a and
Austria. The two sovereigns, left without allies and with their
dominions drained of men and money, agreed to a mutual exchange of their
conquests; the boundaries of their territories once more became as they
had been before the Seven Years' War. Frederick calculated at more than
eight hundred thousand men the losses caused to the belligerents by this
obstinate and resultless struggle, the fruit of wicked ambition or
culpable weaknesses on the part of governments. Thanks to the
indomitable energy and the equally zealous and unscrupulous ability of
the man who had directed her counsels during the greater part of the war,
England alone came triumphant out of the strife. She had won India
forever; and, for some years at least, civilized America, almost in its
entirety, obeyed her laws. She had won what France had lost, not by
superiority of arms, or even of generals, but by the natural and proper
force of a free people, ably and liberally governed.

The position of France abroad, at the end of the Seven Years' War, was
as painful as it was humiliating; her position at home was still more
serious, and the deep-lying source of all the reverses which had come to
overwhelm the French. Slowly lessened by the faults and misfortunes of
King Louis XIV.'s later years, the kingly authority, which had fallen,
under Louis XV., into hands as feeble as they were corrupt, was ceasing
to inspire the nation with the respect necessary for the working of
personal power: public opinion was no longer content to accuse the
favorite and the ministers; it was beginning to make the king responsible
for the evils suffered and apprehended. People waited in vain for a
decision of the crown to put a stop to the incessantly renewed struggles
between the Parliament and the clergy. Disquieted at one and the same
time by the philosophical tendencies which were beginning to spread in
men's minds, and by the comptroller-general Machault's projects for
exacting payment of the imposts upon ecclesiastical revenues, the
Archbishop of Paris, Christopher de Beaumont, and the Bishop of Mirepoix,
Boyer, who was in charge of the benefice-list, conceived the idea of
stifling these dangerous symptoms by an imprudent recourse to the
spiritual severities so much dreaded but lately by the people. Several
times over, the last sacraments were denied to the dying who had declined
to subscribe to the bull Unigenitus, a clumsy measure, which was sure to
excite