not really exceptional, but rather the natural outcome of popular energy inspired by a stirring political ideal.  But the British precedent was forgotten, and so profound was the disturbance caused by the new French methods that its effects are with us still.  We are in fact still dominated by the idea that since the Napoleonic era war has been essentially a different thing.  Our teachers incline to insist that there is now only one way of making war, and that is Napoleon’s way.  Ignoring the fact that he failed in the end, they brand as heresy the bare suggestion that there may be other ways, and not content with assuming that his system will fit all land wars, however much their natures and objects may differ, they would force naval warfare into the same uniform under the impression apparently that they are thereby making it presentable and giving it some new force.

Seeing how cramping the Napoleonic idea has become, it will be convenient before going further to determine its special characteristics exactly, but that is no easy matter.  The moment we approach it in a critical spirit, it begins to grow nebulous and very difficult to define.  We can dimly make out four distinct ideas mingled in the current notion.  First, there is the idea of making war not merely with a professional standing army, but with the whole armed nation—­a conception which of course was not really Napoleon’s.  It was inherited by him from the Revolution, but was in fact far older.  It was but a revival of the universal practice which obtained in the barbaric stages of social development, and which every civilisation in turn had abandoned as economically unsound and subversive of specialisation in citizenship.  The results of the abandonment were sometimes good and sometimes bad, but the determining conditions have been studied as yet too imperfectly to justify any broad generalisation.  Secondly, there is the idea of strenuous and persistent effort—­not resting to secure each minor advantage, but pressing the enemy without pause or rest till he is utterly overthrown—­an idea in which Cromwell had anticipated Napoleon by a century and a half.  Scarcely distinguishable from this is a third idea—­that of taking the offensive, in which there was really nothing new at all, since its advantages had always been understood, and Frederick the Great had pressed it to extremity with little less daring than Napoleon himself—­nay even to culpable rashness, as the highest exponents of the Napoleonic idea admit.  Finally, there is the notion of making the armed forces of the enemy and not his territory or any part of it your main objective.  This perhaps is regarded as the strongest characteristic of Napoleon’s methods, and yet even here we are confused by the fact that undoubtedly on some very important occasions—­the Austerlitz campaign, for example—­Napoleon made the hostile capital his objective as though he believed its occupation was the most effective step towards the overthrow of the enemy’s power and will to resist.  He certainly did not make the enemy’s main army his primary objective—­for their main army was not Mack’s but that of the Archduke Charles.