will must prevail, and that what pleased him must of necessity belong to him.  Most spoilt children harbour the same illusion, for a brief space.  But all the buffetings of fortune failed to drive it from the young Buonaparte; and when despair as to his future might have impaired the vigour of his domineering instincts, his mind and will acquired a fresh rigidity by coming under the spell of that philosophizing doctrinaire, Rousseau.

There was every reason why he should early be attracted by this fantastic thinker.  In that notable work, “Le Contrat Social” (1762), Rousseau called attention to the antique energy shown by the Corsicans in defence of their liberties, and in a startlingly prophetic phrase he exclaimed that the little island would one day astonish Europe.  The source of this predilection of Rousseau for Corsica is patent.  Born and reared at Geneva, he felt a Switzer’s love for a people which was< “neither rich nor poor but self-sufficing “; and in the simple life and fierce love of liberty of the hardy islanders he saw traces of that social contract which he postulated as the basis of society.  According to him, the beginnings of all social and political institutions are to be found in some agreement or contract between men.  Thus arise the clan, the tribe, the nation.  The nation may delegate many of its powers to a ruler; but if he abuse such powers, the contract between him and his people is at an end, and they may return to the primitive state, which is founded on an agreement of equals with equals.  Herein lay the attractiveness of Rousseau for all who were discontented with their surroundings.  He seemed infallibly to demonstrate the absurdity of tyranny and the need of returning to the primitive bliss of the social contract.  It mattered not that the said contract was utterly unhistorical and that his argument teemed with fallacies.  He inspired a whole generation with detestation of the present and with longings for the golden age.  Poets had sung of it, but Rousseau seemed to bring it within the grasp of long-suffering mortals.

The first extant manuscript of Napoleon, written at Valence in April, 1786, shows that he sought in Rousseau’s armoury the logical weapons for demonstrating the “right” of the Corsicans to rebel against the French.  The young hero-worshipper begins by noting that it is the birthday of Paoli.  He plunges into a panegyric on the Corsican patriots, when he is arrested by the thought that many censure them for rebelling at all.  “The divine laws forbid revolt.  But what have divine laws to do with a purely human affair?  Just think of the absurdity—­divine laws universally forbidding the casting off of a usurping yoke! ...  As for human laws, there cannot be any after the prince violates them.”  He then postulates two origins for government as alone possible.  Either the people has established laws and submitted itself to the prince, or the prince has established laws.  In the first