it concerns,
from king to churl, that imposture must come to an end. But for the
precise amount and kind of dissolution which the West owes to it, for
the political meaning of it, as distinguished from its moral or its
dramatic significance, we seek in vain, finding no word on the subject,
nor even evidence of consciousness that such word is needed.

The truth is that with Mr. Carlyle the Revolution begins not in 1789 but
in 1741; not with the Fall of the Bastile but with the Battle of
Mollwitz. This earliest of Frederick's victories was the first sign
'that indeed a new hour had struck on the Time Horologe, that a new
Epoch had arisen. Slumberous Europe, rotting amid its blind pedantries,
its lazy hypocrisies, conscious and unconscious: this man is capable of
shaking it a little out of its stupid refuges of lies and ignominious
wrappages, and of intimating to it afar off that there is still a
Veracity in Things, and a Mendacity in Sham Things,' and so forth, in
the well-known strain.[17] It is impossible to overrate the truly
supreme importance of the violent break-up of Europe which followed the
death of the Emperor Charles VI., and in many respects 1740 is as
important a date in the history of Western societies as 1789. Most of us
would probably find the importance of this epoch in its destructive
contribution, rather than in that constructive and moral quality which
lay under the movement of '89. The Empire was thoroughly shattered.
France was left weak, impoverished, humiliated. Spain was finally thrust
from among the efficient elements in the European State-system. Most
important of all, their too slight sanctity had utterly left the old
conceptions of public law and international right. The whole polity of
Europe was left in such a condition of disruption as had not been
equalled since the death of Charles the Great. The Partition of Poland
was the most startling evidence of the completeness of this disruption,
and if one statesman was more to be praised or blamed for shaking over
the fabric than another, that statesman was Frederick the Second of
Prussia. But then, in Mr. Carlyle's belief, there was equally a
constructive and highly moral side to all this. The old fell to pieces
because it was internally rotten. The gospel of the new was that the
government of men and kingdoms is a business beyond all others demanding
an open-eyed accessibility to all facts and realities; that here more
than anywhere else you n