lic law, or mass of laws, upon which
that independence and equilibrium are founded, be of no leading
consequence as they are preserved or destroyed, all the politics of
Europe for more than two centuries have been miserably erroneous.

[Sidenote: Prussia and Emperor.]

If the two great leading powers of Germany do not regard this danger (as
apparently they do not) in the light in which it presents itself so
naturally, it is because they are powers too great to have a social
interest. That sort of interest belongs only to those whose state of
weakness or mediocrity is such as to give them greater cause of
apprehension from what may destroy them than of hope from anything by
which they may be aggrandized.

As long as those two princes are at variance, so long the liberties of
Germany are safe. But if ever they should so far understand one another
as to be persuaded that they have a more direct and more certainly
defined interest in a proportioned mutual aggrandizement than in a
reciprocal reduction, that is, if they come to think that they are more
likely to be enriched by a division of spoil than to be rendered secure
by keeping to the old policy of preventing others from being spoiled by
either of them, from that moment the liberties of Germany are no more.

That a junction of two in such a scheme is neither impossible nor
improbable is evident from the partition of Poland in 1773, which was
effected by such a junction as made the interposition of other nations
to prevent it not easy. Their circumstances at that time hindered any
other three states, or indeed any two, from taking measures in common to
prevent it, though France was at that time an existing power, and had
not yet learned to act upon a system of politics of her own invention.
The geographical position of Poland was a great obstacle to any
movements of France in opposition to this, at that time, unparalleled
league. To my certain knowledge, if Great Britain had at that time been
willing to concur in preventing the execution of a project so dangerous
in the example, even exhausted as France then was by the preceding war,
and under a lazy and unenterprising prince, she would have at every risk
taken an active part in this business. But a languor with regard to so
remote an interest, and the principles and passions which were then
strongly at work at home, were the causes why Great Britain would not
give France any encouragement in such an enterprise. At th