[Sidenote: =Organisation the characteristic of his government.=] This minute attention to detail on the part of the Crown in a nation gifted like the French with a genius for completeness produced a corresponding thoroughness of treatment in every branch of the administration. Organisation was the order of the day. During the years of Louis’s greatness, before the constant strain of the over-ambitious wars had broken everything down, organisation is the note of his government. The great ministers are organisers not statesmen. They are at the very antipodes of genius to Richelieu. And they are organisers, not in the sense in which Sully was an organiser, merely the rooter-out of patent abuses, but in the far higher sense in which Charles Montague was an organiser, one who laid down true principles of administration and constructed the machinery necessary for carrying them out. Lionne organised the French foreign office and diplomatic service, Colbert the internal administration of France, Louvois the war office, on principles which became the acknowledged principles of foreign, home, and military administration among all countries for more than a century, some of which will remain acknowledged principles for all time. It was this which enabled France to take full advantage of her centralisation, which enabled her to bear the extraordinary strain of unsuccessful war in the way she did, which gave her such advantages in dealing with a huge unorganised mass like the Empire, which left her even after all her losses at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. stronger than she had been at the beginning. To the ministers who planned and carried it out belong justly the honours of the achievement, but it would never have been carried out at all had it not been for the master who inspired them. [Sidenote: =Training of Colbert in the household of Mazarin.=]