Had Danton been well advised, instead of borrowing the money with which to buy an advocate's place in the Council at about seventy thousand livres, which brought him only three cases in four years and obliged him to hang on to the skirts of his father-in-law, he would have gone to Pondicherry or to the palace of some indigenous rajah or king as agent, councilor or companion of his pleasures; he might have become prime-minister to Tippoo Sahib, or other potentate, lived in a palace, kept a harem and had lacs of rupees; undoubtedly, he would have filled his prisons and occasionally emptied them by a massacre, as at Paris in September, but it would have been according to local custom, and operating only on the lives of Sheikhs and Mahrattas.

Bonaparte, after the fall of his protectors, the two Robespierres, finding his career arrested, wanted to enter the Sultan's service; accompanied by Junot, Muiron, Marmont and other comrades, he could have carried to Constantinople rarer commodities, much better compensated in the Orient than in the Occident, namely military honor and administrative talent; he would have dealt in these two products, as he did in Egypt, at the right time and in the right place, at the highest price, without our conscientious scruples and without our European refinements of probity and humanity.

No imagination can picture what he would have become there: certainly some pasha, like Djezzar in Syria, or a khedive like Mahomet-Ali, afterwards at Cairo; he already saw himself in the light of a conqueror, like Ghengis-Khan,[3318] a founder like Alexander or Baber, a prophet like Mahomet; as he himself declares, "one could work only on a grand scale in the Orient," and there he would have worked on a grand scale; Europe, perhaps, would have gained by it, and especially France.
III.

Ambition and Selection.
The Revolution provides an internal outlet and an unlimited career .-- Effect of this .-- Exigencies and pretensions of the modern man .-- Theoretical rule of selection among rivals.
-- Popular suffrage raised to be lord and judge .-- Consequence of its verdict .-- Unworthiness of its choice.
But the Revolution arrived and the ambitions which, under the ancient Regime, found a field abroad or cooled down at home, arose on the natal soil and suddenly expanded beyond all calculation.

After 1789, France resembles a hive in a state of excitement; in a few hours, in the brief interval of an August morning, each insect puts forth two huge wings, soars aloft and "all whirl together pell-mell;" many fall to the ground half cut to pieces and begin to crawl upward as before; others, with more strength or with better luck, ascend and glitter on the highways of the atmosphere .-- Every great highway and every other road is open to everybody through the decrees of the Constituent-Assembly, not only for the future, but even immediately.