an.
In this connection he has the characteristic which perhaps humanized but
was not allowed to hamper the aristocratic plan; I mean that he could
use the middle classes. It was a young soldier of middle rank, James
Wolfe, who fell gloriously driving the French out of Quebec; it was a
young clerk of the East India Company, Robert Clive, who threw open to
the English the golden gates of India. But it was precisely one of the
strong points of this eighteenth-century aristocracy that it wielded
without friction the wealthier _bourgeoisie_; it was not there that the
social cleavage was to come. He was an eloquent parliamentary orator,
and though Parliament was as narrow as a senate, it was one of great
senators. The very word recalls the roll of those noble Roman phrases
they often used, which we are right in calling classic, but wrong in
calling cold. In some ways nothing could be further from all this fine
if florid scholarship, all this princely and patrician geniality, all
this air of freedom and adventure on the sea, than the little inland
state of the stingy drill-sergeants of Potsdam, hammering mere savages
into mere soldiers. And yet the great chief of these was in some ways
like a shadow of Chatham flung across the world--the sort of shadow that
is at once an enlargement and a caricature. The English lords, whose
paganism was ennobled by patriotism, saw here something drawn out long
and thin out of their own theories. What was paganism in Chatham was
atheism in Frederick the Great. And what was in the first patriotism was
in the second something with no name but Prussianism. The cannibal
theory of a commonwealth, that it can of its nature eat other
commonwealths, had entered Christendom. Its autocracy and our own
aristocracy drew indirectly nearer together, and seemed for a time to be
wedded; but not before the great Bolingbroke had made a dying gesture,
as if to forbid the banns.

XV

THE WAR WITH THE GREAT REPUBLICS

We cannot understand the eighteenth century so long as we suppose that
rhetoric is artificial because it is artistic. We do not fall into this
folly about any of the other arts. We talk of a man picking out notes
arranged in ivory on a wooden piano "with much feeling," or of his
pouring out his soul by scraping on cat-gut after a training as careful
as an acrobat's. But we are still haunted with a prejudice that verbal
form and verbal effect must somehow be hypocritical when they are the