All these tendencies might have been working just the other way if Colonel Macdonnel had not succeeded in closing the _château_ gates! Yet more still was in store. Moral and intellectual consequences of greater moment, perhaps, than the political results, impended. The victory of the Allies was followed by a period of severe repression of popular tendencies in Europe. The Holy Alliance, which became a league of Continental monarchs against liberal ideas, was a direct consequence. It inaugurated reaction everywhere. And reaction bred in its turn new and insidious radicalisms. Lassalle, Marx, St. Simon, and Fourier, Socialists, and Bakunin and Proudhon, first of the Anarchists, were the offspring of the Holy Alliance, nurtured in the dark corners of Repression's jail. The course of events in Europe would have been far otherwise indeed if Napoleon's veterans, forcing their way into Hugomont and splitting the British strength in two, had prepared the way for a long lease of the power of that adroit and calculating master, who knew so well how to meet popular demands and still hold his personal sway. In its practical expression, his system was liberal. Every peasant proprietor in France to-day holds his acres by virtue of Napoleonic legislation. That does not mean that all would have been good in France; far from that. A strange falsity, a theatric insincerity, lay beneath all the Napoleonic sentiments and ideals. These qualities color the thought of France still. Will she ever be able to escape them? These tendencies would have been many times more powerful if Napoleon had entrenched himself upon the throne. More than that, they must have passed to other countries. The shadow of his eagles might lie athwart even our America, his insidious ideas expressing themselves in our politics and our intellectual and moral life, if that moment's vast contingency had gone Napoleon's way at Waterloo. CHAPTER XVII IF ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S FATHER HAD MOVED SOUTHWARD, NOT NORTHWARD The two sections in the Civil War in America were led by two men, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, the one President of the United States and the other President of the Confederate States, who were born within about one hundred miles of each other in the State of Kentucky, and within nine months of each other in point of time. For it was in June, 1808, that Jefferson Davis first saw the light in Christian County, Kentucky, and in February, 1809, that Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County, in the same State.