History of Friedrich II of Prussia, vol 13 | Page 6

this one
indispensable business. "Owing to his fears for Hanover!" say they,
with indignation, with no end of suspicion, angry pamphleteering and
covert eloquence, "within those walls" and without.
The suspicion of Hanover's checking his Majesty's Pragmatic velocity
is altogether well founded; and there need no more be said on that
Hanover score. Be it well understood and admitted, Hanover was the
Britannic Majesty's beloved son; and the British Empire his opulent
milk-cow. Richest of milk-cows; staff of one's life, for grand purposes
and small; beautiful big animal, not to be provoked; but to be stroked
and milked:--Friends, if you will do a Glorious Revolution of that kind,
and burn such an amount of tar upon it, why eat sour herbs for an
inevitable corollary therefrom! And let my present readers understand,
at any rate, that,--except in Wapping, Bristol and among the simple
instinctive classes (with whom, it is true, go Pitt and some illustrious
figures),--political England generally, whatever of England had
Parliamentary discourse of reason, and did Pamphlets, Despatches,
Harangues, went greatly along with his Majesty in that Pragmatic
Business. And be the blame of delirium laid on the right back, where it

ought to lie, not on the wrong, which has enough to bear of its own.
And go not into that dust-whirlwind of extinct stupidities, O
reader:--what reader would, except for didactic objects? Know only
that it does of a truth whirl there; and fancy always, if you can, that
certain things and Human Figures, a Friedrich, a Chatham and some
others, have it for their Life-Element. Which, I often think, is their
principal misfortune with Posterity; said Life-Element having gone to
such an unutterable condition for gods and men.
"One other thing surprises us in those Old Pamphlets," says my
Constitutional Friend: "How the phrase, 'Cause of Liberty' ever and
anon turns up, with great though extinct emphasis, evidently sincere.
After groping, one is astonished to find it means Support of the House
of Austria; keeping of the Hapsburgs entire in their old Possessions
among mankind! That, to our great-grandfathers, was the 'Cause of
Liberty;'--said 'Cause' being, with us again, Electoral Suffrage and
other things; a notably different definition, perhaps still wider of the
mark.
"Our great-grandfathers lived in perpetual terror that they would be
devoured by France; that French ambition would overset the Celestial
Balance, and proceed next to eat the British Nation. Stand upon your
guard then, one would have said: Look to your ships, to your defences,
to your industries; to your virtues first of all,--your VIRTUTES,
manhoods, conformities to the Divine Law appointed you; which are
the great and indeed sole strength to any Man or Nation! Discipline
yourselves, wisely, in all kinds; more and more, till there be no
anarchic fibre left in you. Unanarchic, disciplined at all points, you
might then, I should say, with supreme composure, let France, and the
whole World at its back, try what they could do upon you and the
unique little Island you are so lucky as to live in?--Foolish mortals:
what Potentiality of Battle, think you (not against France only, but
against Satanas and the Ministers of Chaos generally), would a poor
Friedrich Wilhelm, not to speak of better, have got out of such a
Possession, had it been his to put in drill! And drill is not of soldiers
only; though perhaps of soldiers first and most indispensably of all;
since 'without Being,' as my Friend Oliver was wont to say, 'Well-

being is not possible.' There is military drill; there is industrial,
economic, spiritual; gradually there are all kinds of drill, of wise
discipline, of peremptory mandate become effective everywhere,
'OBEY the Laws of Heaven, or else disappear from these latitudes!' Ah
me, if one dealt in day-dreams, and prophecies of an England grown
celestial,--celestial she should be, not in gold nuggets, continents all of
beef, and seas all of beer, Abolition of Pain, and Paradise to All and
Sundry, but in that quite different fashion; and there, I should say,
THERE were the magnificent Hope to indulge in! That were to me the
'Cause of Liberty;' and any the smallest contribution towards that kind
of 'Liberty ' were a sacred thing!--
"Belleisle again may, if he pleases, call his the Cause of Sovereignty. A
Sovereign Louis, it would appear, has not governing enough to do
within his own French borders, but feels called to undertake Germany
as well;--a gentleman with an immense governing faculty, it would
appear? Truly, good reader, I am sick of heart, contemplating those
empty sovereign mountebanks, and empty antagonist ditto, with their
Causes of Liberty and Causes of Anti- Liberty; and cannot but wish
that we had got the ashes of that World-Explosion, of 1789, well
riddled and smelted, and the poor World were quit of a great