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Rh and he believes (so he says) in all the Liberal machinery of the hour—the Charter, the Free Press, and so on. He even tries to persuade us that he is interested in it. But in reality it utterly wearies and disgusts him, and all he cares for in his heart is aristocratic individualism, which is the aristocracy of intellect, and the most ruthless of them all. La carrière ouverie aux talens, Napoleon calls it, when he wants to make it specious and palatable; but when he gives forth the brutal truth of his brutal mind concerning the mass of humanity (which has no talents), he calls it simply chair à canon. Food for the engine that permits genius to despotise over the humiliated millions—that is the fate the aristocratic individualist, the individualist of intellect, believes to be the best possible in this worst of possible worlds. Perhaps he is correct. There is a lot to be said in favour of the theory. But whether for right or wrong, for failure or success, we are trying for something different, and we have no more dangerous foe than him who appeals to the apparently reasonable impatience and despair of men. Well, Beyle's chasse an bonheur is the same theory, or, rather, it comes to the same theory when Beyle puts it into practice. The chance of such stupendous success as Napoleon's, or of any stupendous success, is possible to only a very few of us. What remains