THE GREATEST MAN IN HISTORY.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XXiX, Issue 7727, 22 February 1909, Page 1

THE GREATEST MAN IN HISTORY.

The truth is that Napoleon was not one man, but many men in one. Lord Cromcr has won fame for his regeneration of Egypt. This was his lifework; yet Napoleon planned and partly executed manw of Cromer's reforms as a mere incident in his Egyptian expedition. When recent military writers, following Clausewitz, compare him now with Alexander and Hannibal, and now with Caesar and Frederick the Great, they forget that Napoleon alone matched the exploits of every one of them. In Egypt he rivalled' Alexander in India, in Italy and Austria he accomplished more that Caesar ever dreamed of doing. Against Russia" and Prussia he made Hannibal's fame grow dim. His single fierce campaign of 1814 was far more brilliant than anything that can be ascribed to Frederick. Add to his'fame as a soldier his almost greater fame'as a civil administrator, as a legislator,; as a jurist, and as a patron of sciencfe and arts, and still one has not reached the full sigiiifance of his career. 'We may set aside entirely the objects which he sought and failed to reach. We can ignore all that is purely personal in his life and actions. We can think of him as we should think in nature of an elemental foree —cataclysmic re-crea-tive. After his time, absolutism in .Europe was possible no more. Many will remember that strange painting of the Belgian artist, Antoine Wiertz, entitled "Napoleon in Hell." The great soldier stands impassive amid misty flames( while about him there press the wives and mothers of the men whom his ambition sent to death with curses on their lips, they thrust into his face the mangled limbs which they have gathered from a score of battlefields. This was the old conception of Napoleon. We now see clearly that all the thousands who fell because of him were really martyrs, dying for a future in which at east all privilege and caste and arbitratrary rule should Ijo no more. In his own time Napoleon seemed to an affrighted world a blood-red meteor streaming through an ebon sky, wherein it was to be extinguished. To-day, his name in history is a fixed and radiant star, whose light shines clearly down the centuries for over. —Harry Thurston Peck, in Munsey's Magazine.