History of Friedrich II of Prussia, vol 13 | Page 7

many
things!"--
My Constitutional Historian of England, musing on Belleisle and his
Anti-Pragmatic industries and grandiosities,--"how Chief-Bully
Belleisle stept down into the ring as a gay Volunteer, and foolish
Chief-Defender George had to follow dismally heroic, as a Conscript of
Fate,"--drops these words: in regard to the Wages they respectively
had:--
"Nations that go into War without business there, are sure of getting
business as they proceed; and if the beginning were
phantasms,--especially phantasms of the hoping, self-conceited
kind,--the results for them are apt to be extremely real! As was the case
with the French in this War, and those following, in which his Britannic
Majesty played chief counter-tenor. From 1741, in King Friedrich's
First War, onwards to Friedrich's Third War, 1756-1763, the volunteer

French found a great deal of work lying ready for them,--gratuitous on
their part, from the beginning. And the results to them came out, first
completely visible, in the World-Miracles of 1789, and the years
following!
"Nations, again, may be driven upon War by phantasm TERRORS, and
go into it, in sorrow of heart, not gayety of heart; and that is a shade
better. And one always pities a poor Nation, in such case;-- as the very
Destinies rather do, and judge it more mercifully. Nay, the poor
bewildered Nation may, among its brain-phantasms, have something of
reality and sanity inarticulately stirring it withal. It may have a real
ordinance of Heaven to accomplish on those terms:--and IF so, it will
sometimes, in the most chaotic circuitous ways, through endless
hazards, at a hundred or a hundred thousand times the natural expense,
ultimately get it done! This was the case of the poor English in those
Wars.
"They were Wars extraneous to England little less than to France;
neither Nation had real business in them; and they seem to us now a
very mad object on the part of both. But they were not gratuitously
gone into, on the part of England; far from that. England undertook
them, with its big heart very sorrowful, strange spectralities
bewildering it; and managed them (as men do sleep-walking) with a
gloomy solidity of purpose, with a heavy-laden energy, and, on the
whole, with a depth of stupidity, which were very great. Yet look at the
respective net results. France lies down to rot into grand
Spontaneous-Combustion, Apotheosis of Sansculottism, and much else;
which still lasts, to her own great peril, and the great affliction of
neighbors. Poor England, after such enormous stumbling among the
chimney-pots, and somnambulism over all the world for twenty years,
finds on awakening, that she is arrived, after all, where she wished to
be, and a good deal farther! Finds that her own important little errand is
somehow or other, done;--and, in short, that 'Jenkins's Ear [as she
named the thing] HAS been avenged,' and the Ocean Highways
'opened' and a good deal more, in a most signal way! For the Eternal
Providences--little as poor Dryasdust now knows of it, mumbling and
maundering that sad stuff of his--do rule; and the great soul of the

world, I assure you once more, is JUST. And always for a Nation, as
for a man, it is very behooveful to be honest, to be modest, however
stupid!"--
By this time, however,--Mollwitz having fallen out, and Belleisle being
evidently on the steps,--his Britannic Majesty recognizes clearly, and
insists upon it, strengthened by his Harringtons and everybody of
discernment, That, nefarious or not, this Friedrich will require to be
bargained with. That, far from breaking in upon him, and partitioning
him (how far from it!), there is no conceivable method of saving the
Celestial Balances till HE be satisfied, in some way. This is the one
step his Britannic Majesty has yet made, out of these his choking
imbroglios; and truly this is one. Hyndford, his best negotiator, is on
the road for Friedrich's Camp; Robinson at Vienna, has been directed to
say and insist, "Bargain with that man; he must be bargained with, if
our Cause of Liberty is to be saved at all?"--
And now, having opened the dust-bin so far, that the reader's fancy
might be stirred without affliction to his lungs and eyes, let us shut it
down again,--might we but hope forever! That is too fond a hope. But
the background or sustaining element made imaginable, the few events
deserving memory may surely go on at a much swifter pace.

Chapter II.
CAMP OF STREHLEN.
Friedrich's Silesian Camps this Summer, Camp of Strehlen chiefly,
were among the strangest places in the world. Friedrich, as we have
often noticed, did not much pursue the defeated Austrians, at or near
Mollwitz, or press them towards flat ruin in their Silesian business: it is
clear he anxiously wished a bargain without farther exasperation; and
hoped he might get it