And this leads us to remember that, if the Louisiana purchase revolutionized our national outlook, our constitutional attitude, and our sectional control, it quite as radically changed our national texture. From that hour to this we have called to the masses of Europe for help to develop the wilderness, and they have come by millions, until now the men and women of Revolutionary stock probably number less than fifteen millions in the entire country. These later Americans have, like the migrations of the Norsemen in central and southern Europe, proved so conservative in their Americanism that they outrun their predecessors in loyalty to its essentials. They made the Union as it now is, in a very high sense, and there is no question that in the throes of civil war it was their blood which flowed at least as freely as ours in its defense. It is they who have kept us from developing on colonial lines and have made us a nation separate and apart. This it is which has prevented the powerful influence of Great Britain from inundating us, while simultaneously two English-speaking peoples have reacted one upon the other in their radical differences to keep aflame the zeal for exploration, beneficent occupation, and general exploitation of the globe in the interests of a high civilization. The localities of the Union have been stimulated into such activities that manufactures and agriculture have run a mighty race; commerce alone lags, and no wonder, for Louisiana gave us a land world of our own, a home market more valuable than both the Indies or the continental mass of the Far East.
Exhaustion -- The Change in Napoleon's Views -- Intermitting Powers -- Their Extinction -- Common Sense and Idealism -- The Man and the World -- The Philosophy of Expediency -- A Mediating Work -- French Institutions -- Transformation of France -- Napoleon and English Policy -- His Work in Germany -- French Influence in Italy and Eastern Europe -- Napoleon and the Western World.
If Napoleon's qualities as usurper, statesman, and warrior be as remarkable as they appear, why was his time so short, what were the causes of his decline, and what is his place in history? The causes of his decline may be summed up in a single word--exhaustion. There exists no record of human activity more complete than is that of Napoleon Bonaparte's life. In its beginnings we can see this worshiper of power stimulating his immature abilities in vain until, with reckless desperation, he closed the period of training and made his scandalous bargain with Barras; then, grown suddenly, inexplicably rich, becoming with better clothing, food, and lodging physically more vigorous, he seems mercilessly to drive the rowels into his own flanks until initiative, ingenuity, and ruthlessness are displayed with apparently superhuman dimensions. The period of achievement is short, but glorious in politics; the age of domination is long and exciting. Throughout both there is the same wanton physical excess and intellectual dissipation. Then comes the turn. Every human age has in it the germs of the next; we begin to die at birth, and the characteristic qualities and powers of one period diminish as those of the next increase. So it was with Napoleon. He compressed so much, both as regards the number and importance of events, into so short a space that his times are like those wrinkled Japanese pictures which are made by shriveling a large print into a small compass--intense and deep, but unreal. To change the metaphor, he found the ship of state dashing onward, with her helm lashed and no one daring to take the task of the steersman in hand. He cut the lashings and laid hold. His unassisted efforts as a pilot gave the vessel a new course; but he had no steam or other mechanical power, no _deus ex machinâ_, to aid him; and, as the storm increased, exhaustion followed; he seemed to be steering when, in reality, his actions were under the compulsion of events he was not controlling; and this continued until the wreck.