ralizing defeats, that won for him that universal admiration as a
man which he lived to secure in spite of all his defects and crimes. We
admire the resources and dexterity of an outlawed bandit, but we should
remember he is a bandit still; and we confound all the laws which hold
society together, when we cover up the iniquity of a great crime by the
successes which have apparently baffled justice. Frederic II., by
stealing Silesia, and thus provoking a great war of untold and
indescribable miseries, is entitled to anything but admiration, whatever
may have been his military genius; and I am amazed that so great a man
as Carlyle, with all his hatred of shams, and his clear perceptions of
justice and truth, should have whitewashed such a robber. I cannot
conceive how the severest critic of the age should have spent the best
years of his life in apologies for so bad a man, if his own philosophy
had not become radically unsound, based on the abominable doctrine that
the end justifies the means, and that an outward success is the test of
right. Far different was Carlyle's treatment of Cromwell. Frederic had
no such cause as Cromwell; it was simply his own or his country's
aggrandizement by any means, or by any sword he could lay hold of. The
chief merit of Carlyle's history is his impartiality and accuracy in
describing the details of the contest: the cause of the contest he does
not sufficiently reprobate; and all his sympathies seem to be with the
unscrupulous robber who fights heroically, rather than with indignant
Europe outraged by his crimes. But we cannot separate crime from its
consequences; and all the reverses, the sorrows, the perils, the
hardships, the humiliations, the immense losses, the dreadful calamities
through which Prussia had to pass, which wrung even the heart of
Frederic with anguish, were only a merited retribution. The Seven Years'
War was a king-hunt, in which all the forces of the surrounding
monarchies gathered around the doomed man, making his circle smaller and
smaller, and which would certainly have ended in his utter ruin, had he
not been rescued by events as unexpected as they were unparalleled. Had
some great and powerful foe been converted suddenly into a friend at a
critical moment, Napoleon, another unscrupulous robber, might not have
been defeated at Waterloo, or died on a rock in the ocean. But
Providence, it would seem, who rules the fate of war, had some
inscrutable reason for the resc