years of asceticism and Christianism been so disciplined, that they can now be trusted to their own guidance." The hour of his death, whether by a pistol bullet or by poison, or from sheer weariness, was also the hour of Rousseau's deepest insight into the human heart. That hour of penetrating vision into the eternal mystery made him glad to rush into the silence and the darkness. Napoleon, trusting to the word and to the ideal Liberty, to man's unstable desires and to his own most fixed star, yokes France in 1800 to his chariot wheels. But at the outset he has to compromise with the past of France, with the ineradicable traits of the Celtic race, its passion for the figures on the veil of Maya, its rancours, and the meditated vengeance for old defeats. Yet it is in the name of Liberty rather than of France that he greets the sun of Austerlitz, breaks the ramrod despotism of Prussia, and meets the awful resistance of the Slav at Eyiau and Friedland. Then, turning to the West, it is in the name of Liberty that he sends Junot, Marmont, Soult, and Massena across the Pyrenees to restore honour and law to Spain, and, as he had ended the mediaeval Empire of the Hapsburgs, to end there in Madrid the Inquisition and the priestly domination. The Inquisition, which in 300 years had claimed 300,000 victims, is indeed suppressed, but Spain, to his amazement, is in arms to a man against its liberators! But Napoleon cannot pause, his fate, like Hamlet's, calling out, and whilst his Marshals are still baffled by the lines of Torres Vedras, he musters his hosts, and, conquering the new Austrian Empire at Wagram, marches Attila-like across a subjugated Europe against the Empire and capital of the White Czar. Napoleon's fall made the purpose of his destiny clear even to the most ardent of French Royalists, and to the most contented of the servants of Francis II or Frederick William III. At Vienna the gaily-plumaged diplomatists undid in a month all that the fifteen years of unparalleled action and suffering unparalleled had achieved; whilst the most matter-of-fact of all British Cabinets invested the prison of the fallen conqueror with a tragic poetry which made the rock in the Atlantic but too fitting an emblem of the peak in the Caucasus and the lingering anguish of Prometheus. And if not one man of supreme genius then living or in after ages has condemned Napoleon, if the poets of that time, Goethe and Manzoni, Poushkine, Byron, and Lermontoff, made themselves votaries of his fame, it was because they felt already what two generations have made a commonplace, that his hopes had been their hopes, his disillusion their disillusion; that in political freedom no more than in religious freedom can the peace of the world be found; that Girondinism was no final evangel; that to man's soul freedom can never be an end in itself, but only the means to an end.