story of the reports of illness which perplex us in regard to his life and death; it adds interest to the quest when we are told that sometimes disease lent its aid to Fate in swaying the destinies of battles. And yet, even after Napoleon has lived, there are some historians who deny the influence of a “great man” upon history, and would attribute to “tendencies” and “ideas” events which ordinary people would attribute to individual genius. Some persons think that Napoleon was merely an episode--that he had no real influence upon history; it is the custom to point to his career as an exemplification of the thesis that war has played very little real part in the moulding of the course of the world. Into all this we need not now enter, beyond saying that he was the “child of the French Revolution” who killed his own spiritual father; the reaction from Napoleon was Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Holy Alliance; the reaction from these forces of repression was the late war. So it is difficult to agree that Napoleon was only an “episode.” We have merely to remark that he was the most