W. Lloyd Bevan

“ The constant quest for gold that stimulated the voyages of the great explorer had, therefore, its basis in this extraordinary and fanatical revival of the spirit which had once inspired the Crusades. It was almost a mania with Columbus, whose letters contain eulogies on gold: “Who hath this, hath all that can be desired in the world; gold can even bring souls into Paradise.” Though the metal could not be found in great quantities, he discovered nevertheless a way by which the New World might be made to yield the gold which was wanted. ”

“ After deprecating the use of rhetoric as likely to prejudice the judgment, and remarking that eloquent pictures of the horrors of war and rebellion were alien to the matter in hand, Cæsar’s words were: “And indeed, for the crimes we have to deal with, no penalty is in itself too cruel; death at least cannot be so, for it puts an end to the misery of this life and brings no torment in another. But the penalty will be looked on as cruel, simply because it is unconstitutional. It has been over and over again forbidden by express legislation to scourge or kill a citizen without trial. ”

“ It seemed, therefore, a comparatively easy matter to master England by cutting her off from the sources of her wealth. No power or state was allowed to be neutral, for those who declared themselves so were proscribed along with England (decree of Milan, 1807) . A hard fate awaited any refractory nation, for nationalism now lived only on sufferance. To suspend the economic life of millions of people, to transform habits of industry peculiar to sea-going populations was to Napoleon’s mind no greater task than to annihilate armies and partition kingdoms. ”

“ It was this that upset the whole plan of Pompeius’ massive cavalry charge. The intelligent manœuvering of the Gallic and German horse, first giving way, then returning to charge superior numbers, is an illuminating illustration of the discipline prevailing in all arms of Cæsar’s force. The close of the battle was followed by the occupation of the Pompeian camp. The commander himself fled in deep dejection from Greece, and met his death by an assassin’s hands, when landing from a boat on the coast of Egypt. As a military leader he had proved himself in this war unimaginative and sluggish. ”

“ This picturesque barbarity appealed to the imagination of the Turkish ruler, who, as an artist in cruelty, conceded that Vlad belonged to a class above him. When the Turkish sovereign made a punitive expedition to Bucharest, he found the approach to the town, half a mile long, lined with stakes, on which were rotting the bodies of 2000 dead Turks. “How,” Mohammed said, “can we despoil of his estates a man who is not afraid to defend it by such means as these?” Vlad hung on the invading army, always inflicting losses, without showing himself long enough to be attacked in a formal battle. ”

“ Napoleon seemed once again to remember that he was the creation of the Revolution. As an evidence of his sincerity [444] to the tradition of the Republic, he selected as his chief adviser, Benjamin Constant, the old Jacobin leader, whose independence a few years before Napoleon had so much resented when Constant had led the opposition in the Tribunate. All these things were now forgotten. “Public discussions, free elections, responsible ministers, liberty of the press; I want all this. I am a man of the people! If the people want liberty, I am bound to give it.” ”

“ He agreed to support the coalition, unless the French consented to give up Holland, Switzerland, Spain, the Confederation of the Rhine, Poland, and the larger part of Italy. Napoleon was indignant when Metternich laid down these terms during a personal interview at Dresden. “You want war,” he said; “well, you will get it. I will meet you at Vienna. How many allies have you got, four, five, six, twenty? The more you have the less disturbed I am. What do you want me to do? Disgrace myself? Never. I can die, but I shall never give up an inch of territory. ”

“ Nothing was regarded as fixed except that the community must be self-sufficing, it mattered little in what way. It seemed as if the troubled relations of Greek political life might go on indefinitely after the Persian invasion had been repelled.
No Greek statesman for a hundred and fifty years, say roughly from 500 B.C. to 350 B.C., the most brilliant period of Greek history, regarded the kingdom of Macedon as anything but a negligible quantity. Macedon itself was a land that lay on the boundaries of the Hellenic world. Its people were held to be half Hellenic and half barbarian. ”

