The faults and shortcomings of the English, which throughout English history have shown themselves mainly in foreign and colonial matters, seem all to have combined and culminated in the interval of twenty years between the Peace of 1763, which gave Canada to Great Britain, and the Peace of 1783, which took from her the United States; and in addition there were special causes at work in England, which at this more than at any other time militated against national success. [Sidenote: The party System.] The shortcomings in question are, in part, the result of counterbalancing merits, fair-mindedness, and freedom of thought, speech, and action. Love of liberty among the English has begotten an almost superstitious reverence for Parliamentary institutions. Parliamentary institutions have practically meant the House of Commons; and the House of Commons has for many generations past implied the party system. In regard to foreign and colonial policy the party system has worked the very serious evil that Great Britain has in the past rarely spoken or acted as one nation. The party in power at times of national crisis is constantly obliged to reckon on opposition rather than support, from the large section of Englishmen whose leaders are not in office; and ministers have to frame not so much the most effective measures, as those which can under the circumstances be carried with least friction and delay. The result has been weakness and compromise in action; among the friends of England, suspicion and want of confidence; among her foes, waiting on the event which prolongs the strife. The English have so often gone forward and then back, they have so often said one thing and done another, that their own officers, their friends and allies, their native subjects, and their open enemies, cannot be sure what will be the next move. If the Opposition in Parliament and outside, by speech and writing, attacks the Government, the natural inference to be drawn is that a turn of the electoral tide will reverse the policy. Apart too from this more or less necessary result of party government, the element of cross-grained men and women, who, when their own country is at issue with another, invariably think that their country must be wrong and its opponent must be right, has always been rather stronger, or, at any rate, rather more tolerated in the United Kingdom than among continental nations. This is due not merely to the habit of free criticism, but also to a kind of conceit familiar enough in private as in public life. Englishmen, living apart from the continent of Europe, are, as a whole, more wrapped up in themselves than are other nations; and in this self-satisfied whole there is a proportion of superior persons who sit in judgement on the rest, and who, having in reality a double dose of the national Pharisaism, think it their duty to belittle their countrymen.