Perhaps his most remarkable expression on this theme occurs in a speech of 1853,[131] when Sir James Graham had gone about saying that the Emperor was a despot who turned his people into slaves, and when there was one of those periodical outbursts of Gallophobia to which we are accustomed. Disraeli pointed out that peace with France had then subsisted for forty years, that social relations had multiplied, that an identity of interest in high policy existed. He exploded the fallacy that national hostility was a true tradition. Even Agincourt and Crécy stood for a struggle between two princes rather than between two nations. “... No one can deny that both Queen Elizabeth and the Lord Protector looked to that alliance as the basis of their foreign connections. No one can deny that there was one subject on which even the brilliant Bolingbroke and the sagacious Walpole were agreed--and that was the great importance of cultivating an alliance, or good understanding, with France. At a later date the most eminent of the statesmen of this century, Mr. Pitt, formed his system on this principle....” The traditional prejudice, therefore, was the reverse of true. The natural tendency was to concord, for after the great European revolutions at the close of the eighteenth and dawn of the nineteenth centuries, a durable peace had emerged. Nor were the defences (which Sir Robert Peel had really inaugurated) due to the rise of the Third Napoleon; they were due to the changes in scientific warfare. It was true that in France there was then a military government. “But there is a great error also, if history is to guide us, in assuming that because a country is governed by an army, that army must be extremely anxious to conquer other countries.” The lust for conquest under militarism is due to home-uneasiness, and from a feeling in the army that its power is not felt. The real prejudice was that France had subverted her constitution. This prejudice had foundation, but it was the very cause of those acts which indiscreet journalism was now criticising so angrily. “Some years ago,” he resumed (and the glimpse of Louis Philippe is interesting), “I had occasion frequently to visit France. I found that country then under the mild sway of a constitutional monarch--of a prince who, from temper as well as policy, was humane and beneficent. I know that at that time the Press was free. I know that at that time the Parliament of France was ... distinguished by its eloquence, and by a dialectic power that probably even our own House of Commons has never surpassed. I know that under these circumstances France arrived at a pitch of material prosperity which it had never before reached. I know also that after a reign of unbroken prosperity of long duration, when he was aged, when he was in sorrow, and when he was suffering under overwhelming indisposition, this same prince was rudely expelled from his capital,[132] and was denounced as a poltroon