“ Apart from the technical gifts of military art, the personal charm of Cæsar’s character was a great factor in securing for him an army made up of devoted troops and officers. They trusted him, and they were held to him as a leader, because he seems from the first to have been able to establish close relations of a spontaneous and genuine type with those who were under him. His army was not a mere fighting machine, but an organism reflecting the individual driving power and coolness of the man who led it. ”

“ The almost mathematical result bears witness to the presence of that same type of cool reflection which in the political side of his career makes the founder of the Roman Empire something of an enigma. It is hard to believe that a man can be just as unfeeling and unethical in statesmanship as when he is directing the movements of masses of troops. Cæsar’s genius stands for an abnormal development of intellectual power disciplined to serve the ambitious purposes of a man bent on enjoying personal rule, who, to a unique degree, had measured the capacity of other men and himself. ”

“ Hostilities broke out in April, 1809. There was no longer a question of purely dynastic interests in this armed protest of Austria against the Napoleonic system; the army of 310,000 men represented a general patriotic movement of self-defense that had penetrated all classes of society in the Hapsburg dominions. It stood ready to resist the power that was crushing out racial and territorial distinctions; it spoke for a nation in arms conscious of its national right to exist. At home the French Emperor had to deal now with a population that was weary of warfare and satiated with military glory. ”

“ During his stay he founded the only good harbor on the coast, the city which still bears his name. This undertaking was not the boastful action of a conqueror, solicitous of the praise of posterity; it was a keen-sighted scheme to divert from the Phœnician towns of Syria the control of the Mediterranean trade. Within half a century Alexandria had become a great commercial emporium, the center of Greek science and learning, and for three hundred years it continued to be the richest and largest city in the world. ”

“ The army, which never failed to respond to the ever-developing visions and schemes of its commander, until he had carried it to the eastern limits of the known world in his career of conquest, was at the very beginning of Alexander’s career trained for any military project he might propose. It was composed of seasoned officers and men, who had proved their mettle and gained their laurels under Philip while he was bringing his army to the highest pitch of excellence. ”

“ In the early years of Charles’ own reign, it was the wish of the Franks that they should be guided by one ruler, not by two, and in all but one of the conquests of Charles, the principle that some portion at least of the annexed nation should ask him to be their overlord was accepted. Even in the case of the Saxons, where the resistance to the Franks was universal and unanimous, the purpose of Charles was not a personal conquest of a people to be governed afterwards as dependents under an absolute ruler. ”

“ Successful as was Napoleon’s strategy, which contained his favorite expedient of breaking the enemy’s center by an overwhelmingly strong concentrated attack on the weakest point, it was plain to him that there was no longer in his army the cohesive action that had made the earlier victories so complete. The battle cost from 20,000 to 25,000 men on each side. “These are no longer the soldiers of Austerlitz,” he explained; and he showed his lack of confidence by giving up bayonet charges and trusting to artillery fire to break up his opponents’ lines. ”

“ It is usual to expose the failure of the government of Madrid to manage its vast empire under any other ideals than those of absolutism, but when one considers the size and novelty of the experiment that Spain was making in these Western lands, and when one estimates broadly the stage of civilization so soon reached in a large number of new communities, it must be allowed that to the government of the peninsula is to be ascribed the credit of accomplishing a task practically unparalleled in modern history. ”

“ In parting from one of the distinguished captives, John the Fearless, son of the Duke of Burgundy, Bajesid said, “I do not wish to require from you the oath not to bear arms against me again; if, when you return home, you still find yourself in the humor for fighting me, you will find me always ready to meet you on the field of battle, for I am born for war and conquest.” As presents for Charles VI of France, in exchange for those that had been sent him, he despatched by the French envoys various warlike accouterments, among others a drum and bowstrings, made of human flesh. ”

