have been won
for France, had Napoleon been free to divert his energies away from
this "old Europe" of which he professed to be utterly weary?

His whole attitude towards European and colonial politics revealed a
statesmanlike appreciation of the forces that were to mould the
fortunes of nations in the nineteenth century. He saw that no
rearrangement of the European peoples could be permanent. They were
too stubborn, too solidly nationalized, to bear the yoke of the new
Charlemagne. "I am come too late," he once exclaimed to Marmont; "men
are too enlightened, there is nothing great left to be done." These
words reveal his sense of the artificiality of his European conquests.
His imperial instincts could find complete satisfaction only among the
docile fate-ridden peoples of Asia, where he might unite the functions
of an Alexander and a Mahomet: or, failing that, he would carve out an
empire from the vast southern lands, organizing them by his unresting
powers and ruling them as oekist and as despot. This task would possess
a permanence such as man's conquests over Nature may always enjoy, and
his triumphs over his fellows seldom or never. The political
reconstruction of Europe was at best one of an infinite number of such
changes, always progressing and never completed; while the peopling of
new lands and the founding of States belonged to that highest plane of
political achievement wherein schemes of social beneficence and the
dictates of a boundless ambition could maintain an eager and unending
rivalry. While a strictly European policy could effect little more
than a raking over of long-cultivated parterres, the foundation of a
new colonial empire would be the turning up of the virgin soil of the
limitless prairie.

If we inquire by the light of history why these grand designs failed,
the answer must be that they were too vast fitly to consort with an
ambitious European policy. His ablest adviser noted this fundamental
defect as rapidly developing after the Peace of Amiens, when "he began
to sow the seeds of new wars which, after overwhelming Europe and
France, were to lead him to his ruin." This criticism of Talleyrand on
a man far greater than himself, but who lacked that saving grace of
moderation in which the diplomatist excelled, is consonant with all
the teachings of history. The fortunes of the colonial empires of
Athens and Carthage in the ancient world, of the Italian maritime
republics, of Portugal and Sp