All this is true; but it is equally true that much of his work endured both in France and in the civilized world. In France, indeed, the work he did has been in some details only too enduring. History is there to tell us that the test of high civilization is not necessarily in great dimensions. Those histories of the ancient world in which humanity seems strange and distasteful, of Egypt, Phenicia, Babylon, and Assyria, were wide in extent and long in duration: those of Greece and Rome, whose poets, statesmen, legislators, and warriors are our despair, were small in proportion and comparatively short in duration, while they were normal and healthy; the world-empires of both were neither natural nor admirable. It will not do, therefore, to judge Napoleon by the length of his career, nor by the standards of other times and different circumstances. The centralization of administration in the commonwealth which he rescued from the clutches of anarchy was probably essential to the rescue; the expediency which he deliberately cultivated in the Concordat, in the laws of the family and inheritance, and in the fatal Continental System, was possibly a statesman's palliative for momentary political disease. His artificial aristocracy, his system of great fiefs, his financial shifts--who dares to say that these institutions did not meet a temporary want? Moreover, it is worth considering whether a direct reaction to moderate, sane republicanism from extreme and furious Jacobinism was possible at all, and whether a reaction from Napoleon's imperial democracy was not easier and the results more permanent. In other words, is it likely that the third French republic could have been the direct successor of the first? The question is certainly debatable. No pen can so delineate the sufferings of France under Napoleonic institutions as that of Taine has so ably and scathingly done; his wonderful etching powerfully exhibits painful truths. But who is to blame if a nation is hampered by its administration, by a centralization it no longer needs, by social regulations which it has outgrown, by political habits which do not suit the age? Not alone the man who inaugurated them, for ends partly selfish but also partly statesmanlike; the people who timidly endure are responsible for the doom which will certainly overtake any nation living in a social and political structure antiquated and unsuitable.