ned the
seizure of Silesia. It was too late to complain of the dismemberment
of Poland. The work was completed, under very different conditions,
twenty years later. It was overthrown by Napoleon; but, as he was
without a Polish policy, and was disgusted by the obtrusive Liberalism
of the Poles in his time, it was revived and sanctioned by the wisdom
of united Europe at the Congress of Vienna.

The years which followed the Seven Years' War were a time of peace for
a great part of the Continent, in the course of which a memorable
change took place in European polity. It was the age of what may be
called the Repentance of Monarchy. That which had been selfish,
oppressive, and cruel became impersonal, philanthropic, and
beneficent. The strong current of eighteenth-century opinion left the
State omnipotent, but obliged it to take account of public, as
distinct from dynastic, interests. It was employed more or less
intelligently, for the good of the people. Humanity contended for the
mastery with ambition. It was still a despotism, but an enlightened
despotism. The competent expert more than ever was supreme, but he
was influenced by great writers--Locke, Montesquieu, Turgot, Beccaria,
Adam Smith. There was a serious tendency to increase popular
education, to relieve poverty, to multiply hospitals, to promote
wealth by the operations of the engineer, to emancipate the serf, to
abolish torture, to encourage academies, observatories, and the like.
Prisons had never been so bad--attempts were made to reform them. The
slave trade had never been so prosperous; people began to doubt
whether it was moral. Laws were codified, and though the codes were
surprisingly bad, the laws were improved by them. The movement was
almost universal, from Spain to Denmark and Russia. Piedmont dealt
successfully with the feudal and social question, which baffled the
National Assembly in France. The rich plain of the Milanese was
administered by a proconsul of Maria Theresa, in a manner which made
it the example of Europe. A strenuous disciple of the economists
governed Baden. Wuerzburg and Bamberg, under the last Prince Bishop,
were considered the happiest region in the empire. Turgot,
Bernstorff, Firmian, were admired and imitated as Lewis XIV had been
in a former phase of absolute monarchy. Society was enjoyable, apart
from politics, and was studied like a fine art in the homes of
luxury--Paris, Brussels, Rome, and Venice. Thi