would abound in
human interest. Filled with paternal tenderness, his sole ambition
appeared for a time to be that of retaining what he had gained, the
leadership of a Western empire as splendid as that of Charles the
Great. To make sure of this acquisition and hand it on to his heir,
he seems for a moment to have dreamed of standing forth as the
pacificator of Europe. He actually withdrew the mass of his troops
from Germany for use in Spain, leaving only enough to watch Prussia
and guard Westphalia; with the former power he finally formulated his
pecuniary demands, as if thus to put an end to strife. The "rebellion"
in Spain he intended to crush out by the pacific operations of a
commercial warfare with England, which he felt certain would bring
Great Britain to terms, now that for the first time since the outbreak
of hostilities the blood of her soldiers "was flowing in a stream." He
was probably strengthened in this conviction by the reluctant consent
of the cabinet of St. James to open negotiations for the exchange of
prisoners on the very basis he had suggested long before. Believing,
moreover, that European princes had by this time lost their delicate
sensibility, it seemed no monstrous crime to consolidate his empire
for its commercial siege by the simple expedient of removing the Duke
of Oldenburg from his hereditary domains which bordered on the ocean
and offering him the inland sovereignty of Erfurt, or by adopting the
alternative expedient of leaving him to enjoy the former under French
protection. It seems presumptuous to attempt any revelation of his
feelings, but surely he might hope that then, controlling every inlet
to European commerce from Corfu around by Triest, Italy, Spain, and
the Texel as far as Luebeck, his wall of protection for French
manufactures would do its work, that in a few years France would be
the industrial and commercial center of continental Europe. With Paris
the capital of a new Western empire, the true relation between the
secular and ecclesiastical heads of the world would be reestablished,
as it could not be while the papacy had its seat at Rome, and all
things would work together under a strong hand to humble the island
empire of England, destroy her ascendancy on the mainland, and thus
bring in a moral and material millennium for the civilized world.

But alas for such self-deception, if, indeed, it ever existed. Nature
is too complex and habit too strong for such sudden subli