The Death Voyage

It was a winter evening, and as I sat by a dwindling fire in the twilight, my mind hit upon a strange line of thought. Mulling over the great crises of history, I could see that the chief actor in each had always come to a dividing of the ways where it was within his choice to take the one path or the other. He took the one, and the annals tell us what came of it. But suppose that he had taken the other? Is it possible for the human imagination to follow up the course of events which would have resulted from that? A series of fascinating alternatives passed through my brain, each involving a problem of its own. Had Caesar remained faithful as a general of the republic, and refused to cross the Rubicon, would not the whole story or Imperial Rome have been avoided? Had Washington persuaded his fellow countrymen to wait patiently until a liberal majority in the British Parliament righted their wrongs, would not Britain and all her Dominions now be an annex to the great central power of America? If Napoleon had made peace before entering upon the Russian campaign—and so on, and so on.