France is strong where England is weak and is weak where England
is strong; and this divergence of development is by no means accidental.
Just because they were the first countries to become effectively
nationalized, their action and reaction have been constant and have
served at once to develop and distinguish their national temperaments.
The English invasions accelerated the growth of the French royal power
and weakened domestic resistance to its ambitions. The English
revolutions of the seventeenth century made the Bourbons more than ever
determined to consolidate the royal despotism and to stamp out
Protestantism. The excesses of the French royal despotism brought as a
consequence the excesses of the Revolutionary democracy. The Reign of
Terror in its turn made Englishmen more than ever suspicious of the
application of rational political ideas to the fabric of English
society. So the ball was tossed back and forth--the national temperament
of each people being at once profoundly modified by this action and
reaction and for the same cause profoundly distinguished one from the
other.
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