Still, in spite of the destruction of his fleet at Trafalgar, Napoleon held to his Australian plans.  No fact, perhaps, is more suggestive of the dogged tenacity of his will than his order to Peron and Freycinet to publish through the Imperial Press at Paris an exhaustive account of their Australian voyage, accompanied by maps which claimed half of that continent for the tricolour flag.  It appeared in 1807, the year of Tilsit and of the plans for the partition of Portugal and her colonies between France and Spain.  The hour seemed at last to have struck for the assertion of French supremacy in other continents, now that the Franco-Russian alliance had durably consolidated it in Europe.  And who shall say that, but for the Spanish Rising and the genius of Wellington, a vast colonial empire might not have been won for France, had Napoleon been free to divert his energies away from this “old Europe” of which he professed to be utterly weary?

His whole attitude towards European and colonial politics revealed a statesmanlike appreciation of the forces that were to mould the fortunes of nations in the nineteenth century.  He saw that no rearrangement of the European peoples could be permanent.  They were too stubborn, too solidly nationalized, to bear the yoke of the new Charlemagne.  “I am come too late,” he once exclaimed to Marmont; “men are too enlightened, there is nothing great left to be done.”  These words reveal his sense of the artificiality of his European conquests.  His imperial instincts could find complete satisfaction only among the docile fate-ridden peoples of Asia, where he might unite the functions of an Alexander and a Mahomet:  or, failing that, he would carve out an empire from the vast southern lands, organizing them by his unresting powers and ruling them as oekist and as despot.  This task would possess a permanence such as man’s conquests over Nature may always enjoy, and his triumphs over his fellows seldom or never.  The political reconstruction of Europe was at best one of an infinite number of such changes, always progressing and never completed; while the peopling of new lands and the founding of States belonged to that highest plane of political achievement wherein schemes of social beneficence and the dictates of a boundless ambition could maintain an eager and unending rivalry.  While a strictly European policy could effect little more than a raking over of long-cultivated parterres, the foundation of a new colonial empire would be the turning up of the virgin soil of the limitless prairie.

If we inquire by the light of history why these grand designs failed, the answer must be that they were too vast fitly to consort with an ambitious European policy.  His ablest adviser noted this fundamental defect as rapidly developing after the Peace of Amiens, when “he began to sow the seeds of new wars which, after overwhelming Europe and France, were to lead him to his ruin.”  This criticism of Talleyrand on a man far greater than himself, but