Contrary to popular belief, “the hour” does not always bring “the man.”
It did not bring him for France in 1870. In our civil war it brought
him for the Confederacy, but a chance bullet took him off. Every defeat
of a cause discredits anew the superstition about “the hour and the
man.” When the hour strikes, the man may be already present and not
hear. The “mute, inglorious Milton,” dying with all his music in him,
is no more real a character than the mute, inglorious Cæsar trudging
along in the ranks, unsuspected by his comrades and unaware of himself.
Even if conscious of his own consummate genius, and impressing a sense
of it upon others, it is by no means certain that he will come to the
control. An intrigue, the selfish jealousy of some little soul in
authority, the caprice of a woman behind the throne, an unfortunate
peculiarity of manner in himself, a stumbling horse, a random
bullet—any one of ten thousand accidents may deprive his country of
the stupendous advantage of his directing hand.
It was once the fashion among the school of thinkers of which that
truly great man, John Stuart Mill, was the head almost altogether to
ignore the “personal equation” in matters of “great pith and moment.”
They recognized the trend of tendencies—great currents of energy which
apparently had an existence and control quite independent of, and apart
from, human agency. In their view, individual men, so far from guiding
the course of events, were borne along by them like leaves by the wind.
They taught, by implication if not directly, that the Europe of their
day would have been pretty much the same without, for example, the
Napoleon of the day before. The conception of a single dominating mind
bending other minds to its will and working stupendous changes, even by
its caprices, these philosophers considered altogether too primitive
and crude for the world’s manhood, and most of us who were young in
their day assisted in discrediting their theory by reverently accepting
it. We have recovered now; nobody to-day thinks after that fashion of
thought, excepting Tolstoi. The importance of the individual will,
consciously striving for the attainment of definitive ends, yet subject
to all the caprices of chance and accident, is restored in the minds of
men to its own reign of reason.
Considering the matter only in the limited view of its relation to
military success, we all see, or suppose ourselves to see, that
if Marlborough had died of measles when he was John Churchill; if
Frederick had burst a blood vessel in one of his blind rages before he
became the Great; if Carnot had fallen down a cellar stairway when he
was a boy; if Napoleon had been knocked over at the bridge of Arcola,
or Von Moltke had deserted to the French and been given command of the
column that was headed for Berlin, the historian of to-day would have
had a Europe to deal with which it is impossible now even to conceive.
Suppose that “the hour” had not brought John Sobieski to confront
the victorious Turk a couple of centuries ago. Europe might now be
Mohammedan and the word Russia destitute of meaning. Considerations of
this character may advantageously be permitted to teach us humility in
the matter of prophecy, and particularly with reference to military
undertakings, than the result of which nothing is more beset with
accident and dependent upon the unknowable and incalculable.