one of them should begin with him; a
resolution which for that time was frustrated by their want of seamen
and magazines; but the preparations were continued under pretence
of keeping themselves in a condition to fulfil their engagements,
contracted in the last subsidiary convention with England; and when all
were finished, the storm would fall on the king of Prussia.

This is the substance of that famous memorial published by his Prussian
majesty, to which the justifying pieces or authentic documents were
annexed; and to which a circumstantial answer was exhibited by the
partisans of her imperial majesty. Specious reasons may, doubtless, be
adduced on either side of almost any dispute, by writers of ingenuity;
but, in examining this contest, it must be allowed that both sides
adopted illicit practices. The empress-queen and the elector of
Saxony had certainly a right to form defensive treaties for their own
preservation; and without all doubt, it was their interest and their
duty to secure themselves from the enterprises of such a formidable
neighbour; but at the same time, the contracting parties seem to have
carried their views much farther than defensive measures. Perhaps the
court of Vienna considered the cession of Silesia as a circumstance
altogether compulsive, and therefore not binding against the rights of
natural equity. She did not at all doubt that the king of Prussia would
be tempted by his ambition and great warlike power, to take some step
which might be justly interpreted into an infraction of the treaty of
Dresden; and in that case she was determined to avail herself of the
confederacy she had formed, that she might retrieve the countries she
had lost by the unfortunate events of the last war, as well as bridle
the dangerous power and disposition of the Prussian monarch; and in all
probability the king of Poland, over and above the same consideration,
was desirous of some indemnification for the last irruption into his
electoral dominions, and the great sums he had paid for the subsequent
peace. Whether they were authorised by the law of nature and nations
to make reprisals by an actual partition of the countries they might
conquer, supposing him to be the aggressor, we shall not pretend to
determine; but it does not at all appear, that his Prussian majesty's
danger was such as entitled him to take those violent steps which he
now attempted to justify. By this time the flame of war was kindled up
to a