new Prussian ruler prepared to repudiate his father Frederick William's guarantee of the Pragmatic Sanction, the domestic record by which the emperor fancied he could ensure the descent of his possessions to his daughter Maria Theresa, to the exclusion of any eventual pretenders claiming on the ground of their descent from earlier imperial lines. Similar recognitions of the rights of the young archduchess had been signed by the principal European Powers, several of whom now allowed it to be understood that they regarded the said acts as waste paper, which might be torn up without scruple. Frederick was not much given to barren ethical speculation, but he set forth certain practical reasons for repudiating his father's promise to maintain Maria Theresa's rights. His argument was, that his predecessor's recognition of the Pragmatic Sanction was no nude pact,' but a quid pro quo, and that the consideration for which it was given had afterwards been fraudulently withheld. Two hundred years before this time the Elector of Brandenburg and the Count Palatine of the Lower Rhine were in dispute regarding the possession of the duchies of Berg, Jülich, and Cleves, situated in the latitude of Düsseldorf and Cologne. A long conflict, which merged into the Thirty Years' War, terminated in a compromise, by which Berg and Julich were assigned to the Palatine house, with reversion to Brandenburg in case that house should become extinct. Cleves (the home of the Lady Anne, the consort divorced by Henry VIII. for her resemblance to a Flanders mare') was ceded to the elector in absolute ownership. After the lapse of two centuries the eventuality for which provision had been made seemed to be in sight, the death of the then palatine without heirs of his body being expected to supervene. Thereupon the Emperor Charles VI., adopting the lines of a previous unratified convention by which he had hoped to secure Prussia's support of the Pragmatic Sanction, tied himself by treaty to secure to Frederick William the execution of the compromise, receiving, in return, that monarch's promise to support Maria Theresa's claims on the palatine's decease. Not long afterwards his imperial majesty, turning his back upon himself, signed an equally solemn treaty with France, whereby Berg and Jülich were secured to a new llateral claimant of the Palatine branch, to whom posseson, as against Prussia, was specially guaranteed. That this roke of Hapsburg diplomacy released Frederick William om his undertaking to support the Pragmatic Sanction is lf-evident: the more so as an article of the treaty between

Charles VI. and himself recited that any infraction of its provisions would relieve both parties of their engagements. Frederick William was, therefore, entitled to say to Austria: 'No Berg and Jülich, no empress-queen.'

The acquisition of the two duchies was an idea which had haunted Frederick previous to his accession. After his father's death it was pushed into the background by a scheme for the recovery of certain avulsa imperii situated in the frontier Austrian province of Silesia. Two centuries before, the principality of Jägerndorf and the duchies of Liegnitz, Brieg, and Wohlan had fallen by various incidents of purchase and inheritance to the family of the electors of Brandenburg, by whom they were held, as appanages or in other ways, as Bohemian or Hapsburg fiefs. These Silesian territories were thus under the emperor's feudal control, and the Hohenzollern owners were at different times, on grounds religious or political, dispossessed by formal imperial decision. Whether the acts of deprivation were, as Frederick's Prussian apologists say, mere robbery, or whether, as Austrian partisans argue, the emperors were herein simply exercising their rights as the fountains of Germanic law, no sane person will now attempt to decide. The knowledge requisite for the formation of a serious judgement on this intricate subject is possessed by no modern; it could only be attainable, if at all, by prolonged study of cobwebs of antique Wetzlar jurisprudence, of which every reasonable being must, in Gibbonian phrase, 'desire to remain ignorant.' The point is happily more or less irrelevant. Finding the outstanding Brandenburg claims of which there was chronic reiteration at Vienna to be irksome, the Emperor Leopold decided to buy them up. Accordingly, by the Treaty of Berlin of 1686, he ceded to the Great Elector, so called, the circle of Schwiebus on the Oder, in lieu of the confiscated districts. But the solatium which the Hapsburg thus gave he adroitly took away. By the offer of a pecuniary bribe, or loan, to the Elector's son, afterwards King Frederick I., who was in want of money, he induced that prince to sign a surreptitious parallel treaty which bound him, when he came to the throne, to restore Schwiebus to the imperial house.

To this undertaking, valid or not, the prince on his accession held firm; but he considered himself to have been the victim of black Austrian treachery, a feeling which descended through his son to Frederick the Great.

That the ancient acts of ban and forfeiture just described,

and the illusory gift of Schwiebus, should rankle in Prussian bosoms, was not unnatural. But though these proceedings might rightly inspire resentment, or even thoughts of reprisal, they could not justify the burglarious invasion, in a time of perfect peace, of the province in which the disputed duchies lay. A modern Hohenzollern Mawworm has not been ashamed to write that the Christian morality was the loadstar of the ruler who treated revealed religion as a despicable delusion. In him was rooted the con'sciousness of the moral rights of the house of Hohen'zollern against the house of Hapsburg;' the divine gadfly impelled him to plunder Austria, the more so as the lost duchies were male fiefs, which the empress-queen could not inherit! From cant of this sort those German historians whom the events of 1870 have not rendered blind to the meaning of 1740 almost invariably refrain. As a rule, they allow considerable force to the arguments by which the Vienna jurists of the time met the Berlin apologists of the sudden Prussian irruption into Austrian territory. To partiality to Frederick non-Prussian Germans are, indeed, often less disposed than English authors, some of whom do not go beyond Charles Knight's mild censure of the conquest of Silesia It was not a very chivalrous movement.' On the historic Hohenzollern claims, as constituting a 'sittliches • Moment,' or ethical motive, justifying his irruption into Austrian territory, the King of Prussia himself laid little sss. The first preliminary version of his 'Memoirs' (rewenty published), written shortly after the invasion, alludes without emphasis to the rights' of his house to the Silesian principalities, giving, as more serious inducements for his attack on the empress-queen, his wish personally to acquire

putation, and his desire to furnish his troops with the mans of gaining glory.' In the authorised version of the Memoirs, published thirty years after the composition of 4 preliminary draft, and much amended and edited, both stylistic and political grounds-in this the military motive presiently suppressed.

