soldier was, or might be, the fittest man to rule. A man of the lowest birth might, at such a period, become the greatest of monarchs by universal consent; and his greatness might naturally be estimated by the extent of his conquests. This could not last very long. Strifes and struggles, plots, intrigues, murders, and revolutions must follow upon any established custom of making men kings by their military merits. Also, a new order of qualifications becomes necessary when conquest has reached a certain limit, and it is time for the industrial period of social progress to begin. The process is the same on land and sea. Monarch-Adventurers became vulgar and a nuisance in the decline of the Roman empire, and in the wild Scandinavian regions when the Sea-Kings had ravished more coasts than they could hold.
The seer might still look for Monarch-Adventurers for many generations, because industry could not grow up to be a firm basis of popular liberty till the great soldiers had killed off the larger proportion of their own order. While the conflicts of the feudal ages were bringing out all kinds of military adventurers, as if for a final exhibition of “war for an idea,” a middle-class was growing up, and sowing the earth with industry. At the mouth of great rivers those workers sat down and made cities: in inland plains they sat down and grew harvests. In the heart of forests they made clearings for the fertilising sun and air to enter, and exchanged their timber for flocks and herds, which again founded new arts of life. In the creeks of the shore they built vessels in which they ventured forth on trading errands. Watching such a process as this, the seer would understand that wars must henceforth be for commercial objects, and the character of adventurers must therefore be somewhat changed.
Then ensued the period briefly referred to in my notice of Rajah Brooke—the age of buccaneering for the discovery of gold, or the great prizes of barter; or for the capture of rich merchant or treasure ships; or to avenge any injuries done to commerce. A man here and there might make himself supreme by the strong arm in remote regions or exceptional cases; but it was not a favourable age for adventurers to fit themselves with crowns.
The time had come now for hereditary sovereignty in old-established states. Each nation being provided with its own royal stock, and with some long-founded polity, and with its own industrial occupations; so that all states were busy at home, and connected more or less by their respective industries, there might seem to be nothing for the adventurer to do—no access to the throne for him. Such pretenders as could make themselves attended to at all must be, or pretend to be, of royal birth, and simply dispute the succession to the throne. The seer might well suppose that it would be useless trouble to look for more Monarch-Adventurers at so late a period, except in countries which had not passed through the earlier stages of social progress.
The wiser the seer was, the more confidently might he say that the reasons and inducements for this kind of adventure were over. What could a man gain, in the commercial age of society, with its great popular liberties, by being a parvenu sovereign? There might be some dignity, and many salutary and happy affections sustained by a monarchy founded in remote antiquity, and administered by an ancient line of kings: but an upstart king is a vulgar object in all eyes in an age when use and antiquity are the main warrants of sovereignty. To be a supreme statesman or warrior is a higher honour in our time than to be a new made king, or, indeed, a king of any sort. And what could it be for? A man would scarcely snatch a crown from a river of blood and tears to promote industry, order, and peace: and if he does it with a view to conquest and military glory, he can be neither philosopher nor statesman, but a stupid egotist, who does not see that ruin must ensue upon any attempt to force the exhausted aims of a former period upon a later one, which has quite enough upon its hands with its own proper business. The seer would therefore conclude that there could be no Monarch-Adventurers in Europe in the nineteenth century; or that they must prove failures, after doing more or less of mischief to everybody about them.
What would he have said to the Bonapartes, if he had foreseen them putting off from their Corsican bay, and soon dispersing themselves over half the thrones of Europe?
Their leader and his course are easily accounted for. His career was so far opened for him that his ability was the only other condition requisite to make him what he was.
It was essential that society in France should take some shape, according to some principle or method, if it was to be saved from utter dissolution. At the crisis, war was forced upon the nation by neighbouring sovereigns: Bonaparte made himself indispensable by his military ability; his personal tendencies then had free scope, and he led back the nation in the direction of barbarism as fast and as far as his genius, in conflict with his age, could permit. The result would have been clear from the beginning, if men had understood history even as well as they do now,—which is not saying much.
It would have been clear to any philosophical statesman, from the day when Bonaparte became Emperor, that France must suffer for a while, to admit of a new start in concurrence with the great natural laws of human progress, instead of in opposition to them. From the time of Napoleon I. becoming Emperor, it was inevitable that France should be drained of her choicest manhood, as well as of her wealth; that her industry should be paralysed during his reign; her political morals corrupted; her national aim degraded; her companionship repelled by her neighbours, and her aggressions finally punished. All this happened, as it necessarily must; and no one had the heart to ask the humbled nation whether a few fits of intoxication from vanity, and big words of adulation exchanged between the nation and its temporary arbiter were an adequate reward for the cost.
Throughout the hills and vales, and towns and villages of France, the generation of young men was almost extirpated. Towards the last, women were in all the posts of industry, and boys made