orm of practical absolutism.
Theological monarchy had done its time, and was now followed by
military monarchy. Church and State had oppressed mankind together;
henceforth the State oppressed for its own sake. And this was the
genuine idea which came in with the Renaissance, according to which
the State alone governs, and all other things obey. Reformation and
Counter-Reformation had pushed religion to the front: but after two
centuries the original theory, that government must be undivided and
uncontrolled, began to prevail. It is a new type, not to be
confounded with that of Henry VIII, Philip II, or Lewis XIV, and
better adapted to a more rational and economic age. Government so
understood is the intellectual guide of the nation, the promoter of
wealth, the teacher of knowledge, the guardian of morality, the
mainspring of the ascending movement of man. That is the tremendous
power, supported by millions of bayonets, which grew up in the days of
which I have been speaking at Petersburg, and was developed, by much
abler minds, chiefly at Berlin; and it is the greatest danger that
remains to be encountered by the Anglo-Saxon race.

XVIII

FREDBRIC THE GREAT

THE PEACE of Utrecht was followed by a period of languor and
depression. Spain and Sweden asserted themselves unsuccessfully;
whilst England under Walpole, France under Fleury, Austria under the
ceremonious majesty of Charles VI, were inactive and pacific; The
generation lacked initiative, and was not rich in eminent men.

In Prussia, there was no repose, no leisure, but simply the tension of
a tiger crouching for a spring. The king, who had devoted his life to
creating the greatest army in Europe, never attempted to employ it,
and left it a thunderbolt in the hands of his son. The crown prince
was a musician and a versifier, with a taste for clever men, but also
for cleverish men, an epicurean student, with much loose knowledge,
literary rather than scientific, and an inaccurate acquaintance with
French and Latin. To Bayle, Locke, Voltaire in his first manner, he
owed an abundance of borrowed ideas, conventionally rational; but to
the rising literature; of his own country, which ruled the world
before he died, he did not attend. Hardened by his father's
heartless severity he learnt to live without sympathy, to despise
mankind, to rely on himself. He was the author of a commonplace
treatise against Machiavelli, partly founded on Montesquieu's Gran