reat nation
had succeeded in establishing and preserving a free government. When we
compare attentively the history and social development of France and
England, we find it difficult to decide by which we ought to be most
impressed,--the differences or the resemblances. Never have two
countries, with origin and position so totally distinct, been more
deeply associated in their respective destinies, or exercised upon each
other, by the alternate relations of peace and war, such continued
influence. A province of France conquered England; England for a long
time held possession of several provinces of France; and on the
conclusion of this national strife, already the institutions and
political wisdom of the English were, with the most political spirits of
the French, with Louis XI. and Philip de Comines, for example, subjects
of admiration. In the bosom of Christianity the two nations have served
under different religious standards; but this very distinction has
become between them a new cause of contact and intermixture. In England
the French Protestants, and in France the persecuted English Catholics,
have sought and found an asylum. And when kings have been proscribed in
their turn, in France the monarch of England, and in England the
sovereign of France, was received and protected. From these respective
havens of safety, Charles II., in the seventeenth century, and Louis
XVIII. in the nineteenth, departed to resume their dominions. The two
nations, or, to speak more correctly, the high classes of the two
nations, have mutually adopted ideas, manners, and fashions from each
other. In the seventeenth century, the court of Louis XIV. gave the tone
to the English aristocracy. In the eighteenth, Paris went to London in
search of models. And when we ascend above these historical incidents to
consider the great phases of civilization in the two countries, we find
that, after considerable intervals in the course of ages, they have
followed nearly the same career; and that similar attempts and
alternations of order and revolution, of absolute power and liberty,
have occurred in both, with singular coincidences and equally remarkable
distinctions.

It is, therefore, on a very superficial and erroneous survey that some
persons look upon French and English society as so essentially
different, that the one could not draw political examples from the other
except by factitious and barren imitations. Nothing is more completely
falsi