Well might he exclaim to Caulaincourt, his ambassador in 1814, when the congress was sitting at Chatillon:  “These people will not treat; the position is reversed; they have forgotten my conduct to them at Tilsit.  Then I could have crushed them; my clemency was simple folly.”

The nations who treated him with such unreasonable severity would do well to reflect over the unfathomable folly of the past, and try to realize, at the present stage of their critical existence, that it may be possible that human life is reaping the agonies of a terrible retribution for a crime an important public in every civilized country believed, and still continues to believe, to have been committed.  It is a natural law of life that no mysterious physical force ever dies, but only changes its form and direction.  Individuals and vast communities may dare to mock at the great mystery that we do not understand.  But it is a perilous experiment to defy its visitations.  What incalculable results may arise through taking the wrong attitude towards the great laws that govern our being!

The autocratic rulers at the beginning of the last century were never right in their views as to how the vastly greater image than their own should be treated.  They measured Napoleon and his loftier qualities by their own tumultuous limitations, which prevented them from seeing how wide the gulf was between him and the ordinary man.  He was a magical personality, and they failed to comprehend it.

Heinrich Heine, the great German writer, who was pro-Napoleon, has told a vivid story of how he visited the East India Docks, while he was in London, and there saw a large sailing vessel with a great number of coloured people on board, Mohammedans for the most part.  He wished to speak to them but did not know their language.  He was particularly anxious to show them some courtesy if even, as he says, in a single word, so he reverently called out the name “Mohammed.”  In an instant the countenance of these strange people beamed with pleasure, and with characteristic Eastern devotion bowed themselves and shouted back to him “Bonaparte.”

I have no thought, in writing of Napoleon, to draw a comparison between him and the ex-Kaiser and his guilty coadjutors in crime, who forced a peaceful world into unspeakable war.  They have been guilty of the foulest of murders, which will outmatch in ferocity every phase of human barbarity.  There can be no pardon or pity for them.  They must pay the penalty of their crimes, as other criminals have to do.  The following letter, addressed by William II to his late colleague in guilt, the Emperor Joseph of Austria, is enough in itself to set the whole world into a blaze of vengeance:—­