It is the French authors themselves who have most insisted upon this mental difference between the French and the English, which seems to be determining a great difference in the destinies of the two peoples; and most of them, while justly valuing the sympathetic and sociable quality of the French mind, deeply regret its lack of the English independence[115]. There has been no lack of speculation and inquiry as to the origin and causes of this supremely important difference. It is perhaps worth while to glance at some of these attempts. The most superficial attempt at explanation is to say that the political and social institutions of the French people foster in each individual the social tendencies in question, while the English institutions develop their opposites. It is true, but it obviously is not the explanation of the difference; for that we must go further back, in order to find the origin of these differences of institution. An explanation a little less superficial is that the domination of the first Napoleon and the strong centralised system of administration established by him accounts for the difference. But the permanence, if not the very possibility, of that system, and the rise to power of Napoleon himself, were but symptoms of this deep-lying tendency of the French mind. Buckle, recognising the profound difference which we are considering, summed it up in the phrases ‘the dominance of the protective spirit in France’ and of ‘the spirit of independence in England,’ He attributed the former partly to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in France with its centralised authoritative system, partly to the long prevalence of the feudal system of social organisation, under which every man was made to feel his personal dependence upon the despotic power of an independent noble and was accustomed to look to him for all initiative and guidance—was trained to obey a despot, whose absolute jurisdiction and whose title to his lands and rights was unchallenged. The system, he said, culminated in the despotism of Louis XIV, by the subjection of the previously independent nobles to the king, and was revived in a different form, immediately after the great revolution, by Napoleon.