MR. SPENCER AND NAPOLEON 85 



and personality of Napoleon. " Out of the sanguin- 

 ary chaos of the Revolution" he writes, "rose a 

 soldier whose immense ability, joined with his 

 absolute unscrupulousness, made him now general, 

 now consul, now autocrat. The instincts of the 

 savage were scarcely at all qualified in him by 

 what we call moral sentiments. . . . And all this 

 slaughter, all this suffering, all this devastation 

 was gone through Let us pause and ask why 

 it was gone through, according to Mr. Spencer. 

 Does he say it was gone through because of 

 "aggregates of past conditions" and the influence 

 of antecedent generations ? Far from it. He says, 

 " All this was gone through because one man had a 

 restless desire to be despot over all men." 



But perhaps Mr. Spencer may have a defence 

 ready. He may tell us that the influence of 

 Napoleon was merely that of a military leader, 

 which influence he has excepted from his theory 

 of general causes. To this it must be answered 

 in the first place that Napoleon was at all events 

 not a leader in "early" or "primitive" warfare, 

 to which Mr. Spencer's exception is specifically and 

 emphatically limited. Mr. Spencer consequently 

 shows us, by his own practical reasoning, that this 

 theoretical limitation of which he made so much 

 cannot be maintained for a moment, and that what- 

 ever is true of great leaders in a primitive war, he 

 himself recognises all his theories notwithstanding 

 as equally true of them in the most advanced 

 stages of civilisation. But a far more important 



