It is in the expansion in the world of the two peoples that the effects of this difference are most clearly expressed and assume the greatest importance. The English race has populated a vast proportion of the surface of the world, and rules over one-fifth of the total population. Whereas the French people, who have conquered large areas, have never succeeded in permanently colonising any considerable portion of their conquests and they have failed to maintain their domination in many regions where they have for a time established it. In every extra-European region where they have come into conflict with the English race they have been worsted.
The secret of the difference in the expansion of the two peoples is the difference of innate mental quality that we are considering, enhanced by the differences of custom and of political and family organisation engendered by it. For, like all other innate tendencies, the two to which we are referring obtain accentuated expression through moulding customs, institutions and social organisation in ways which foster in successive generations just those tendencies of which these institutions are themselves the traditional outcome and expression. Thus, it is the individualistic nature of the political, religious, and family organisation of the English people which, having been engendered by innate independence of character and having in turn accentuated it in each generation, has enabled the people to achieve its marvels of colonisation and tropical administration. We see these tendencies playing a predominant part in the history of every British colony.
The difference was well brought out by Volney, a French observer of the French and English colonists in the early days of the settlement of North America. He wrote “The French colonist deliberates with his wife upon everything that he proposes to do; often the plans fall to the ground through lack of agreement.” “To visit one’s neighbours, to chat with them, is for the French an habitual need so imperious that on all the frontier of Louisiana and Canada you will not find a single French colonist established beyond sight of his neighbour’s home.” “On the other hand, the English colonist, slow and taciturn, passes the whole day continuously at work; at breakfast he coldly gives his orders to his wife; ... and goes forth to labour.... If he finds an opportunity to sell his farm at a profit, he does so and goes ten or twenty leagues further into the wilderness to make himself a new home[114].”
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.
The dominance of the spirit of independence among the English people he would explain also from the character of their political institutions during recent centuries. After recounting the political history of England from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and after showing how the people during that period repeatedly succeeded in asserting its liberties against the encroachments of the kings, he wrote—“In England the course of affairs, which I have endeavoured to trace since the sixteenth century, had diffused among the people a knowledge of their own resources and a skill and independence in the use of them, imperfect indeed, but still far superior to that possessed by any other of the great European countries,” But he was not wholly satisfied with this explanation; he added—“Besides this, other circumstances, which will be hereafter related, had, as early as the eleventh century, begun to affect our national character and had assisted in imparting to it that sturdy boldness, and at the same time, those habits of foresight, and of cautious reserve, to which the English mind owes its leading peculiarities.”
When we turn to his account of the primary cause of English independence[116], we find that it was, in his view, that the feudal system was established by William the Conqueror in a form different from that obtaining on the continent. The nobles received their lands directly from the king as grants, and all land owners were made to acknowledge their direct obligation to him. The nobles were in consequence too weak to set up their own power against that of the king, and therefore they called the people to their aid in resisting the power of the king; hence, the people early acquired rights and privileges and the habit of organised resistance to the central authority. “The English aristocracy, being thus forced by their own weakness, to rely on the people, it naturally followed that the people imbibed that tone of independence and that lofty bearing, of which our civil and political institutions are the consequence, rather than the cause. It is to this, and not to any fanciful peculiarity of race, that we owe the sturdy and enterprising spirit for which the inhabitants of this island have long been remarkable.”
“The practice of subinfeudation, became in France almost universal.” The great lords subgranted parts of their lands to lesser lords, and these again to others, and so on—“thus forming a long chain of dependence, and, as it were, organising submission into a system.” In this country, on the other hand, the practice was actively checked. “The result was that by the fourteenth century the liberties of Englishmen were secured,” and the spirit of independence had become a part of the national character; that is to say, Buckle maintained that three centuries of a different form of the feudal system sufficed to produce this profound difference between the French and English peoples.