MADMAN’S DREAM OF WORLD DOMINION.

Taihape Daily Times, 10 December 1918, Page 7

MADMAN’S DREAM OF WORLD DOMINION.

I "If anything bo certain it is this j (writes Dr. N. McLeod in the "ScotsI man”), that the world-devastating war i sprang from the lust of world-dominion j There is no thought how. the dream of world-conquest has always ended in misery. The Kaiser is only the last ">f many. Three hundred years before the Christian pra Alexander the Groat swept through the iancient world lilce A tornado, but at the age of 32 he died At Bagdad, and his opalescent dream j )f world-dominion burst like a bubble j Rome built up a world-empire so great j that Cicero could write: —'Wherever you are, remember you are equally within the power of the Emperor/ but the men who weildcd that sceptre came •Almost all to a violent end, and the Empire fell tottering to the earth. Napoleon dominated ihc world with the dynamic force of his person;>.lity, making emperors and kings the ser- j j vants of his will. 'We arc going to ; I make an end of Europe/ he declared ! I -when he set forth on the Russian cam- i | paign. . . ‘ln three years we shall I be masters of the universe.’ But the ! would-be master of the universe left j his armies frozen on the Russian plains J end St. Helena was waiting for him j even as he spoke. | ‘The Kaiser is the last victim of the j intoxicating gas whence that dream 1 springs. The American Ambassador, 1 Mr. Gerard, has recorded how the last I of the Hohenzollerns said: 'Alexander, \ Caesar, Theodoric, Frederick and Naj polen aimed at world-dominion; they I failed, I shall succeed. ’ But the same unseen powers that brought his predecessors to ruin ill doom him also. "It is not by cataclysmic acts that judgment is wrought, but by the regular working of the normal law r s that govern life. The ambition of worldconquest is doomed, because no human personality is equal to the strain of such a burden. Only colossal egotism can dream such a dream, and when success seems within the grasp the egotism develops into mania, "These would-be conquerors of the world all go the same way. Alexander, convinced that no mere man could win such victories, proclaims himself a god, and kills his friends for doubting his divinity. Napoleon -walks at last among men as if he were a god. ‘You say man proposes and God disposes! I propoos and I dispose/ declared the Corsican. The Kaiser has gone the • same road. ‘On me the spirit of God I descended/ he declared: ‘I am His ’ weapon, His sword, His vice-regent. Woe to the disobedient. Death to cowards and unbelievers/ On the altar of this mad vanity judgment and wisdom laro sacrificed. To achieve the end humanity is slain in hecatombs. "In eleven years Napoleon slow four milions of the youth and manhood of Europe that he might gratify his megai omania; in four years the Kaiser has i slain some 20,000,000. But the fruit of that is isolation at last in the midst of a horrified world. Napoleon foiind $ himself in the end without a friend, and the Kaiser has set the world ablaze against him. The end is inevitable. The mesmerised awake, and then eometh judgment. The sword of the Divine judgment suspended over Potsdam has fallen. The executioners of that judgment are the people whom he made the writhing tools and suffering victims to his colossal and mad ambition.’ ’ f