CHAPTER X. DIPLOMACY, OR THE CASTLE OF COPPET. (OCTOBER 12TH 1535.) [Sidenote: DIPLOMACY AND WAR.] Diplomacy and war are the two means employed to decide international differences. It is customary to speak disparagingly of both, and not without cause. All who care for their fellow-men and desire the material and moral prosperity of nations, look upon war as a crime against humanity; and yet a people, invaded by an unjust and ambitious conqueror, who desires to despoil them of their independence and nationality, have as much right to defend themselves as the man attacked on the highway by a robber bent on depriving him of his purse or his life. Diplomacy has its faults, like war. Its object being to conciliate jarring interests, it falls easily into narrow and selfish views, while it should possess that broad wisdom which reconciles differences with impartiality. Fully acknowledging the tact with which in ordinary times it adheres to the path it ought to follow, we think that it gets confused and goes astray in periods of transition, when society is passing from one phase to another. Seamen on a distant voyage have observed that in certain latitudes and on certain days the compass-needle is so agitated that the steersman cannot make use of it to direct his course: it turns, perhaps, to the right when it should point to the left. This is just the case with diplomacy in those great epochs, when, as in the sixteenth century, society is turning on its hinges and entering into a new sphere. In such a case diplomacy acts first in a direction contrary to the impulses which prepare the future: it devotes all its care to maintain what has been, while the normal character of the new epoch is precisely that what has been must give place to what is to be. Governments, naturally enough, always begin by opposing the new developments of social, political, and religious life. This is just what the powerful aristocracy of Berne did at first with regard to Geneva: we have seen it once and we shall see it again. But if there is a bad diplomacy, there is also a good one. Would it be out of place to remark here, that if the château of Coppet, where some of the facts of our history occurred, was in 1535 the seat of bad policy, it became afterwards the centre of a liberal statesmanship?[650]