XXVII.
THE INSTABILITY OF HIS RULE.
And not only is Europe united against him, but his own country at last ceases to have any faith in him. Those who are immediately around him are soonest convinced that his day must come to an end, and that with such a despotism as his, abyssmal ruin is the foredoomed and inevitable result. It shows a strange lack somewhere in Napoleon's character and mind that he was always blind to consequences, which the commonest and the dullest man around him could see. I suppose that this is one of the penalties which men of inflexible and resistless wills have to pay for their great powers—the same fearlessness, the same tenacity, the same determination to succeed which make them, are also the very qualities which finally mar them. We have seen in Irish political history a remarkable and tragic example, in our own time, of how the same great qualities, which commanded success against gigantic odds, brought failure when the power to calculate the odds had been submerged by the inflexible will, imperious temper, and deadly and unyielding tenacity of purpose.
All those near Napoleon or at the centre of affairs, like Metternich, saw, as I have just said, that the fabric raised by him had not a single element of durability.
