characteristics was constantly charged against us. Thus Bossuet, in his sermon on Henrietta Maria, declared us to be more unstable than the sea which encircles us. De Witt, the Dutch statesman, remarked the same. In the succeeding eighteenth century Peter the Great described us as a power torn within itself and variable in its plans. Torcy, the French foreign minister, observed that of all the countries comprised in Europe there is none where the maxims of government vary more than in England; while, later in the century, Vergennes wrote that nothing is so fickle as the policy of the cabinet of St. James.
There was the same complaint in the nineteenth century. Bismarck held that it was impossible to make an alliance of assured permanence with us; and, on the other side of the Rhine, Ollivier, the minister of Napoleon III., has echoed the accusation.
As regards the three other qualities above mentioned, their attribution to us is too common to be emphasised. Michelet called us pride incarnate. Bismarck said that the policy of England has constantly been to sow dissension between the continental powers for her own interests. And from Froissart downwards any number of continental writers have remarked upon the quarrelsome proclivities of the English people. In fact, these charges reveal an old, deep-seated, and widespread sense of irritation against us as a power which will
