it
is my experience of the past which unveils to me the future.... It is
all a scene in an opera, and the English control the machinery." A
week later he notified Alexander that he was aware of the movement of
Russian troops toward Poland, and declared that he himself was
likewise preparing. Lauriston was sent to replace the too pacific
Caulaincourt at St. Petersburg, and Champagny was removed from the
Foreign Office to make way for the fiery Maret. There was much to be
done before the actual outbreak of hostilities. England's history is
the story of her struggles for nationality, for religious, civil, and
political liberty, and for mercantile ascendancy. Her inborn longings
for the highest civilization were not inconsistent with her grim
determination to resist a system that stood on the Continent for
progress, but which she had come to believe meant national ruin for
her. Prussia, with a new vigor born of self-denial, education, and
passionate patriotism; Sweden, restless and uneasy under the yoke of
Napoleonic supremacy; Denmark, friendly, but independent in her
quasi-autonomy; the United States, chafing under the restrictions of
her commerce; Turkey, sick to death, but then as now pivotal in all
European politics--the relation of all these powers to the coming
conflict was still a question, and during a year much might be done in
a diplomatic way to determine it. The whole civilized world was to be
in array, although the life-and-death struggle was to be between two
insatiate despotisms, one Western and modern, the other Oriental and
theocratic. Napoleon grasped the tendency of his own career but dimly.
Goethe said of him, "He lives entirely in the ideal, but can never
consciously grasp it." Unconsciously, too, Alexander the Great had
fought for the extension of Greek culture; Caesar, to destroy the
stifling institutions of a worn-out system; Charles the Great, to
realize the "city of God" on earth; Napoleon, for nationality,
individual liberty, popular sovereignty. What was personal and petty
in the work of these Titans, being ephemeral, disappeared in the death
of each; what was human and large has endured and will endure. The
creative ideas of the revolutionary era with which Napoleon's name is
so closely connected are no longer called in question; his own career
was now verging to its decline, but in his fall the fundamental
conceptions of the epoch were firmly established.

In January, 1812, Wellington, as has