and our own glorious island
only as subordinates or seconds. That duel, first, last, and for ever,
was a duel between the Frenchman and the German; that is, between the
citizen and the barbarian.

It is not necessary nowadays to defend the French Revolution, it is not
necessary to defend even Napoleon, its child and champion, from
criticisms in the style of Southey and Alison, which even at the time
had more of the atmosphere of Bath and Cheltenham than of Turcoing and
Talavera. The French Revolution was attacked because it was democratic
and defended because it was democratic; and Napoleon was not feared as
the last of the iron despots, but as the first of the iron democrats.
What France set out to prove France has proved; not that common men are
all angels, or all diplomatists, or all gentlemen (for these inane
aristocratic illusions were no part of the Jacobin theory), but that
common men can all be citizens and can all be soldiers; that common men
can fight and can rule. There is no need to confuse the question with
any of those escapades of a floundering modernism which have made
nonsense of this civic common-sense. Some Free Traders have seemed to
leave a man no country to fight for; some Free Lovers seem to leave a
man no household to rule. But these things have not established
themselves either in France or anywhere else. What has been established
is not Free Trade or Free Love, but Freedom; and it is nowhere so
patriotic or so domestic as in the country from which it came. The poor
men of France have not loved the land less because they have shared it.
Even the patricians are patriots; and if some honest Royalists or
aristocrats are still saying that democracy cannot organise and cannot
obey, they are none the less organised by it and obeying it, nobly
living or splendidly dead for it, along the line from Switzerland to the
sea.

But for Austria, and even more for Russia, there was this to be said;
that the French Republican ideal was incomplete, and that they
possessed, in a corrupt but still positive and often popular sense, what
was needed to complete it. The Czar was not democratic, but he was
humanitarian. He was a Christian Pacifist; there is something of the
Tolstoyan in every Russian. It is not wholly fanciful to talk of the
White Czar: for Russia even destruction has a deathly softness as of
snow. Her ideas are often innocent and even childish; like the idea of
Peace. The phrase Holy Alliance was a b