Quarrelling, snatching things from each other,
blustering or amusing themselves with transitory pomps and displays
of power. Here is a huge empire whose immense, half-savage population
has seethed for centuries in its hidden, boiling cauldron of
rebellion. Oh! it has seethed! And only cruelties have repressed
it. Now and then it has boiled over in assassination in high places,
and one has wondered how long its autocratic splendour could hold
its own. Here are small, fierce, helpless nations overrun and
outraged into a chronic state of secret ever-ready hatred. Here
are innocent, small countries, defenceless through their position
and size. Here is France rich, careless, super-modern and cynic.
Here is England comfortable to stolidity, prosperous and secure to
dullness in her own half belief in a world civilization, which
no longer argues in terms of blood and steel. And here--in a
well-entrenched position in the midst of it all--within but a few
hundreds of miles of weakness, complicity, disastrous unreadiness
and panic-stricken uncertainty of purpose, sits this Man of One
Dream--who believes God Himself his vassal. Here he sits."
"Yes his One Dream. He has had no other." The Duchess was poring
over the map also. They were as people pondering over a strange
and terrible game.
"It is his monomania. It possessed him when he was a boy. What
Napoleon hoped to accomplish he has BELIEVED he could attain by
concentrating all the power of people upon preparation for it--and
by not flinching from pouring forth their blood as if it were the
refuse water of his gutters.
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