The following remarks responded to a comment that the allies of Ukraine were not doing enough  to reach peace with Russia.

1.  It is not a matter of punishing Putin, but of  protecting a nation from annihilation by Russia.
2. Ukraine needs assistance for that purpose, and we and other free nations have a moral obligation to give it.
3. Those supporting Ukraine – including Australia and me – will have an interest in any settlement offer.  We will be like a lawyer acting on legal aid.  If the client unreasonably refuses to settle, we withdraw the aid.  
4. We are no way near that now, and I have not seen articulated what might be described as a reasonable offer of settlement from Russia.  (If Australia got invaded, and the US said we should settle by giving up a slice of Queensland, we would see that as a breach of trust of Trumpian proportions.)
5. It is above my pay level to say if our strategic interests are suited by having Russia engaged in such a war, but I have seen it said by respectable people – like Timothy  Snyder.
6. The settlement issue looks moot until one reasonable opening appears.
7. If it does, then I think the position of the allies should be guided by two principles.  We should give the benefit of the doubt to the  people attacked.  And we should do all we can to deter other belligerent regimes.  (Russia, China and Iran are similar.   They mistreat their own people so that they can mistreat other peoples.  Serial pests.)
8. I pay little attention to the posturing of the aggressor.  It comes from someone who is not used to being checked.  He is cruel and evil and a coward, but not insane.  People who say they are not bluffing usually are. 
9. And it sounds childish to say to Ukraine you can only use our weapons at home against an invader. There is an old saying we probably got from England – if you don’ like the heat, don’t go near the bloody kitchen.
10. As it happens, there are many precedents  of the quagmire Russia finds itself in.  I wrote the note below ten years ago in a book about revolutions.  I agree with Pitt the Elder.

Guerilla Wars

On 4 July 1976 the colonists formally declared their independence with a document prepared by a number of lawyers and others, setting out in detail, although not with any objectivity, the grounds upon which the colonists were entitled to say that they were discharged from any further obligations to the English crown.

Although the Americans like to see themselves as having been the underdogs, they won the War of Independence, as they call it, and it is not hard to isolate some of the reasons why their position was eventually so much stronger than that of the English.  You can apply the following criteria to the American War of Independence – or to the Vietnam War, the Russian war in Afghanistan, the second Iraq war, or the present military operations in Afghanistan.  The phrases ‘home team’ and ‘away team’ are used for convenience and not to detract from the significance of the wars, or the valour shown and losses taken by those who actually fought them and are fighting the present one.

1. The away team is the biggest in the world, or as the case may be, the only empire in the world, or the second biggest.
2. The away team is a regular professional army while the home team consists of amateur irregulars.
3. The professional soldiers in the away team have no advantage over the amateurs in the other team because they have not been trained for this kind of war and people who fight for the cause are more reliable than those who do it for money.
4. People defending their own soil are far more motivated than those who cross the world to try to bring them into line.
5. The away team has massive resources and advantages in population and war matériel (such as the navy) and technology, but the home team has local knowledge. 
6. The home team can move more quickly, avoid pitched battles, and use guerilla tactics, which are sometimes referred to as terrorism, and which, as we saw, the British objected to as not being fair play.
7. The away team has problems with morale and supplies that just get worse as time goes on.
8. The away team finds that winning requires more than just winning battles – they may beat the army of the other side, but they will not beat the country, which has widespread support among its people (even if the people are otherwise split).
9. The away team has a hopeless dilemma – it has to hit hard to win, but every time it hits hard it loses more hearts and minds.
10. The home team finds it is easy to generate heroes and leaders; the away team finds it is easy to sack losers.
11. The home team out-breeds the others – the result is just a matter of time.
12. The war becomes one of exhaustion and attrition, which in turn exaggerates the above advantage of the home team.
13. Because of its felt superiority, its actual ignorance, and its sustained frustration, the away team resorts to atrocious behaviour that it would never be guilty of in a normal war, or against an enemy of its own kind.

In short, the American colonists felt that they were fighting on the moral high ground, a position that they have never surrendered. Appalling crimes were committed on both sides, especially in the civil war in the south between the Patriots and Loyalists. There were, Churchill said, ‘atrocities such as we have known in our day in Ireland.’ Professor Gordon S Wood said that the ‘war in the lower south became a series of bloody guerilla skirmishes with atrocities on both sides’ (like Vietnam). But for the intervention of the French, this civil war – guerilla war may have gone on for years and degenerated into what would happen in Latin America with ‘Caesarism, military rule, army mutinies and revolts, and every kind of cruelty’ (like the Roman Empire).

But the terrorism on both sides ceased and the result was dictated by the sentiment expressed at the time by another former Prime Minister of England. The older Pitt, by this time the Earl of Chatham, one of the most experienced war time leaders England has ever had, knew what the home ground advantage meant: ‘My Lords, if I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I would never lay down my arms – never, never, never.’

If you asked who were the greatest minds the U K produced, the answer would include Isaac Newton, scientist, Adam Smith, economist, and David Hume, philosopher.  Shakespeare is in a different category.   What then did the great Scot think of the great English poet and playwright?

If Shakespeare be considered as a MAN, born in a rude age, and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruction, either from the world or from books, he may be regarded as a prodigy: If represented as a POET, capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined or intelligent audience, we must abate much of this eulogy. In his compositions, we regret, that many irregularities, and even absurdities, should so frequently disfigure the animated and passionate scenes intermixed with them; and at the same time, we perhaps admire the more those beauties, on account of their being surrounded with such deformities. A striking peculiarity of sentiment, adapted to a singular character, he frequently hits, as it were by inspiration; but a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot, for any time, uphold. Nervous and picturesque expressions, as well as descriptions, abound in him; but it is in vain we look either for purity or simplicity of diction. His total ignorance of all theatrical art and conduct, however material a defect; yet, as it affects the spectator rather than the reader, we can more easily excuse, than that want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way, only by intervals, to the irradiations of genius. A great and fertile genius he certainly possessed, and one enriched equally with a tragic and comic vein; but, he ought to be cited as a proof, how dangerous it is to rely on these advantages alone for attaining an excellence in the finer arts.  And there may even remain a suspicion, that we over-rate, if possible, the greatness of his genius; in the same manner as bodies often appear more gigantic, on account of their being disproportioned and misshapen. He died in 1616, aged 53 years.

But wait. There is more.

Johnson possessed all the learning which was wanting to Shakespeare, and wanted all the genius of which the other was possessed. Both of them were equally deficient in taste and elegance, in harmony and correctness. A servile copyist of the ancients, Johnson translated into bad English the beautiful passages of the Greek and Roman authors, without accommodating them to the manners of his age and country. His merit has been totally eclipsed by that of Shakespeare, whose rude genius prevailed over the rude art of his cotemporary. The English theatre has ever since taken a strong tincture of Shakespeare’s spirit and character; and thence it has proceeded, that the nation has undergone, from all its neighbours, the reproach of barbarism, from which it’s valuable productions in some other parts of learning would otherwise have exempted it. Johnson had a pension of a hundred marks from the king, which Charles afterwards augmented to a hundred pounds. He died in 1637, aged 63.

(The only other reference to Shakespeare in the six volumes is in a footnote that says there is no reference to ‘civil liberty’ in the history plays from King John to Henry VIII.  Perhaps that’s because ‘civil liberty’  had not yet been invented and would have struck either king as hilarious.)

Hume was admired for his mind and well  regarded for his affable character – especially by les belles dames in Paris.  What poison  – unless it was  green eyed jealousy – caused  him to unload this bile?

We all have our flaws, but this is a blinder.

And it is also very sad.  Coming from the great philosopher who said that ‘reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.’

4 Forms of action (common law) and a release valve (equity)

Lawyers have a saying – hard cases make bad law.  If you stretch the law to fix an unhappy problem at the edge, you may make the law worse – if for no other reason than that you are adding to it – and making it more complicated and harder to find and apply.  But that is just how the common law developed – by applying a precedent to a similar case. 

And you do not have to be a lawyer to understand that cases arise that fairly call out for the law to be extended to deal with them – in the interests of justice overall.  So, for a long time the law hesitated before allowing someone other than the person who bought defective goods to sue them for damage suffered as a result of the negligence of the manufacturer.  But what happens when someone gets badly hurt when the wheels fall off a Buick?  Or when a lady is violently ill after partaking of a ginger beer bought for her by a friend – and the drink contained a decomposed snail?  Every law student quickly learns that the modern law of negligence began with the developments made by these two decisions.

The law has doctrines to prevent people resiling from their stated position where that would be unfair to the other side.  (They are called estoppel and waiver.)  Many Australian sailors died or were injured as a result of a naval collision – a national tragedy.  They sued the Commonwealth of Australia.  Someone sued out of time can waive the right to plead the Statute of Limitations.  The Commonwealth did so.  Then it sought to amend its defence to plead the Statute.  The case got to the High Court, and counsel for the Commonwealth knew they were in for a lacing.  Which they got.  The Commonwealth lost, but although they had no judge in their favor on the result, it looked as if it had a majority on each issue in its corner.  You could hardly say that the law was improved by this ‘hard case’.

Most cases turn within a simple moral frame.  You should not deliberately hurt another person.  You should avoid hurting another by your carelessness.  You should keep your promise.  If you are in a position of trust, you owe higher obligations of integrity. 

Most of the capital of the world ultimately depends on promises.  You would therefore think that a great mercantile nation like England would have settled its law of contract before all others.  It did not so until about the time of Napoleon.  Merchants were largely left to their own devices.  The main problems came from the preoccupation with the forms of action and the devices found by judges to escape them.

The great legal historian F W Maitland published lectures under the heading The Forms of Action at Common Law.  It has I fear bedeviled students for more than a century.  Which is a pity, because the author states the history with the clarity he was so famous for.  The barest outline will do here.

We start with the notion that the law had to seek to put an end to the vendetta.  There was a very basic criminal process.  (At the start, the law did not distinguish between criminal and civil process.)  From that process, we got the Writ of Trespass.   Think of trespass as in the Lord’s Prayer or transgressio.   It could be to the person or land or perhaps cattle or chattels.  It was like our wrong or tort. 

But the victim had to allege that the trespass was committed vi et armis – by force of arms – et contra pacem regis – against the King’s peace.  This was fundamental – a private wrong had become a public crime, which it was the function of the king to put right – to preserve his peace – his first and paramount duty.  But the technical arguments flowing from those limitations would vex litigants up to the nineteenth century.

There never was a writ (form of action) for contract or negligence or trust.  Litigants had to finesse their way around writs of Account, Covenant or Debt.  For trusts, they had to go to a completely separate court and body of law.  Can you imagine the human cost?

Historians are not agreed about how new avenues of complaint were opened.  A statute allowed Chancery clerks to issue a writ where the complaint was in consimile casu – in a similar case – as an existing writ.  These were called ‘actions on the case’ – but when you think about it, that is how the common law had to develop. 

Plaintiffs began to allege that the defendant undertook to do something – assumpsit.  This opened the way to actions for failure to deliver on a bargain.  After they began to allege a prior debt –indebitatus assumpsit – the action of contract was on foot.  The doctrine of consideration – you have to earn the right to sue – emerged over the centuries.  It can be tricky, but it is not as mystical as the Roman causa.  Finally, after the wheels came off the Buick, and the lady threw up on the snail, the law of negligence had arrived.  It had taken about 800 years.  And if you think these actions had got tricky, those relating to land were even more dense – in large part because of the feudal inheritance.

A lot of this movement on the forensic carousel involved artifice – or fictions.  To get around technical issues, the judges allowed plaintiffs to make allegations that could not be traversed.  The wrong of conversion was for a long time called Trover (after the French trouver for ‘to find’.)  The plaintiff alleged that he ‘casually lost’ goods, that the defendant ‘found’ them, and was now refusing to hand them back.  And he would toss in a casual allegation of fraud – which is now verboten. 

You do not have to be a lawyer to see that building deceit into the system will lead to serious problems in the witness box.  And the ‘sporting theory’ of justice is not a theory at all.  When the punters believe that they are part of a game that the lawyers are playing with them, for profit – we have all lost.

But an even more fundamental split or division opened up.  Outsiders would call it schizophrenic.  The Greeks understood that you would have to be mad to think that you could make laws to meet every contingency.  But in the name of doctrinal purity, innocent people were getting badly hurt by the fraud of others or their own accidents; and the common law did not recognize trusts.  And people were being denied a remedy by a pitiless, technical common law. 

Such cases were downright unconscionable.  Could the king, as the fountain of justice, or his senior minister, the Chancellor, answer these calls of conscience and provide a remedy to those denied relief at common law?  Over time, the Chancellor developed a body of law in the Court of Chancery, a jurisprudence we know as Equity in an attempt to ease the pain left by the common law.

The Chancellor acted on the conscience of the defendant – in personam.  He developed the subpoena and the process called discovery – when parties were compelled to produce documents or answer questions on oath – where to do so might cost them their case, and their tenderness would cause discomfort between them and their lawyers. 

You will see immediately that they were much more inquisitorial than the common lawyers.  Evidence was led in writing – which has always led to serial lying.  And the equity judges were not brought back to earth by a jury.  Instead, they adumbrated refined theories on ethics and legal personality.  They became immured in worse delay and obfuscation than the system they were meant to relieve. 

There were ugly turf wars.  The equity crowd had trouble burying the notion that they looked like they felt morally and intellectually superior.  They became victims of their own unreal subtlety.  Lawyers generally know that they are in for it if the judge says that their argument is ‘subtle’, ‘nuanced’, or ‘ingenious.’ 

This has not been the case with the Whisperers – as some call them.  Too many of them in our time were up to their eye-balls in appallingly convoluted and artificial tax schemes that disgraced the profession until first the judges and then the legislators got their act together.  And I am not alone in thinking that their processes and leaning toward the inquisition have been the principal causes of the failings of our trial system.

By the time Dickens wrote novels like Bleak House, the appalling screams of the victims could no longer be ignored.  A Victorian parliament ordered the two systems to ‘fuse’ – but the notion of fusion is an invitation to the dance for some in the colonies, who might remind us of the observation of Sir Lewis Namier that the United States was a refrigerator for ideas that had passed their use-by date in the old country.

So what?  The common law is truly a thing of wonder.  But there are two ineluctable truths.  The most important person in the court is the loser.  And at least one side in these contests has to lose.  The common law was built on the blood and bones of the broke, the wounded, the mad, and the dead.  We lawyers might have a Remembrance Day in honor of the millions of our losers.

The IPA published a note in the AFR that contained the following.

For good (or for ill), the culture of the nation was created on a foundation of Judeo-Christian ethics and the British legacy of human rights, the rule of law, and parliamentary democracy. Australia has one culture – not many.

Australia is multiethnic – it is not, and never has been, multicultural. The multiculturalism politicians are so fond of talking about can only exist in a social and political culture that’s liberal, peaceful, and accepts (up to a point) difference. Australia made multiculturalism possible, not the other way around.

(Yet, for some reason, the academic institutions of the English-speaking world now believe their primary purpose is to attack the history of a culture that allows people of different backgrounds and beliefs to live together in some sort of harmony.)….

At the Sydney Jewish Museum, Albanese said he wanted Australia to be “a place where people are valued regardless of their gender, their faith, their race, their sexuality, regardless of who they are”. That implies there should be equality of citizenship – a concept that the Voice referendum attempted to overturn. The strongest advocate for the Voice was the prime minister himself.

You may be familiar with that kind of ideology.  If you went to  family dinners on a Friday with Jewish, Muslim and Catholic families, you might be surprised to find only ethnic differences and not cultural differences. 

You might also be surprised to learn that the Voice was a challenge to equality.  (And try all that on with First Nations people at Yuendemu. Did Emily share the culture of Turner or Picasso?)

But what of ‘Judeo-Christian ethics’?  This label is often used with ‘Western civilisation’.  The trouble is that the three main faiths in Australia – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – all came out of Asia.  Christianity chose to bury that past.  It took its philosophy from Greece and made Rome its geographic base.  To me – a lapsed Prot – in doing so, it butchered the teaching of the founder.

But let us put to one side whether Christian and Jewish ethics are the same, and if so whether they differ from those of Islam.  You are still left with  a gaping schism in Christianity.  We cannot have a Jew or Muslim as our head of state in London.   We cannot have a Catholic.  We take what we get, and the English constitution says the king or queen must be in communion with the Church of England.

Which is an interesting contribution to our multi-culturalism.  Or our attitude to the Enlightenment.

Multi-culturalism – IPA – religion – ethics.

In 1215, the English sealed a pact with their king.  He would be under the law because the law made the king.  Magna Carta is the foundation of the rule of law.  No one is above the law.  All are equal before it.  The Romans never got this; the French botched it in 1789; and the rest have been at best patchy.  Yet it is fundamental to our notion of civilisation.

A majority of the U S Supreme Court – put crudely, three stooges and two misfits –  now think differently.  Their President has immunity from prosecution when acting officially.  Is he acting in the discharge of his office when seeking to subvert what he is sworn to uphold?

How could this happen?  They have no separate bar and this is reflected in the character and standing of their judiciary.  And the respect they give to academe lets in ideology.   In the result, crude politicking violates both history and sense.

And even hard cases like Justices Clarence and Alito should know that appearances matter.

3 The rule of law

In the events surrounding the fall of the Bastille, the government could lock away its opponents simply by giving them a letter saying that the king willed it (a lettre de cachet; Depar le Roy, Car le Roy le veult).  It was a symptom of the absolute power of a king in a monarchy that was said to be unlimited.  The king was said to be absolved from all the laws – after the model of Roman emperors.  (Indeed, at one time Louis XVI expressed his exasperation that his mere say-so did not create a law.)  The person seized had no judicial remedy.  He could just rot in jail like the Count of Monte Christo.  Rulers in other parts of Europe exercised or claimed similar powers.  That had not been the case in England for centuries.  And this was so because of two instruments of their laws that we now come to.

When the Mafia dons got together to make the peace in The Godfather series, things got nasty.  Things had got very nasty between King John, who would be roughly handled by Shakespeare, and his barons before they got together to make the peace in 1215 at a place called Runnymede – the peace of which is now blasted by activity at the nearby Heathrow.  They had been engaged in a form of civil war.  This charter – the Great Charter, or Magna Carta – contained the peace treaty or terms of settlement between the parties. 

The compact of the parties contained mutual promises and undertakings given in the most solemn manner known to the law and God, which were intended to be legally binding on the parties, and which contained contractual rights of remedy if at least one party failed to observe his side of the compact.  Put to one side what the law then said or provided for such undertakings – this was what we call a contract.  That statement is unequivocal. 

The Charter set out the terms on which the king held the crown and would rule England.  It was like the service agreement of a hot shot CEO of a huge public company like BHP or Shell.  It would be supplemented nearly 500 years later by another service agreement between the people and the crown that would be called the Bill of Rights. 

When Winston Churchill referred to the great title deeds of western civilization, he would certainly have had these two in mind.  But the first is clearly numero uno.  It is for me far and away the most significant tablet of the law ever made.  The Americans probably share that view by the reverence that they pay to it at its shrine in the Smithsonian in Washington.

Much in the English fashion, they would say that the Charter said nothing new – it just confirmed ancient liberties or freedoms.  That proposition suggests what might be called the Continental view – that freedoms or liberties have to be granted to us by government.  We take the contrary view – we know that we are free to act unless and until a government, after due process, makes a law that infringes that freedom – and, if necessary, the government is held by a competent court to have acted within its constitutional powers in doing so.

So much of the history of political evolution has consisted of people on one rung of power curbing the powers of the person on the next rung up – and then slamming the door on all those under them, because they do not want to see their power being diluted by being shared with those they see below them.  That is just why the American, French and Russian Revolutions miscarried.  It would take the English more than 200 years to spread power across the people after what they call their Glorious Revolution.

This was not the case with the barons. They expressly stipulated that all free men would have the benefit of the Charter, and they also expressly subjected themselves to those obligations in favor of those under them that they had extracted from the king in their favor.

Any constitutional document is only good as it is found to be over time.  The most important issue is: Does it work? 

This Charter would become the legal Bible of the English – something you went to for binding authority in a crunch issue.  Whatever they may have meant in medieval England, two clauses would come to have the status of holy writ.  ‘39. No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or diseised [deprived of property] or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will be go or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.  40.  To no one will we sell, to none will we deny or delay right or justice.’  It sounds just as good in Latin.

Here is ‘due process’, a phrase that would come into a later version of the Charter, and which is a lynchpin of the U S Bill of Rights.  The king could not go or send against you by a mere letter just because he felt like it.  He had to do so ‘by the law of the land,’ and by ‘the lawful judgment’ of the peers of the citizen affected.  From that time on, a lettre de cachet was out of the question.  And you can easily imagine the fillip to trial by jury as it evolved – and which it is still felt to be nigh on a sacred right in the U S.

Well, the barons knew that they were treating with a rat.  They could hardly sue the king in his own court.  How could they protect themselves when he ratted? 

If you borrow money on your house, the bank will sell you up if you default.  If you are a company, they will send in receivers and managers to manage the business.  The barons chose this option (clause 61).  If the king defaulted, 25 barons could go on to his castles and, for the want of a better term, raise hell – ‘ourselves and our queen excepted.’ 

Vladimir Putin might blanch at that.  It shows just how much power that the barons had over John.  And being a rat, he beetled straight off to Rome and got the deal annulled.  (We will come back to that foreign intervention on an issue of English sovereignty.) 

That clause was not in later versions of the Charter, which got to be regularly reenacted, and we will see how the English dealt with the issue of enforcement in the Bill of Rights.  But the thing about the Charter is that it happened.  The king had had to negotiate and the contract that resulted set out the terms on which he held the crown.  From then on, kings might romance about Divine Right, but when the king was only there by the leave if his subjects, that was just moonshine.  Richard II would not be the only king the English deposed for forgetting that.

The established doctrine would become: the king was under the law because the law made the king.  That doctrine was incomprehensible to the Bourbons, but zealous lawyers brought up on the faith of Magna Carta would wave it in the faces of the power-hungry Stuarts like mad mullahs with the Quran before an alarmed Ayatollah.

Magna Carta was not a declaration of independence made by the people, but it was an admission by the king of his dependence on the people.  It was the communal equivalent of the discovery of the wheel.  Or even stealing fire from the gods.  Prometheus would have loved it.

Another legal process had been begun before all this.  You will by now not be surprised to learn that the process came first and the rationalization later.  First the writ; then the theory – and the congratulations. 

The writ was called habeas corpus.  That Latin phrase means ‘you have the body.’  If someone is taken into custody, they can serve the custodian with such a writ, and that person must then account to a judge by saying under what law and by what process the person is held.  The writ would be refined and enlarged and secured by statute over the centuries so that it became part of the English constitution.  It was on the on the return of one such writ that Lord Mansfield ordered the release of a slave on the footing that such a condition was against the common law of England.

So, here at last is the chance for civilization.  No one is above the law.  All are equal before it.  And government can only go or send against you after due process and under the law. 

Magna Carta and old English acts about habeas corpus are still part of the law of Victoria.  One justice of its Supreme Court is rostered to hear urgent applications.  To this day in Melbourne, all such business of the court stops immediately if counsel informs the court that they have an issue involving the liberty of the subject.

That, to put it softly, is quite some inheritance.  And you notice it immediately when you step off a plane in a place that has never known anything like such laws.  It is chilling – like being launched into space and losing all gravity and being deprived of air.

Finally, a couple of other acorns fell from the Charter.  Clause 14 begins ‘And in order to have the common counsel for assessing aid…,’ the king will summon his principal advisers.  Here is the germ of the idea that the king should only act on advice from those representing the people, and that he could not collect aid – impose a tax – without their consent.  That would the ground on which the English settled with those who succeeded the Stuarts. 

Then the default clause said that the barons could go against the king ‘together with the community of the entire country’ – cum commune totius regius.  Commune!  There was a word all Europe would come to marvel at and loathe or salute – in Paris in 1793, in just about every capital in Europe in 1848, and in St Petersburg in 1917. 

Then we might reflect on remarks of the great French historian, Marc Bloch, in his wonderful work, Feudal Society: ‘In feudal society, the oath of aid and ‘friendship’ had figured from the beginning as some of the main elements of the system.  But it was an engagement between inferior and superior, which made the one the subject of the other.  The distinctive feature of the communal oath, on the other hand, was that it united equals….  It was there in the commune that the really revolutionary ferment was to be seen, with its violent hostility to a stratified society.   The originality of the latter [feudal] system consisted in the emphasis it placed on the idea of an agreement capable of binding the rulers; and in this way, oppressive as it may have been to the poor, it has in truth bequeathed to our Western civilization something with which we still desire to live.’ 

Those comments are French, and Gallic fervor can unsettle the English, but an occasional shot of it does them no harm.

Lord Acton said ‘Power ends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’  We all know that.  But then?  ‘Great men are almost always bad.’  Worth bearing in mind, especially when thinking about ‘great’ men like Caesar and Napoleon.