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

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 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