he souls of his soldiers
surrender to his gibbet and his whipping-post; he could 'make the souls
of the nations surrender to his soldiers. He could only break men in as
he had been broken; while he could break in, he could never break out.
He could not slay in anger, nor even sin with simplicity. Thus he stands
alone among the conquerors of their kind; his madness was not due to a
mere misdirection of courage. Before the whisper of war had come to him
the foundations of his audacity had been laid in fear.

Of the work he did in this world there need be no considerable debate.
It was romantic, if it be romantic that the dragon should swallow St.
George. He turned a small country into a great one: he made a new
diplomacy by the fulness and far-flung daring of his lies: he took away
from criminality all reproach of carelessness and incompleteness. He
achieved an amiable combination of thrift and theft. He undoubtedly gave
to stark plunder something of the solidity of property. He protected
whatever he stole as simpler men protect whatever they have earned or
inherited. He turned his hollow eyes with a sort of loathsome affection
upon the territories which had most reluctantly become his: at the end
of the Seven Years' War men knew as little how he was to be turned out
of Silesia as they knew why he had ever been allowed in it. In Poland,
like a devil in possession, he tore asunder the body he inhabited; but
it was long before any man dreamed that such disjected limbs could live
again. Nor were the effects of his break from Christian tradition
confined to Christendom; Macaulay's world-wide generalisation is very
true though very Macaulayese. But though, in a long view, he scattered
the seeds of war all over the world, his own last days were passed in a
long and comparatively prosperous peace; a peace which received and
perhaps deserved a certain praise: a peace with which many European
peoples were content. For though he did not understand justice, he could
understand moderation. He was the most genuine and the most wicked of
pacifists. He did not want any more wars. He had tortured and beggared
all his neighbours; but he bore them no malice for it.

The immediate cause of that spirited disaster, the intervention of
England on behalf of the new Hohenzollern throne, was due, of course,
to the national policy of the first William Pitt. He was the kind of man
whose vanity and simplicity are too easily overwhelmed by the obviou