advantage ultimately to follow, and so on, it be to the
advantage of Prussia to break such solemn treaty, then such a
treaty should be broken.

To this he adds:

This doctrine of the "Frederician Tradition" does not mean that the
Prussian statesmen wantonly do wrong, whether in acts of cruelty or
in acts of treason and bad faith. What it means is that, wherever
they are met by the dilemma, "Shall I do _this_, which is to the
advantage of my country but opposed to European and common morals,
or _that_, which is consonant with those morals but to the
disadvantage of my country?" they choose the former and not the
latter course.

That this tradition not merely existed but was the paramount influence
in Prussian foreign politics Mr. Belloc had long realized, while, at the
same time, he had been very well aware of the fatuous illusions about
themselves under which the Prussians and a great portion of the
German-speaking peoples labour--illusions which necessarily led the
German national will into conflict with the will of the other European
nations. Proof of the fact that Mr. Belloc had long held this view of
Prussia may be found by any reader of his essays, while a passage which
occurs in _Marie Antoinette_ is especially illuminating:

It is characteristic of the more deplorable forms of insurgence
against civilized morals that they originate either in a race
permanently alien to (though present in) the unity of the Roman
Empire, or in those barbaric provinces which were admitted to the
European scheme after the fall of Rome, and which for the most part
enjoyed but a brief and precarious vision of the Faith between
their tardy conversion and the schism of the sixteenth century.
Prussia was of this latter kind, and with Prussia Frederick. To-day
his successors and their advisers, when they attempt to justify the
man, are compelled still to ignore the European tradition of
honour. But this crime of his, the partition of Poland, the germ of
all that international distrust which has ended in the intolerable
armed strain of our time has another character added to it: a
character which attaches invariably to ill-doing when that
ill-doing is also uncivilized. It was a folly. The same folly
attached to it as has attached to every revolt against the historic
conscience of Europe: such blindnesse