“ When his life was ended, Alexander was still a young man with a fresh and vigorous intelligence, open to new impressions. It is hazardous to infer (as Grote does) that he would have spent his life in acts of military aggression or that he would have sunk to the position of an Oriental despot, little differing from the Persian kings to whose title he succeeded. It is safer to put aside these pessimistic historic prognostics of what might have been, and to recognize that Alexander, provided he kept his mental powers undulled by drink, would have remained a Greek and not become a Hun or a Vandal. ”

“ Indeed, one of the most important contributions of the Romans to the art of warfare was superior technique in fortifications, and in protection of camps, aided by which the defensive of a numerically smaller force could be made to balance the offensive of superior numbers. The sole method of overcoming such resistance was by starving out the army placed in a fortified camp. In his campaigns Cæsar showed remarkable versatility in using the argument of hunger as well as the argument of the sword, and he was quick to turn from one to the other as occasion required. ”

“ The act had never been forgotten, and now Alexander caused all the inhabitants of the place to be massacred, and every vestige of it to be destroyed. An action like this was alien to the spirit of free Greece, and it marks the king’s progress in Oriental despotism. It is all the more a witness to his personal degradation that the Milesian men in his own army, to whom Alexander wished to leave the decision, could not themselves agree on the fate of the Branchidæ, and hence the initiative in the massacre was due to the savage sentiments of their leader. ”

“ While the Moslem ruler and his successors spared the population, and left to their Greek subjects a kind of spiritual empire, the conquest of Constantinople proved fatal to the many treasures of ancient art that had survived the Latin conquest of the city in 1204. The bronze statues of the Emperors were made into cannon, the bronze inscriptions on arches and obelisks were coined into money, and the marble statues of pagan divinities were turned into lime. ”

“ Those who took part in the overthrow of the Aztec and Inca governments magnified their own achievements by describing themselves as the conquerors of great civilized empires. Such fictions were natural in men who desired to exalt the difficulties of a suddenly achieved fame, and the exaggeration was the more easily believed because of their seizure of large stores of those precious metals by which, in the Old World, progress in civilization was measured. ”

“ Talleyrand was plotting to have him imprisoned, while the English urged deportation to an inaccessible island. Napoleon, who was an admirable actor, accommodated himself to his Lilliputian kingdom and to his mimic court, and adopted the pose of a modern Timoleon. “I wish to live henceforth,” he said, “like a justice of the peace. The Emperor is dead, I am no longer anything. I think of nothing outside of my small island. I exist no longer for the world. ”

“ Napoleon’s reply was that he would only pledge himself not to give any assistance to any revolt tending to restore the kingdom of Poland. The Czar’s anxiety was misplaced, for the provinces of his empire that he feared might be taken, were in no sense Polish socially, though they had formed a part of the ancient kingdom of Poland. There was no likelihood of a popular movement in favor of the Poles, nor would the population have endured a pro-Polish rearrangement of their territory against the Russians, with whom they, as members of the Orthodox Church, were closely in sympathy. ”

“ Predatory warfare was the training which gave the Ottoman Turks their irresistible power as conquerors; they were organized as an army disciplined and ever ready to strike. No better field for such training could have been found than the territory of Anatolia when the empire of the Seldjouks disappeared, and a condition of affairs arose, of which Northern Spain, at a somewhat earlier period, is a parallel instance of prevailing anarchy and local turmoil. ”

“ Charles, too, showed no willingness to deal radically with the customary laws of succession of the Frankish people, and in this sphere he was far more conservative than the Lombards or the Ostrogoths. The principle of division among the heirs rather than unity of territory, meant in itself a great danger. It would have caused trouble to Charles himself had not his brother been removed by death early in the reign. Yet the Emperor set a strong precedent for its recognition in his own disposition of the Empire among his three sons. ”

“ Though we speak of an empire founded by Charles the Great, the use of the word should not be allowed to lead us astray into comparisons or analogies based on merely verbal resemblances. Charles was not an emperor of the type known to the Roman Empire of the classic Christian period, nor as a ruler can he be compared with Russian Czars or Napoleon the First. Neither as king nor as emperor was Charles an absolute monarch. ”