The Crimes of England | Page 9

Austria was a German of the more
generous sort, limited in a domestic rather than a national sense, firm in
the ancient faith at which all her own courtiers were sneering, and as
brave as a young lioness. Frederick hated her as he hated everything
German and everything good. He sets forth in his own memoirs, with
that clearness which adds something almost superhuman to the
mysterious vileness of his character, how he calculated on her youth,
her inexperience and her lack of friends as proof that she could be
despoiled with safety. He invaded Silesia in advance of his own
declaration of war (as if he had run on ahead to say it was coming) and
this new anarchic trick, combined with the corruptibility of nearly all
the other courts, left him after the two Silesian wars in possession of
the stolen goods. But Maria Theresa had refused to submit to the
immorality of nine points of the law. By appeals and concessions to
France, Russia, and other powers, she contrived to create something
which, against the atheist innovator even in that atheist age, stood up
for an instant like a spectre of the Crusades. Had that Crusade been
universal and whole-hearted, the great new precedent of mere force and
fraud would have been broken; and the whole appalling judgment
which is fallen upon Christendom would have passed us by. But the
other Crusaders were only half in earnest for Europe; Frederick was
quite in earnest for Prussia; and he sought for allies, by whose aid this
weak revival of good might be stamped out, and his adamantine
impudence endure for ever. The allies he found were the English. It is
not pleasant for an Englishman to have to write the words.
This was the first act of the tragedy, and with it we may leave Frederick,
for we are done with the fellow though not with his work. It is enough
to add that if we call all his after actions satanic, it is not a term of

abuse, but of theology. He was a Tempter. He dragged the other kings
to "partake of the body of Poland," and learn the meaning of the Black
Mass. Poland lay prostrate before three giants in armour, and her name
passed into a synonym for failure. The Prussians, with their fine
magnanimity, gave lectures on the hereditary maladies of the man they
had murdered. They could not conceive of life in those limbs; and the
time was far off when they should be undeceived. In that day five
nations were to partake not of the body, but of the spirit of Poland; and
the trumpet of the resurrection of the peoples should be blown from
Warsaw to the western isles.

III--The Enigma of Waterloo
That great Englishman Charles Fox, who was as national as Nelson,
went to his death with the firm conviction that England had made
Napoleon. He did not mean, of course, that any other Italian gunner
would have done just as well; but he did mean that by forcing the
French back on their guns, as it were, we had made their chief gunner
necessarily their chief citizen. Had the French Republic been left alone,
it would probably have followed the example of most other ideal
experiments; and praised peace along with progress and equality. It
would almost certainly have eyed with the coldest suspicion any
adventurer who appeared likely to substitute his personality for the pure
impersonality of the Sovereign People; and would have considered it
the very flower of republican chastity to provide a Brutus for such a
Caesar. But if it was undesirable that equality should be threatened by a
citizen, it was intolerable that it should be simply forbidden by a
foreigner. If France could not put up with French soldiers she would
very soon have to put up with Austrian soldiers; and it would be absurd
if, having decided to rely on soldiering, she had hampered the best
French soldier even on the ground that he was not French. So that
whether we regard Napoleon as a hero rushing to the country's help, or
a tyrant profiting by the country's extremity, it is equally clear that
those who made the war made the war-lord; and those who tried to
destroy the Republic were those who created the Empire. So, at least,
Fox argued against that much less English prig who would have called

him unpatriotic; and he threw the blame upon Pitt's Government for
having joined the anti-French alliance, and so tipped up the scale in
favour of a military France. But whether he was right or no, he would
have been the readiest to admit that England was not the first to fly at
the throat of the young Republic. Something in Europe