Washington's republic is in existence; Bonaparte's empire is destroyed. Washington and Bonaparte issued from the bosom of democracy: both were born of liberty; the first was faithful to her, the second betrayed her. Washington was the representative of the needs, the ideas, the judgment, the opinions of his day; he seconded, rather than opposed, the changes in men's minds; he desired what he was bound to desire, the very thing for which he had been called: hence the coherent and perpetual character of his work. This man who strikes the imagination little, because he is in proportion, merged his existence in that of his country: his glory is civilization's inheritance; his fame towers like one of those public sanctuaries from which flows a fertile and inexhaustible spring. Bonaparte had it equally in his power to enrich the commonwealth; he worked upon the most intelligent, the most gallant, the most brilliant nation on earth. How high would be the rank held by him today, if he had added magnanimity to the heroism which was his, if, Washington and Bonaparte in one, he had appointed liberty the universal legatee of his glory! But this giant did not link his destinies with those of his contemporaries; his genius belonged to modern times: his ambition was of a by-gone age; he did not perceive that the miracles of his life surpassed a diadem in value, and that that Gothic ornament would become him badly. Now he flung himself into the future, again he drew back towards the past; and according to whether he reascended or followed the course of time, thanks to his prodigious force, he drew with him or pushed back the waves. Men, in his eyes, were but a means of power; no sympathy was established between their happiness and his; he had promised to deliver them, and he enchained them; he isolated himself from them, and they withdrew from him. The Kings of Egypt placed their funeral pyramids, not among thriving pastures, but in the midst of barren deserts; those great tombs rise like eternity in the solitude: Bonaparte built the monument of his fame in their image, * I was impatient to continue my journey. I had not come to see the Americans, but something quite different from the men I knew, something more in harmony with the habitual order of my ideas; I burned to throw myself into an enterprise for which I had nothing prepared except my imagination and my courage. At the time when I formed the project of discovering the North-West Passage, it was not known whether North America extended towards the Pole and joined Greenland, or whether it terminated in some sea adjoining Hudson's Bay and Behring's Straits. In 1772, Hearne had discovered the sea at the mouth of the Copper Mine River in latitude 71° 15' N. and longitude 119° 15' W. of Greenwich[469].