mations of
purpose. Had the true, complex Napoleon in his supposed communing
asked the question, What then? sincerity would have compelled him to
reply, More beyond. Men remembered to have heard him use the
expression, "Emperor of the Continent," in these very days, jocularly,
perhaps, but still with significance. Orders were issued in March,
1811, to fit out vessels for two expeditions, one against Sicily and
Egypt, one against Ireland; if these were successful he could then
work his will at the Cape of Good Hope and ultimately in the East and
West Indies. "They want to know where we are going, where I shall
plant the new Pillars of Hercules," he said. "We will make an end of
Europe, and then, as robbers fling themselves on others less bold, we
will fling ourselves on India, which the latter class have mastered."
About the same time the Bavarian minister, pleading for peace,
received the retort: "Three years more, and I am lord of the
universe." When Mollien advised against war, on account of the fiscal
disorders, the reply was: "On the contrary, the finances are falling
into disorder, and for that very reason need war." Behind Napoleon the
father was the ambitious and haughty statesman combined with the
self-reliant general, the embodiment of French ambitions as they had
consolidated in the old regime, and had been transmitted through the
Revolution, the Directory, and the Consulate to the Empire.

But there were two other gladiators in the arena: England, hard
pressed but still undaunted in her mastery of the seas which flowed
around her majestic colonial empire; Russia, grimly determined to hold
an even balance with France in Europe while reestablishing by the
overthrow of Turkey the eastern counterpoise to Napoleon's western
dominion. The Czar of Muscovy would fain have passed for a
philosopher. Fourteen years earlier, when in his eighteenth year, he
had fallen under the charm of Prince Adam Czartoryski, a youth of
about his own age, whom the Empress Catherine had taken as a hostage
after the final dismemberment of Poland in 1795. Trained by his
grandmother to play her own role of enlightened despot, the young
ruler, still in those early years when generous impulses rule,
conversed with his friend, the representative of a downtrodden land,
about the possibility of a restored and regenerated Poland, avowing
his secret detestation of all that he was compelled in public to
profess. We may picture the joy of the noble