Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 5.djvu/12

vi interference with the affairs of the French nation, the cause of whose exiled dynasty we had chosen to espouse, involved this nation in the horrors of a Continental War, which lasted far on into the next century, failing, after all, of its original object, and in which the splendid victories gained by our forces, both by land and sea, scarcely half compensated the country for the prodigious loss of blood and treasure, and the crippling of her commerce, which she had to undergo.

In fact, two great mistakes marked the policy of the English Government during this reign: they endeavoured to rule our colonies by coercion, and they interfered to force on the French nation a dynasty it had repudiated. In both of these efforts they were eventually foiled, and from these defeats they learned two grand principles of international law—that colonies must be left to govern themselves, if they are to be retained; and that no people has, on any pretence whatever, a right to intrude itself into the domestic affairs of another people.

We have closed this volume with a careful and minute picture of the excesses of a nation renouncing Christianity. We shall open the next with the grand error of England in commencing war to replant an impossible dynasty.