With us the decision rests. If we should decide wrongly—it is not the loss of prestige, it is not the narrowed bounds we have to fear, it is the judgment of the dead, the despair of the living, of the inarticulate myriads who have trusted to us, it is the arraigning eyes of the unborn. Who can confront this unappalled?
[[1]] The battle of Bedr was fought in the second year of the Hegira, A.D. 624, in a valley near the Red Sea, between Mecca and Medina. The victory sealed the faith not only of his followers but of Mohammed himself in his divine mission. Mohammed refers to this triumph in surah after surah of the Koran, as Napoleon lingers over the memory of Arcola, of Lodi, or Toulon.
[[2]] Gentz' work on the Balance of Power, Fragmente aus der neuesten Geschichte des politischen Gleichgevaichtes in Europa, Dresden, 1806, is still, not only from its environment, but from its conviction, the classic on this subject. It gained him the friendship of Metternich, and henceforth he became the constant and often reckless and violent exponent of Austrian principles. But he was sincere. To the charge of being the Aretino of the Holy Alliance, Gentz could retort with Mirabeau that he was paid, not bought. The friendship of Rahel and Varnhagen von Ense acquits him of suspicion. Nor is his undying hostility to the Revolution more surprising than that of Burke, whom he translated, or of Rivarol, whose elusive but studied grace of style he not unsuccessfully imitated. Gentz, who was in his twelfth year at Bunker's Hill, in his twenty-sixth when the Bastille fell, lived just long enough to see the Revolution of 1830 and the flight of Charles X. But the shock of the Revolution of July seemed but a test of the strength of the fabric which he had aided Metternich to rear. So that as life closed Gentz could look around on a completed task. Napoleon slept at St. Helena, his child, le fils de l'homme, was in a seclusion that would shortly end in the grave, Canning was dead and Byron, Heine was in exile, Chateaubriand, a peer; quotusquisque reliquus qui rempublicam vidisset? who was there any longer to remember Marengo and Austerlitz, Wagram, and Schönbrunn? And yet exactly seven months and nineteen days after Gentz breathed his last, the first reformed parliament met at Westminster, January 29th, 1833, announcing the advent to power of a democracy even mightier than that of 1789.
[[3]] It is hardly necessary to indicate that allusions to the "glorious but bloodless" revolution of 1688 are unwarranted and pointless when designed to tarnish, by the contrast they imply, the French Revolution of 1789. It was the bloody struggle of 1642-51 that made 1688 possible. The true comparison—if any comparison be possible between revolutions so widely different in their aims and results, though following each other closely in the outward sequence of incident and character—would be between the Puritan struggle and the first revolutionary period in France, and between 1688 and the flight of James II, and 1830 and the abdication of Charles X. Both Guizot, whose memoirs of the English Revolution had appeared in 1826, and his master Louis Philippe intended that France should draw this comparison—the latter by the title "King of the French" adroitly touching the imagination or the vanity, whilst deceiving the intelligence, of the nation.
[[4]] I have employed the phrase "Islam of Omar" throughout the present work as a means of designating the period of nine-and-twenty years between the death of Mohammed, 12th Rabi I. 11 A.H., June 8th, A.D. 632, and the assassination of Ali, 17th Hamzan, 40 A.H., January 27th, A.D. 661. Even in the lifetime of Mohammed the genius and personality of Omar made themselves distinctly felt. During the caliphate of Abu Bekr the power of Omar was analogous to that of Hildebrand during the two pontificates which immediately precede his own. Omar's is the determining force, the will, and throughout his own, and the caliphates of Osman and Ali which follow, that force and that will impart its distinction and its direction to the course of the political life of Islam. The nature and extent of the sway of this extraordinary mind mark an epoch in world-history not less memorable than the Rome of Sulla or the Athens of Pericles. From the Arab historians a portrait that is fairly convincing can be arranged, and the threat or promise with which he is said to have announced the purpose for which he undertook the caliphate is consonant with the impression of his appearance and manners which tradition has preserved—"He that is weakest among you shall be, in my sight, as the strongest until I have made good his rights unto him; but he that is strongest shall I deal with like the weakest until he submit himself to the Law."