strife; but there are also,
between such nations, common interests and common sentiments, which tend
to harmony and peace. The wisdom and ability of governments and of
nations themselves are shown in devoting themselves to making the grounds
of harmony and peace stronger than those of discord and war. Anyhow
common sense and moral sense forbid differences of interests and
tendencies to be set up as a principle upon which to establish general
and permanent rivalry, and, by consequence, a systematic hostility and
national enmity. And the further civilization and the connections
between different people proceed with this development, the more
necessary and, at the same time, possible it becomes to raise the
interests and sentiments which would hold them together above those which
would keep them asunder, and to thus found a policy of reciprocal equity
and of peace in place of a policy of hostile precautions and continual
strife. "I have witnessed," says M. Guizot, "in the course of my life,
both these policies. I have seen the policy of systematic hostility, the
policy practised by the Emperor Napoleon I. with as much ability and
brilliancy as it was capable of, and I have seen it result in the
greatest disaster France ever experienced. And even after the evidence
of its errors and calamities this policy has still left amongst us deep
traces and raised serious obstacles to the policy of reciprocal equity,
liberty, and peace which we labored to support, and of which the nation
felt, though almost against the grain, the justice and the necessity."
In that feeling we recognize the lamentable results of the old historic
causes which have just been pointed out, and the lasting perils arising
from those blind passions which hurry people away, and keep them back
from their most pressing interests and their most honorable sentiments.

In spite of appearances to the contrary, and in view of her future
interests, England was, in the eleventh century, by the very fact of the
conquest she underwent, in a better position than France. She was
conquered, it is true, and conquered by a foreign chieftain and a foreign
army; but France also had been, for several centuries previously, a prey
to conquest, and under circumstances much more unfavorable than those
under which the Norman conquest had found and placed England. When the
Goths, the Burgundians, the Franks, the Saxons, and the Normans
themselves invaded and disputed over Gaul,