"All things for the people, nothing by the people." This maxim attributed to Napoleon embodied as well the policy of Richelieu. In it are embalmed the strength and weakness of French statesmanship. The late growth of the royal power and the long continuance of aristocratic oppression threw the people helpless and speechless into the arms of the monarchy. They were happy if some one should prove strong enough to take up their cause without putting them to the trouble or the risk of thinking and speaking for themselves. It is no blame to Richelieu if, being a Frenchman of the seventeenth century, he worked under the only conditions which Frenchmen of the seventeenth century would admit. We can well fancy that he would think with scorn and contempt of the English Revolution, which was accomplishing itself under his eyes. Yet in the England of the Civil War, men were learning not merely to be governed well, but to know what good government was. It was a greater thing for a nation to learn to choose good and to refuse evil, even if the progress was slow, than to be led blindfold with far more rapid steps. [Sidenote: § 4. His foreign policy.] Richelieu's foreign policy was guided by the same deep calculation as his home policy. If at home he saw that France was greater than any faction, he had not arrived at the far higher notion that Europe was greater than France, excepting so far as he saw in the system of intolerance supported by Spain an evil to be combated for the sake of others who were not Frenchmen. But there is no sign that he really cared for the prosperity of other nations when it was not coincident with the prosperity of France. As it is for the present generation a matter of complete indifference whether Breisach was to be garrisoned by Frenchmen or imperialists, it would be needless for us, if we regarded Richelieu's motives alone, to trouble ourselves much with the later years of the Thirty Years' War. [Sidenote: § 5. His support of rising causes.] But it is not always by purity of motive only that the world's progress advances. Richelieu, in order to make France strong, needed help, and he had to look about for help where the greatest amount of strength was to be found. An ordinary man would have looked to the physical strength of armies, as Wallenstein did, or to the ideal strength of established institutions, as Ferdinand did. Richelieu knew better. He saw that for him who knows how to use it there is no lever in the world like that of a rising cause, for a rising cause embodies the growing dissatisfaction of men with a long-established evil, which they have learned to detest, but which they have not yet learned to overthrow. [Sidenote: § 6. And of those causes which were in themselves good.]