"If the plans of Napoleon had succeeded, if he had been able to humble Russia, to drive the English from Spain, to keep down the whole continent by military force, if his life had been prolonged to the full age of man, and if his power had lasted as long as his life, it is scarcely possible to estimate the amount of evil which he would have produced. He would have renewed, perhaps for centuries, the expiring lease of tyranny... The insolence of office would have succeeded to the insolence of birth. The old aristocracy would have fallen, only that a new aristocracy, of the basest and most pernicious kind, might rise in its stead; an aristocracy of placemen, oppressing the people, and oppressed by each other. A new generation would have grown up skilfully trained and broken in to slavery, – a generation which would have derived all its political notions from books mutilated by censors, and conversations watched by spies. The government would have been like that of the Byzantine empire, or that of China, – a vast official hierarchy, rising by numerous gradations, with an oppressed people beneath and a solitary tyrant at the summit; and the human intellect would have languished as it languished under the emperors of the east, and as it has for ages languished in China."