Archives Have Been Thrown Open,
Ransacked, Catalogued And Codified.
Memoirs by the score, letters by the
hundred, have been published.
Documents by the thousand have been
studied. A battalion of eager students have handled this vast mass of
material. The piercing minds of eminent scholars have drilled into it to
elucidate problems incidental to Napoleon's era. But nothing has been
brought to light which indicates that Australia was within the radius of
his designs.
The idea that the publication of the Terre Napoleon maps, with their
unfounded pretensions to discoveries, was a move on Napoleon's part
towards asserting a claim upon territory in Australia, is surely
untenable by any one with any appreciation of the irony of circumstances.
No man in history had a deeper realisation of the dynamics of empire than
Napoleon had. A nation, as he well knew, holds its possessions by the
power behind its grasp. If he had wanted a slice of Australia, and had
been able to take and hold it, of what political use to him would have
been a few maps, even with an eagle's picture on one of them? When his
unconquerable legions brought Italy under his sway, absorbed the Low
Countries, and established his dominion on the Rhine, the Elbe, and the
Danube, he based no claims on maps and documents. He took because he
could. An empire is not like a piece of suburban property, based on
title-deeds drawn by a family solicitor. Its validity is founded on
forces - the forces of ships, armies, manhood, treaties, funds, national
goodwill, sound government, commercial enterprise, all the forces that
make for solidity, resistance, permanence.
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