nothing new about them save their application. Young opinions, as they
are supposed to have been, are best championed by young men; and hence
it is assumed that the French leaders in the field were youthful heroes,
as were the civil leaders in many instances,--and a very nice mess the
latter made of the business they engaged in, doing little that was well
in it beyond getting their own heads cut off. There are some facts that
greatly help to sustain the position that France was saved from
partition by the exertions of young generals, the new men of the new
time. Hoche, Moreau, Bonaparte, Desaix, Soult, Lannes, Ney, and others,
who early rose to fame in the Revolutionary wars, were all young men,
and their exploits were so great as to throw the deeds of others into
the shade; but the salvation of France was effected before any one of
their number became conspicuous as a leader. Napoleon once said that it
was not the new levies that saved France, but the old soldiers of the
Bourbons; and he was right; and he might have added, that they were led
by old or elderly generals. Dumouriez was in his fifty-fourth year when,
in 1792, he won the Battles of Valmy and Jemmapes; and at Valmy he was
aided by the elder Kellermann, who was fifty-seven. Those two battles
decided the fate of Europe, and laid the foundation of that French
supremacy which endured for twenty years, until Napoleon himself
overthrew it by his mad Moscow expedition. Custine, who also was
successful in 1792, on the side of Germany, was fifty-two. Jourdan and
Pichegru, though not old men, were old soldiers, when, in 1794 and 1795,
they did so much to establish the power of the French Republic, the
former winning the Battle of Fleurus. It was in the three years that
followed the beginning of the war in 1792, that the French performed
those deeds which subsequently enabled Napoleon and his Marshals to
chain victory to their chariots, and to become so drunk from success
that they fell through their own folly rather than because of the
exertions of their enemies. Had the old French generals been beaten at