se
legislator. Full of sympathy for his backward compatriots, he knew
their weaknesses, and could avoid the consequences, while he
recognized at the same time their virtues, and made the fullest use of
them. Above all, he had the wide horizon of a philosopher,
understanding fully the proportions and relations to each other of
epochs and peoples, not striving to uplift Corsica merely in her own
interest, but seeking to find in her regeneration a leverage to raise
the world to higher things. So gracious, so influential, so
far-seeing, so all-embracing was his nature, that Voltaire called him
"the lawgiver and the glory of his people," while Frederick the Great
dedicated to him a dagger with the inscription, "Libertas, Patria."
The shadows in his character were that he was imperious and arbitrary;
so overmastering that he trained the Corsicans to seek guidance and
protection, thus preventing them from acquiring either personal
independence or self-reliance. Awaiting at every step an impulse from
their adored leader, growing timid in the moment when decision was
imperative, they did not prove equal to their task. Without his people
Paoli was still a philosopher; without him they became in succeeding
years a byword, and fell supinely into the arms of a less noble
subjection. In this regard the comparison between him and Washington,
so often instituted, utterly breaks down.

"Corsica," wrote in 1790 a youth destined to lend even greater
interest than Paoli to that name--"Corsica has been a prey to the
ambition of her neighbors, the victim of their politics and of her own
wilfulness.... We have seen her take up arms, shake the atrocious
power of Genoa, recover her independence, live happily for an instant;
but then, pursued by an irresistible fatality, fall again into
intolerable disgrace. For twenty-four centuries these are the scenes
which recur again and again; the same changes, the same misfortune,
but also the same courage, the same resolution, the same boldness....
If she trembled for an instant before the feudal hydra, it was only
long enough to recognize and destroy it. If, led by a natural feeling,
she kissed, like a slave, the chains of Rome, she was not long in
breaking them. If, finally, she bowed her head before the Ligurian
aristocracy, if irresistible forces kept her twenty years in the
despotic grasp of Versailles, forty years of mad warfare astonished
Europe, and confounded her enemies."

The same pen wrote