nd to guard your right according to my
power, and to do fair justice at your summons or the summons of your
bailiff, to the best of my wit.' Then the king kissed him on the mouth
and raised him up."

[Illustration: ST. LOUIS MEDIATING BETWEEN HENRY III. AND HIS BARONS----
136]

Three years later Louis gave not only to the King of England, but to the
whole English nation, a striking proof of his judicious and true-hearted
equity. An obstinate civil war was raging between Henry III. and his
barons. Neither party, in defending its own rights, had any notion of
respecting the rights of its adversaries, and England was alternating
between a kingly and an aristocratic tyranny. Louis, chosen as arbiter
by both sides, delivered solemnly, on the 23d of January, 1264, a
decision which was favorable to the English kingship, but at the same,
time expressly upheld the Great Charter and the traditional liberties of
England. He concluded his decision with the following suggestions of
amnesty: "We will also that the King of England and his barons do forgive
one another mutually, that they do forget all the resentments that may
exist between them; by consequence of the matters submitted to our
arbitration, and that henceforth they do refrain reciprocally from an
offence and injury on account of the same matters." But when men have
had their ideas, passions, and interests profoundly agitated and made to
clash, the wisest decisions and the most honest counsels in the world are
not sufficient to re-establish peace; the cup of experience has to be
drunk to the dregs; and the parties are not resigned to peace until on or
the other, or both, have exhausted themselves in the struggle and
perceive the absolute necessity of accepting either defeat compromise.
In spite of the arbitration of the King of France the civil war continued
in England; but Louis did not seek any way to profit by it so as to
extend, at the expense of his neighbors, his own possessions or power;
he held himself also from their quarrels, and followed up by honest
neutrality ineffectual arbitration. Five centuries afterwards the great
English historian, Hume, rendered him due homage in these terms: "Every
time this virtuous prince interfered in the affairs of England, it was
invariably with the view of settling differences between the king and the
nobility. Adopting an admirable course of conduct, as politic probably
as it certainly was just, he never interposed his