Page:The Practice of Diplomacy - Callières - Whyte - 1919.djvu/46

 Austria which then reigned despotically, dethroning her princes and disposing of their states and their titles to its own court minions. Rumour even attributes the revolution in Bohemia to the action of Cardinal Richelieu. He formed and maintained several leagues; he won for France many great allies who contributed to the success of his high designs, in which the abasement of the prodigious power of the House of Austria was always the chief; and throughout all these designs we can trace the unbroken thread of a well-maintained system of diplomacy, acting as the obedient and capable agent of the great minister himself, whose profound capacity and vast genius thus found a favourable field of action.

It is not necessary to turn far back into the past in order to understand what can be achieved by negotiation. We see daily around us its definite effects in sudden revolutions favourable to this great design of state or that, in the use of sedition in fermenting the hatreds between nations, in causing jealous rivals to arm against one another so that the tertius gaudens may profit, in the formation of leagues and other treaties of various kinds between monarchs whose interests might otherwise clash, in the dissolution by crafty means of the closest unions between states: in a word, one may say that the art of negotiation, according as its