The history of the nineteenth century centres in the successive transformations of this ideal so highly-pitched. In the gradual declension of the cause which was then a religion, and to mankind the warrant of a new era, into a local or party-cry, a watch-word travestied and degraded, lies the origin of the intellectual despair or solicitude which marks the closing years of the century. The first disillusionment came swiftly. Fifteen years pass, years of war and convulsion unexampled in Europe since the cataclysm of the fifth century, the century of Alaric and Attila--and within that space, those fifteen years, what a revolution in all the sentiments, the hopes, the aspirations of men! The Consul Bonaparte has become the Emperor Napoleon, the arch-enemy of Liberty and of the human race. France, the world's forlorn hope in 1800, is, in 1815, the gathering place of the armies of Europe, risen in arms against her! Emperors and kings, nations, cities, and principalities, statesmen like Stein, philosophers like Fichte, poets like Arndt and Körner, warriors like Kutusov, Blücher, and Schwartzenberg, the peoples of Europe and the governments of Europe, the oppressed and the oppressors, the embittered enmities and the wrongs of a thousand years forgotten, had leagued together in this vast enterprise, whose end was the destruction of one nation and one sole man--the world-deliverer of but fifteen years ago! What tragedy of a lost leader equals this of Napoleon? What marvel that it still troubles the minds of men more profoundly than any other of modern ages. Yet Napoleon did not betray Liberty, nor was France false to the Revolution. Man's action at its highest is, like his art, symbolic. To Camille Desmoulins and the mob behind him the capture of a disused fortress and the liberation of a handful of men made the fall of the Bastille the symbol and the watchword of Liberty. To the Europe of Napoleon, the monarchs of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Spain, the princes of Germany and Italy, the Papal power, "the stone thrust into the side of Italy to keep the wound open"--these were like the Bastille to the France of Desmoulins, a symbol of oppression and wrong, injustice and tyranny. And in Bonaparte, whether as Consul or Emperor, the peoples of Europe for a time beheld the hero who led against the tyrants the hosts of the free. What were his own despotisms, his own rigour, his cruelty, the spy-system of Fouché, the stifled Press, the _guet-apens_ of Bayonne, the oppression of Prussia, and one sanguinary war followed by another--what were these things but the discipline, the necessary sacrifice, the martyrdom of a generation for the triumph and felicity of the centuries to come? Napoleon at the height of Imperial power, with thirty millions of devoted subjects behind him, and legions unequalled since those of Rome, did but make Rousseau's experiment. "The emotions of men," Rousseau argued, "have by seventeen hundred