ip
between Prussia and France. With France Frederic could never have any
serious controversy. His territories were so situated that his ambition,
greedy and unscrupulous as it was, could never impel him to attack her
of his own accord. He was more than half a Frenchman; he wrote, spoke,
read nothing but French; he delighted in French society; the admiration
of the French he proposed to himself as the best reward of all his
exploits. It seemed incredible that any French government, however
notorious for levity or stupidity, could spurn away such an ally.

The Court of Vienna, however, did not despair. The Austrian diplomatists
propounded a new scheme of politics, which, it must be owned, was not
altogether without plausibility. The great powers, according to this
theory, had long been under a delusion. They had looked on each other as
natural enemies, while in truth they were natural allies. A succession
of cruel wars had devastated Europe, had thinned the population, had
exhausted the public resources, had loaded governments with an immense
burden of debt; and when, after two hundred years of murderous hostility
or of hollow truce, the illustrious Houses whose enmity had distracted
the world sat down to count their gains, to what did the real advantage
on either side amount? Simply to this, that they had kept each other
from thriving. It was not the King of France, it was not the Emperor,
who had reaped the fruits of the Thirty Years' War, or of the War of the
Pragmatic Sanction. Those fruits had been pilfered by states of the
second and third rank, which, secured against jealousy by their
insignificance, had dexterously aggrandized themselves while pretending
to serve the animosity of the great chiefs of Christendom. While the
lion and tiger were tearing each other, the jackal had run off into the
jungle with the prey. The real gainer by the Thirty Years' War had been
neither France nor Austria, but Sweden. The real gainer by the war of
the Pragmatic Sanction had been neither France nor Austria, but the
upstart of Brandenburg. France had made great efforts, had added largely
to her military glory, and largely to her public burdens; and for what
end? Merely that Frederic might rule Silesia. For this, and this alone,
one French army, wasted by sword and famine, had perished in Bohemia;
and another had purchased, with floods of the noblest blood, the barren
glory of Fontenoy. And this prince, for whom France had suffered s