enterprise: and, lastly, when by the occupation of Dalmatia, Corfu and all Italy he had made the Adriatic a French lake, with a view to another expedition to the East, and was negotiating with the Shah of Persia for action against India, he was defeated by the whims of the Tsar Alexander, who at times was undoubtedly willing to support a march on India and whose aid would infallibly have secured its success. It was only after the failure of all extra-European combinations that he chose, as his _ultima ratio_ in the battle against England, the incorporation of Germany and Spain, and so, raising against himself _his own_ English- Revolutionary ideas, the very ideas of which he had been the vehicle,[170] he took the step that made him “no longer necessary.” At one time it falls to the Spanish spirit to outline, at another to the British or the French to remould, the world-embracing colonial system. A “United States of Europe,” actualized through Napoleon as founder of a romantic and popular military monarchy, is the analogue of the Realm of the Diadochi; actualized as a 21st-Century economic organism by a matter-of-fact Cæsar, it is the counterpart of the _imperium Romanum_. These are incidentals, but they are in the picture of history. But Napoleon’s victories and defeats (which always hide a victory of England and Civilization over Culture), his Imperial dignity, his fall, the _Grande Nation_, the episodic liberation of Italy (in 1796, as in 1859, essentially no more than a change of political costume for a people long since become insignificant), the destruction of the Gothic ruin of the Roman-German Empire, are mere surface phenomena, behind which is marching the great logic of genuine and invisible History, and it was in the sense of this logic that the West, having fulfilled its French- formed Culture in the _ancien régime_, closed it off with the English Civilization. As symbols of “contemporary” epochal moments, then, the storming of the Bastille, Valmy, Austerlitz, Waterloo and the rise of Prussia correspond to the Classical-history facts of Chæronea, Gaugamela (Arbela), Alexander’s Indian expedition and the Roman victory of Sentinum.[171] And we begin to understand that in wars and political catastrophies—the chief material of our historical writings—victory is not the essence of the fight nor peace the aim of a revolution. ----- Footnote 166: The original is somewhat obscure. It reads: "Welche Form die Wahrscheinlichkeit für sich hat, ist bereits eine Frage des historischen—und also des tragischen—Stils."—_Tr._ Footnote 167: The words of Canning at the beginning of the XIXth century may be recalled. “South America free! and if possible English!” The expansion idea has never been expressed in greater purity than this. Footnote 168: