and its conditions, not to compare him with men of far distant times and places in order to arrange all in a final scale of values. It was once the fashion in debating societies to discuss whether Demosthenes was a greater orator than Cicero, and whether either was the equal of Daniel Webster. It is even more futile to consider whether William the Conqueror was a greater man than Alexander or a less than George Washington, for the quantities are incommensurable. So far as comparisons of this sort are at all legitimate, they must be instituted between similar things, between contemporaries or between men in quick sequence. When they deal with wide intervals of time and circumstance, they wrest each man from his true setting and become fundamentally unhistorical.
An able general, strong in battle and still stronger in strategy and craft, a skilful diplomat, a born ruler of men, William was yet greater in the combination of vision, patience, and masterful will which make the statesman, and the results of his statesmanship are writ large on the page of English history. To his contemporaries his most striking characteristic was his pitiless strength and inflexible will, and if they had been familiar with Nietzsche's theory of the 'overman,' they would certainly have placed him in that class. Stark and stern and wrathful, the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle approaches him, as Freeman well says,[1] "with
- ↑ Norman Conquest, ii, p. 166.
