it
will be an ordinary war.

Louis XIV., Frederick the Great, the Emperor Alexander, and Napoleon,
sustained gigantic struggles against united Europe. When such contests
arise from voluntary aggressions, they are proof of a capital error on
the part of the state which invites them; but if they arise from
imperious and inevitable circumstances they must be met by seeking
alliances, or by opposing such means of resistance as shall establish
something like equality between the strength of the parties.

The great coalition against Louis XIV., nominally arising from his
designs on Spain, had its real origin in previous aggressions which had
alarmed his neighbors. To the combined forces of Europe he could only
oppose the faithful alliance of the Elector of Bavaria, and the more
equivocal one of the Duke of Savoy, who, indeed, was not slow in adding
to the number of his enemies. Frederick, with only the aid of the
subsidies of England, and fifty thousand auxiliaries from six different
states, sustained a war against the three most powerful monarchies of
Europe: the division and folly of his opponents were his best friends.

Both these wars, as well as that sustained by Alexander in 1812, it was
almost impossible to avoid.

France had the whole of Europe on its hands in 1793, in consequence of
the extravagant provocations of the Jacobins, and the Utopian ideas of
the Girondists, who boasted that with the support of the English fleets
they would defy all the kings in the world. The result of these absurd
calculations was a frightful upheaval of Europe, from which France
miraculously escaped.

Napoleon is, to a certain degree, the only modern sovereign who has
voluntarily at the same time undertaken two, and even three, formidable
wars,--with Spain, with England, and with Russia; but in the last case
he expected the aid of Austria and Prussia, to say nothing of that of
Turkey and Sweden, upon which he counted with too much certainty; so
that the enterprise was not so adventurous on his part as has been
generally supposed.

It will be observed that there is a great distinction between a war made
against a single state which is aided by a third acting as an auxiliary,
and two wars conducted at the same time against two powerful nations in
opposite quarters, who employ all their forces and resources. For
instance, the double contest of Napoleon in 1809 against Austria and
Spain aided by England was a very different affair fr