If your neighbor becomes too powerful during peace, what prevents you from rendering yourself equally powerful? If he has made alliances, make them on your side. If, having fewer monks, he has more soldiers and manufacturers, imitate him in this wise economy. If he employs his sailors better, employ yours in the same manner: all that is very just. But to expose your people to the most horrible misery, in the so often false idea of overturning your dear brother, the most serene neighboring prince!--it was not for the honorary president of a pacific society to give you such advice. WEAKNESS ON BOTH SIDES. Weakness on both sides is, as we know, the motto of all quarrels. I speak not here of those which have caused blood to be shed--the Anabaptists, who ravaged Westphalia; the Calvinists, who kindled so many wars in France; the sanguinary factions of the Armagnacs and Burgundians; the punishment of the Maid of Orleans, whom one-half of France regarded as a celestial heroine, and the other as a sorceress; the Sorbonne, which presented a request to have her burned; the assassination of the duke of Orleans, justified by the doctors; subjects excused from the oath of fidelity by a decree of the sacred faculty; the executioners so often employed to enforce opinions; the piles lighted for unfortunates who persuaded others that they were sorcerers and heretics--all that is more than weakness. Yet these abominations were committed in the good times of honest Germanic faith and Gallic naivete! I would send back to them all honest people who regret times past. I will make here, simply for my own particular edification, a little instructive memoir of the fine things which divided the minds of our grandfathers. In the eleventh century--in that good time in which we knew not the art of war, which however we have always practised; nor that of governing towns, nor commerce, nor society, and in which we could neither read nor write--men of much mind disputed solemnly, at much length, and with great vivacity, on what happened at the water-closet, after having fulfilled a sacred duty, of which we must speak only with the most profound respect. This was called the dispute of the stercorists; and, not ending in a war, was in consequence one of the mildest impertinences of the human mind.