lain helpless and well-nigh dead, rose to manhood as if by magic, and
shed their blood like water in the effort to secure a free and
unfettered existence both for the individual and the nation. It is a
true saying of the German historian, Gervinus, "The history of this age
will no longer be only a relation of the lives of great men and of
princes, but a biography of nations."

At first sight, this illuminating statement seems to leave out of count
the career of the mighty Napoleon. But it does not. The great Emperor
unconsciously called into vigorous life the forces of Democracy and
Nationality both in Germany and in Italy, where there had been naught
but servility and disunion. His career, if viewed from our present
standpoint, falls into two portions: first, that in which he figured as
the champion of Revolutionary France and the liberator of Italy from
foreign and domestic tyrants; and secondly, as imperial autocrat who
conquered and held down a great part of Europe in his attempt to ruin
British commerce. In the former of these enterprises he had the new
forces of the age acting with him and endowing him with seemingly
resistless might; in the latter part of his life he mistook his place in
the economy of Nature, and by his violation of the principles of
individual liberty and racial kinship in Spain and Central Europe,
assured his own downfall.

The greatest battle of the century was the tremendous strife that for
three days surged to and fro around Leipzig in the month of October
1813, when Russians, Prussians, Austrians, Swedes, together with a few
Britons, Hanoverians, and finally his own Saxon allies, combined to
shake the imperial yoke from the neck of the Germanic peoples. This
_Völkerschlacht_ (Battle of the Peoples), as the Germans term it,
decided that the future of Europe was not to be moulded by the imperial