One of these is the period of the Long Parliament in England. The other is the brief but most important interval which elapsed between the recognition of the independence of the thirteen seceded British colonies in America, at Versailles in 1783, and the first inauguration of Washington as President of the United States at New York on April 30, 1789. No Englishman or American, who is reasonably familiar with the history of either of these periods, will hastily attribute the phenomena of modern French politics to something essentially volatile and unstable in the character of the French people. My own acquaintance, such as it is, with France--for I should be sorry to pretend to a thorough knowledge of France, or of any country not my own--goes back, as I have intimated, to the early days of the Second Empire. It has been my good fortune, at various times, to see a good deal of the social and political life of France, and I long ago learned that to talk of the character of the French people is almost as slipshod and careless as to talk of the character of the Italian people. The French people are not the outgrowth of a common stock, like the Dutch or the Germans. The people of Provence are as different in all essential particulars from the people of Brittany, the people of French Flanders from the people of Gascony, the people of Savoy from the people of Normandy, as are the people of Kent from the people of the Scottish Highlands, or the people of Yorkshire from the people of Wales. The French nation was the work, not of the French people, but of the kings of France, not less but even more truly than the Italian nation, such as we see it gradually now forming, is the work of the royal House of Savoy. The sudden suppression of the National Executive by a parliamentary conspiracy at Paris in 1792 violently interrupted the orderly and natural making of France, just as the sudden suppression of the National Executive in 1649 after the occupation of Edinburgh by Argyll and the surrender of Colchester to Fairfax had put England at the mercy of Cromwell's 'honest' troopers, and of knavish fanatics like Hugh Peters, violently interrupted the making of Britain. It took England a century to recover her equilibrium. Between Naseby Field in 1645 and Culloden Moor in 1746 England had, except during the reign of Charles II., no better assurance of continuous domestic peace than France enjoyed first under Louis Philippe and then under the Second Empire. During those hundred years Englishmen were thought by the rest of Europe to be as excitable, as volatile, and as unstable as Frenchmen are not uncommonly thought by the rest of mankind now to be. There is a curious old Dutch print of these days in which England appears as a son of Adam in the hereditary costume, standing at gaze amid a great disorder of garments strewn upon the floor, while a scroll displayed above him bears this legend: