(1.) First in order, and for the sake of completeness, I speak of intervention in _external_ affairs, where two or more nations are parties. As long ago as 1645, France offered mediation between what were then called “The Two Crowns of the North,” Sweden and Denmark. This was followed, in 1648, by the famous Peace of Westphalia, the beginning of our present Law of Nations, negotiated under the joint mediation of the Pope and the Republic of Venice, present by nuncio and ambassador. In 1655, the Emperor of Germany offered mediation between Sweden and Poland; but the old historian records that the Swedes suspected him of seeking to increase rather than to arrange pending difficulties; and the effort ended by the withdrawal of the imperial envoy into the Polish camp. Sweden, though often belligerent in those days, was not so always, and, in 1672, when war broke forth between France and England on one side and the Dutch Provinces on the other, we find her proffering mediation, which was promptly accepted by England, who justly rejected a similar proffer most hardily made by the Elector of Brandenburg, ancestor of the kings of Prussia, while marching at the head of his forces to join the Dutch. The English note on this occasion, written in what at the time was called “sufficiently bad French, but in very intelligible terms,” declared that the Electoral proffer, though under the pleasant name of mediation (_par le doux nom de médiation_), was adjudged to be only arbitration, and that, instead of mediation _unarmed and disinterested_, it was mediation armed and pledged to the enemies of England.[52]