“Friendship between princes,” observed the wise Philippe de Commines, “is not of long duration.” He would have said as much of friendship between republics, had he ever conceived of representative government. What he knew was that the friendships of men, built on affection and esteem, outlast time; and that the friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests, which are always liable to deflection. He had proof, if proof were needed, in the invasion of France by Edward the Fourth under the pressure of an alliance with Charles of Burgundy. It was one of the urbane invasions common to that gentlemanly age. “Before the King of England embarked from Dover, he sent one of his heralds named Garter, a native of Normandy, to the King of France, with a letter of defiance couched in language so elegant and so polite that I can scarcely believe any Englishman wrote it.” This was a happy beginning, and the end was no less felicitous. When Edward landed in France he found that Louis the Eleventh, who hated fighting, was all for peace; and that the Duke of Burgundy, who generally fought the wrong people at the wrong time, was in no condition for war. Therefore he patched up a profitable truce, and went back to England, a wiser and a richer man, on better terms with his enemy than with his ally. “For where our advantage lies, there also is our heart.” The peculiar irritation engendered by what Americans discreetly designate as “entangling alliances” was forced upon my perception in early youth, when I read the letters of a British officer engaged in fighting the Ashanti. The war, if it may be so termed, was fought in 1873, and the letters were published in “Blackwood’s Magazine.” The Ashanti had invaded Fantiland, then under a British protectorate, and the troops commanded by Sir Garnet Wolseley were presumably defending their friends. This particular officer expressed his sense of the situation in a fervid hope that when the Ashanti were beaten, as they deserved to be, the English would then come to speedy terms with them, “and drive these brutes of Fanti off the map.” It is a sentiment which repeats itself in more measured terms on every page of history. The series of “Coalitions” formed against Napoleon were rich in super-comic, no less than in super-tragic elements; and it was well for those statesmen whose reason and whose tempers were so controlled that they were able to perceive the humours of this giant game of pussy-in-the-corner. A mutual fear of France drew the Allies together; a mutual distrust of one another pulled them apart. Sir Gilbert Elliot, afterwards Lord Minto, endeavoured from the beginning to make England understand that Austria would prefer her own interests to the interests of the Coalition, and that it was not unnatural that she should do so. The situation, as he saw it, was something like this: “Austria: ‘If I am to dance to your tune, you must pay the piper.’