war
being an occasional method of obtaining peace, it pained him to think
that peace seemed only a process for arriving at war. Surely it was no
epigram in those days, but the simplest statement of commonplace fact,
that war was the normal condition of Christians. Alas will it be
maintained that in the two and a half centuries which have since elapsed
the world has made much progress in a higher direction? Is there yet any
appeal among the most civilized nations except to the logic of the
largest battalions and the eloquence of the biggest guns?

De Rosny came to be the harbinger of a political millennium, and he
heartily despised war. The schemes, nevertheless, which were as much his
own as his master's, and which he was instructed to lay before the
English monarch as exclusively his own, would have required thirty years
of successful and tremendous warfare before they could have a beginning
of development.

It is not surprising that so philosophical a mind as his, while still
inclining to pacific designs, should have been led by what met his eyes
and ears to some rather severe generalizations.

"It is certain that the English hate us," he said, "and with a hatred so
strong and so general that one is tempted to place it among the natural
dispositions of this people. Yet it is rather the effect of their pride
and their presumption; since there is no nation in Europe more haughty,
more disdainful, more besotted with the idea of its own excellence. If
you were to take their word for it, mind and reason are only found with
them; they adore all their opinions and despise those of all other
nations; and it never occurs to them to listen to others, or to doubt
themselves. . . . Examine what are called with them maxims of state;
you will find nothing but the laws of pride itself, adopted through
arrogance or through indolence."

"Placed by nature amidst the tempestuous and variable ocean," he wrote to
his sovereign, "they are as shifting, as impetuous, as changeable as its
waves. So self-contradictory and so inconsistent are their actions almost
in the same instant as to make it impossible that they should proceed
from the same persons and the same mind. Agitated and urged by their
pride and arrogance alone, they take all their imaginations and
extravagances for truths and realities; the objects of their desires and
affections for inevitable events; not balancing and measuring those
desires with the actual condition of th