Page:Montesquieu - The spirit of laws.djvu/260

208 Charles in the deserts of Poland imagined himself master of the universe: here he wandered, and with him in some measure wandered Sweden; whilst his capital enemy acquired new strength against him, locked him up, made settlements along the Baltic, destroyed or subdued Livonia.

Sweden was like a river whose waters are cut off at the fountain head in order to change its course.

It was not the affair of Pultova that ruined Charles. Had he not been destroyed at that place, he would in another. The casualties of fortune are easily repaired; but who can be guarded against events that incessantly arise from the nature of things?

But neither nature nor fortune were ever so much against him, as he himself.

He was not directed by the actual situation of things, but by a kind of model he had formed to himself; and even this he followed very ill. He was not an Alexander; but he would have been Alexander's belt soldier.

Alexander's project succeeded because it was prudently concerted. The bad success of the Persians in their several invasions of Greece, the conquests of Agesilaus and the retreat of the ten thousand had shewn to demonstration the superiority of the Greeks in their manner of fighting and in the arms they made use of; and it was well known that the Persians were too proud to be corrected.

It was no longer possible for them to weaken Greece by divisions: Greece was then united under one head, who could not pitch upon a better method of renderivg her insensible of her servitude, than by flattering her vanity with the destruction of her hereditary enemy, and with the hopes of the conquest of Asia. Rh