Page:Diplomacy and the Study of International Relations (1919).djvu/191

 The work may seem, at points, to treat in too large outline international changes, such as, for example, were initiated by Richelieu, and to ascribe too boldly to the English Revolution important changes effected; and in particular it may seem to pursue too assiduously, though with more reserve than in The Expansion of England, the quest for tendency, for some large conclusion, the formula. But it is a work unsurpassed in Britain for its suggestiveness in the realm of international policy; for its gift of relating causes to effects, motives and principles to policy and action; of relating the domestic to the foreign, the insular to the international; for its grasp of inter-connexions and inter-dependences in the causes and consequences of great events. These qualities are exhibited in the author's treatment of the dangers to Elizabethan England from the Powers of the Counter-Reformation, and the winning by England of 'a self-confidence which it has never lost since'. 'If the Muse is asked to say what first caused the discord