to the Crucifixion.[1] Heine, the most French in feeling of Germans, predicted that if France came to war with an united German people, she would be overborne.[2]
It will be observed that the most conspicuous instances of strikingly false prophecies are taken from the utterances of statesmen of the highest rank; while those predictions that have been verified belong as often as not to publicists, or to statesmen, like De Tocqueville, whose philosophy to some extent disqualified them for active politics. The reason, however, is probably not to be sought in any special fitness of abstract politicians for making forecasts of the future; but in the fact that statesmen are constantly tempted to make predictions of immediate interest, whereas the power of divination among men seems rather to concern itself with general laws. Accordingly, the same man has often been markedly right in his speculations about the distant future, and curiously wrong in predicting the possibilities of the next few years. Napoleon's alleged prophecy, that all Europe would end by being Republican or Cossack, seems more probable now than when it was first given to the world;[3] but his expectation that
- ↑ In a drawing, which was engraved, and sold in London at the time; and which represented John Brown on the Cross.
- ↑ "You" (the French) have more to fear from liberated" (i.e. united) " Germany, than from the whole Holy Alliance, together with all the Croats and Cossacks.—Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, S. 269.
- ↑ The part of the prophecy that relates to Russia seems the best proved. "You are in the flower of your age, and may expect to live thirty-five years longer. I think you will see, that the Russians will either invade and take India; or enter Europe with 400,000 Cossacks, and 200,000 real Russians."—O'Meara's Napoleon at St. Helena, vol. i. p. 104. "The Continent is now in the most perilous situation, being continually exposed to the risk of being overrun by Cossacks and Tartars."—Life, Exile, and Conversations of the Emperor Napoleon, by Count de Las-Cases, part vi. p. 2.
