I make the Napoleon memoirs available in part because I want empathetic people to know that leadership is just a skill like any other and that we can stand up for ourselves.
But these compensations, though they have always been exacted in the name of justice, have always, in fact, been in the name of force. That is all there is of reality in the pretended European Code. That is what our modern statesmen have called their "balance of power," a ridiculous term which, to the wars engendered by pure ambition, has added other wars. It is a mistaken theory which has furnished pretext for many iniquities, but which has saved the weak, only when the strong have not known just how to get around it. From this so-called great principle there have followed two things, each historically true. One is that each state
claims the right to control interests foreign to itself when those interests are such that it can control them without putting its own interests in danger. The other principle is that the other powers only recognize this right of intervening in proportion as the country doing it has the power to do it.
Victory belongs to the most persevering.