Wing to the Swan of Padua' before he embarked en the opening enterprise of the New Course,' Frederick where that all had long been arranged in his head, the wly thing left to settle being the manner of the execution ox design, We know how carefully he had considered tox apparent dangers, and also its side issues. First he xindad the Furopean diplomatic situation. France and Angland wwww he remarked, the two leading continental

Powers; the rest were their satellites, and did not count for much. A former French minister for foreign affairs lately exhorted his countrymen to endeavour to form a coalition of Central Europe against 'le péril anglais.' A century and a half ago it was an axiom of political belief at Versailles that British statesmanship aimed at the usurpation of naval supremacy over the seas and oceans of both hemispheres, so that the insular fleet, undisturbed by rivals, might monopolise the maritime commerce of the globe; while at the Court of St. James's it was held for gospel that the foreign policy of France was an uninterrupted plot against the liberties of Europe and the security and independence of our island. A grand confederacy against the house of Bourbon, to be led by the young King of Prussia and joined by the emperor, had been planned by Horace Walpole the elder, a paper combination warmly advocated by his brother, the unwarlike minister, Sir Robert. Beyond the Channel, the cardinal who after a fashion governed France, whose pacific passion inspired Pope with the line-Peace is my dear delight, not Fleury's more'— was never so deeply lapped in dreams of quiet as to forget his grand duty of isolating us from the Continent by holding in check Austria, lately escaped from his control, as well as the Dutch Republic, by means of the ascendency of France in the minor German States on the Baltic, on the Bosphorus, and in Madrid.

Through this antagonism Frederick saw a road to the accomplishment of his designs of aggrandisement. An age that cannot keep secrets has little use for the methods of the Prussian Jupiter Scapin, otherwise his political correspondence would be useful to our sucking fetials as a primer of professional chicane. Not even the Napoleon papers, edited under the Second Empire with such fraudulent reserves, can match this revelation of the secrets of a ruler's mental workshop. The intellectual heir of the Sforzas and Borgias might unfold himself with elaboration to Talleyrand or Savary when a solemn treaty was to be broken, or a royal prince kidnapped and murdered, or proclamation made that an ancient European dynasty had ceased to reign. But his orders to inferiors were usually couched in a certain high-level style of Olympian command. To the confidential avowals of mean motives, to the injunctions for the practice of bribery, falsehood, intrigue, and even forgery, from which the King of Prussia did not shrink, the Corsican tyrant did not care to set his name. Very characteristic of what we may call Frederick's first 'manner' are the private directions to the envoys sent to

announce his accession at Versailles and Hanover. Letters written from his own drafts detail with scientific precision the species of flattery and imposture which his agents are to use, the humbug suitable for the French being carefully separated from the humbug suitable for the Hanoverians. The distinctions observed are worth study. First comes, set forth in each case with a different instrumentation, what a Wagnerian would call the Leitmotif' of jealousy. Colonel Camas, the envoy to Paris, is ordered to excite suspicions there by giving out that Truchsess, the envoy to Hanover, enjoys Frederick's particular confidence and is deep in his secrets. Colonel Truchsess in Hanover is told to rouse jealousy by hinting that there is something fishy about the mission of Colonel Camas, who is one of the king's intimates, and has certainly not gone to Paris to thread pearls.' Then comes the Leitmotif' of the augmentation of the Prussian army. Camas in Paris is to take that as a text from which to speak of his master as an ambitious, explosive Phaeton who is likely to set the world on fire. On the other Land, Truchsess in Hanover, if the augmentation should be mentioned, has to minimise its importance, and explain that all his young sovereign wants is to leave his neighbours alone and live at home in quiet.

Frederick's correspondence of this date contains hardly a trace of his Silesian design. But there is a constant harping on his desire to secure support of his claims on the duchies of Berg and Jülich, and on certain districts of Mecklenburg and East Friesland. The days were gone when people said, as they did in his father's reign, The King of Prussia is a funk, and will never give the order “March!"' Knowing that an alliance with the master of 93,000 good troops, reputed to be the best drilled in Europe, and a well-filled treasury, was a marketable article, the young Brandenburger was prepared, on the Bismarckian principle of do ut des, to sell himself for a suitable price. Having a preference for France, it was his object to get Fleury to make a first bid. The trick being that Frederick's envoy was to make the cardinal nervous with the notion that London and Hanover were eager for the Prussian connexion, it was plain that the more seriously Colonel Camas took the arguments which he was to present, the more emphatic they would sound. That gentleman was therefore instructed to insinuate' to the cardinal that Hanover was making the most brilliant offers imaginable at Berlin, and was pressing for a renewal of the old alliance between the two Courts, but that the king had