nies would
engage in that supreme struggle which has given to the world the United
States of America.

CHAPTER LIV.----LOUIS XV.--THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR.--MINISTRY OF THE DUKE OF
CHOISEUL. 1748-1774.

It was not only in the colonies and on the seas that the peace of Aix-la-
Chapelle had seemed merely a truce destined to be soon broken;
hostilities had never ceased in India or Canada; English vessels scoured
the world, capturing, in spite of treaties, French merchant-ships; in
Europe and on the continent, all the sovereigns were silently preparing
for new efforts; only the government of King Louis XV., intrenched behind
its disinterestedness in the negotiations, and ignoring the fatal
influences of weakness and vanity, believed itself henceforth beyond the
reach of a fresh war. The nation, as oblivious as the government, but
less careless than it, because they had borne the burden of the fault
committed, were applying for the purpose of their material recovery that
power of revival which, through a course of so many errors and reverses,
has always saved France; in spite of the disorder in the finances and the
crushing weight of the imposts, she was working and growing rich;
intellectual development was following the rise in material resources;
the court was corrupt and inert, like the king, but a new life,
dangerously free and bold, was beginning to course through men's minds
the wise, reforming instincts, the grave reflections of the dying
Montesquieu no longer sufficed for them; Voltaire, who had but lately
been still moderate and almost respectful, was about to commence with his
friends of the _L'Encyclopedie_ that campaign against the Christian faith
which was to pave the way for the materialism of our own days. "Never
was Europe more happy than during the years which rolled by between 1750
and 1758," he has said in his _Tableau du Siecle de Louis XV._ The evil,
however, was hatching beneath the embers, and the last supports of the
old French society were cracking up noiselessly. The Parliaments were
about to disappear, the Catholic church was becoming separated more and
more widely every day from the people of whom it claimed to be the sole
instructress and directress. The natural heads of the nation, the
priests and the great lords, thought no longer and lived no longer as it.
The public voice was raised simultaneously against the authority or
insensate prodigality of Madame de Pompadour, and against the