ir
chief features, inasmuch as they exercised, for centuries, a determining
influence upon the destinies of two great nations, and upon the course of
modern civilization.

As to France, the consequences of the conquest of England by the Normans
were clearly pernicious, and they have not yet entirely disappeared. It
was a great evil, as early as the eleventh century, that the duke of
Normandy, one of the great French lords, one of the great vassals of the
king of France, should at the same time become king of England, and thus
receive an accession of rank and power which could not fail to render
more complicated and more stormy his relations with his French suzerain.
From the eleventh to the fourteenth century, from Philip I. to Philip de
Valois, this position gave rise, between the two crowns and the two
states, to questions, to quarrels, to political struggles, and to wars
which were a frequent source of trouble in France to the government and
the people. The evil and the peril became far greater still when, in the
fourteenth century, there arose between France and England, between
Philip de Valois and Edward III., a question touching the succession to
the throne of France and the application or negation of the Salic law.
Then there commenced, between the two crowns and the two peoples, that
war which was to last more than a hundred years, was to bring upon France
the saddest days of her history, and was to be ended only by the inspired
heroism of a young girl who, alone, in the name of her God and His
saints, restored confidence and victory to her king and her country.
Joan of Arc, at the cost of her life, brought to the most glorious
conclusion the longest and bloodiest struggle that has devastated France
and sometimes compromised her glory.

Such events, even when they are over, do not cease to weigh heavily for a
long while upon a people. The struggles between the kings of England,
dukes of Normandy, and the kings of France, and the long war of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for the succession to the throne of
France, engendered what historians have called "the rivalry between
France and England;" and this rivalry, having been admitted as a natural
and inevitable fact, became the permanent incubus and, at divers epochs,
the scourge of French national existence. Undoubtedly there are, between
great and energetic neighbors, different interests and tendencies, which
easily become the seeds of jealousy and