made the international policy of France a synonym both for iniquity and folly. On the 15th of August 1769 Voltaire concluded his letter to D’Alembert with his usual vivacity: ‘Adieu; my compliments to the devil, for it is he who governs the world.’[250] If he had known that, while he was writing, Napoleon Bonaparte had come into the world, and could at the same time have foreseen the new-comer’s destiny, he might have said the same thing more seriously. Voltaire never played the sentimentalist. He knew that there are complexities of affairs which only the sword can cut. But he was the first influential writer—for the abbé Saint-Pierre, so undeservedly laughed at for his dreams of perpetual peace, had no influence to speak of—who deliberately placed war among retrograde agencies, and deliberately dwelt upon peaceful industry as the true life of nations.[251] Diplomacy and its complex subterranean processes, which have occupied so extremely disproportionate a space in written history, and which are in acted history responsible for so much evil, were in the same way informally relegated to the region of inhuman occupations. Its methods were the tortuous and depressing methods of the same past, which had made the many the playthings and unhappy instruments of the few, and had never interrupted the triumphant manœuvres of craft and subtlety by a whisper for the claims of humanity and justice. Voltaire scarcely ever speaks of negotiations between contending powers without a shrewd thrust, half contemptuous and half angry. The plain where some negotiations took place in the struggles among the descendants of Charles the Great is still called the Field of Lies; a name, he says, that might well be common to most spots where men have negotiated.[252] And this represents his general tone in speaking of a branch of activity which may interest the professional diplomatist in all its details, but which, as he thought, can only concern the historical student in its results. Here Voltaire represented a marked tendency, which waxes stronger as societies grow more penetrated with popular forces, to divest diplomacy of a professional quality, and to throw the adjustment of the relations between nations as entirely as possible into the hands of plain men of firm and upright character, and full knowledge of the special matters at issue.