Those who speak French and those who speak English fare no better when we turn from the arts of peace to the art of war.  Every race takes pride in the renown of the far-sighted and swift-striking commanders who have led it to victory, and every race is prone to over-estimate the military genius of its own successful soldiers.  Here in the United States we seek to set up Washington and Grant and Lee as the rivals of the most gifted warriors that the old world has to show in all the long centuries of its incessant warfare; and in Great Britain our kin across the sea are led by local loyalty to do the same disservice to Marlborough and Wellington.  But if we were to search the countless treatises on battles and campaigns written in every modern language, we should soon be forced to record that there were five men, and only five, whom the experts of every race united in singling out.  In any list of the ten greatest soldiers, prepared in any country in the world, these five names would surely appear, even tho the other names on the several lists might be those of merely national heroes.  The five international masters of war are Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Frederick, and Napoleon.

Napoleon, altho he rose to be Emperor of the French, was a Corsican by birth and an Italian by descent.  The French have ever battled bravely for military glory; but they have not brought forth one of the supreme soldiers.  The race that speaks English has done its full share of fighting on land and on sea, but it is on the blue water that it can give the best account of itself.  The supreme leaders in war at sea worthy to be set by the side of the five supreme leaders in war on land are two at the very utmost; and probably an international tribunal would hold that Nelson alone was to be classed with Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Frederick, and Napoleon.  But it is the opinion of the foremost living expert on sea-power that Farragut deserves to be placed not far distant from Nelson, and that the gap which separates the American sailor from the British is smaller than that which stretches between Farragut and the third claimant, whoever he may be and of whatever nationality.

Turning from the art of war and from the arts of peace to the sciences whereon all the arts are based, we find that the English and the French are richly represented.  The supreme leaders in science, the men whose discoveries have been fecundating and fundamental, seem to be at least seven—­Euclid, Archimedes, Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, Lavoisier, and Darwin.  This list might well be larger; it could not be less; and no matter how it might be extended it would include these seven.  None of them was merely an inventor of specific devices; all of them were discoverers of essential principles, and thereby contributors to the advancement of civilization and to man’s mastery of knowledge.