The Heinousness of the Crime. 151 the prey, and when the young Empress was seen reeling under his attack, the instincts of blood and burglary, the barbaric lust of conquest masking itself in fine words, awoke throughout Europe. Blood flowed in torrents, and the fountains, stopped for a time, burst out again and again. It would not be fair to accuse Frederick of having foreseen all the consequences of his crime, but he was a most intelligent, well-informed man, twenty-eight years of age, perfectly able to estimate the principal results-in bloodshed and devastation-of a rupture of European peace at that moment. "On the head of Frederick," wrote an author, not so gifted with genius as Mr. Carlyle, but cool and shrewd in his judgments, "is all the blood which was shed in a war which raged during many years, and in every quarter of the globe, the blood of the column of Fontenoy, the blood of the mountaineers who were slaughtered at Culloden. The evils produced by his wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and, in order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America." There is, doubtless, a touch of rhetoric in the form in which Macaulay's indictment is expressed, but it is substantially just; and if it is substantially just, and if there is one moral law for kings and for common men, then the guilt incurred by Frederick was stupendous. Frederick-this must be owned-never troubled himself much to defend his act. He began the war, he said, to make a name for himself, to strengthen Prussia, to turn a rare opportunity to good account. Kingly reasons enough! If successful kings are to be worshipped as heroes, they are good reasons; otherwise they are infamously bad reasons. Frederick, we may suppose, was not clearly conscious of the depth and blackness of his villainy. But this fact shows only to what an amazing extent, even in the luminous eighteenth century, a naturally vigorous brain had been intoxicated by the fumes of king-worship. Mr. Carlyle, though not pronouncing unreservedly in favour of his hero, defends him more expressly than Frederick ever attempted to defend himself; but Mr. Carlyle's arguments, though presented with rare skill, not only of a literary sort but of that kind which we admire in great pleaders at the Bar, prove, when fairly examined, almost incredibly weak. In the first place, as much is made as possible of Frederick's claims upon the Empress-Queen; but these, stated at their broadest, could extend to no more than certain bits of Silesia, and it was obviously burglarious to snatch the whole. In the second place, it is studiously represented that the French were principally to blame for the infraction of the Pragmatic Sanction, and for the sanguinary wars that followed. But the logical nullity of this plea can be demonstrated by reference to the dates of events, nay, by words which, as if forgetful of the drift of his own argument, Mr. Carlyle himself allows to fall from his pen. He tells us that, when Maria Theresa called upon the European Courts to maintain the Pragmatic Sanction, they all, except England and Holland, "hung back," and "waited till they saw." What was it they waited to see? What was the occasion which made Maria Theresa apply to them to defend her? They waited to see how Frederick's attack would prosper. The occasion on which she applied to her pledged protectors was the breaking of Frederick into her dominions like, as she said, a thief in the night. "On the first invasion of Silesia," says Mr. Carlyle," Maria Theresa had indignantly complained in every Court; and pointing to the Pragmatic Sanction, had demanded that such law of nature be complied with, according to covenant." She evidently had no doubt, therefore, as to who was the first breaker of the Pragmatic Sanction; and who should know Carlyle's Defence of Frederick. 153 if she did not? Had Frederick been defeated at Mollwitz, the first battle of the war, the Powers that had guaranteed the Pragmatic Sanction would likely enough have affected virtuous indignation, and lent her their aid to crush the robber. He won the battle; and then the Powers, with the exceptions formerly named, flocked like vultures to tear the victim. France may have acted badly and meanly, but there is nothing like evidence that France would have drawn the sword if Frederick's had remained in the scabbard. The grand argument, however, by which Mr. Carlyle defends Frederick, is independent of all such consideration. of facts and dates. It is of a transcendental character. It rests upon that optimism of which we formerly found traces in the works of Mr. Carlyle. "Friedrich," he says, "after such trial and proof as has seldom been, got his claims on Schlesien allowed by the Destinies. For there are laws valid in Earth and in Heaven; and the great soul of the world is just." The simple answer to this is that it is a begging of the question, or, rather, a twofold begging of the question,-once in respect of the principle implied, a second time in its application to the case in hand. The destinies, even if written with a big D, cannot make right wrong, though they crown it with success, and though the success endures for a thousand years. Success has nothing whatever to do in the spiritual sphere. The destinies bade the wind whistle through Cromwell's bones at Tyburn, and flung his system into the kennel. Was his spiritual triumph any the less on that account? So much for Mr. Carlyle's principle; but is he secure on the ground of fact? Has the seizure of Silesia indeed been sealed with the approval of the destinies? In other words, has this great crime borne such fruits that we can refer to it as part of the providential scheme of human history? It has added to the power of Prussia, but I am not sure that it will be found, in the long run, to have conduced to the well-being of Prussia. It typifies that reliance upon “blood and iron" which has become an integral part of Prussian policy. That member of the German Reichstag who represents the district of Holstein, which Prussia retains in her grasp in direct contravention of the Treaty of Prague, protests, in the name of justice and of European law, against that spirit in the Government of Prussia which was evinced in the seizure of Silesia. The too-manifest fact that the statesmen and people of Prussia are incapable of hearing the voice of justice incarnated in the Holstein member, and of obeying it in spite of all considerations of material advantage, is a proof that the Silesian policy has, in so far, stunted the intelligence and paralysed the conscience of Prussia. The misery and unrest which, without question, prevail widely in that country-the burden of life rendered intolerable by military constraint and bureaucratic meddling the spectre of Socialism menacing in the background-suggest a doubt whether it is not too soon to mark the seizure of Silesia as one of those lessons which God has written in the Bible of History. FREDERICK A DESCRIPTION CHAPTER XVII. HOMERIC HERO CARLYLE'S OF HIS BATTLES - HOHENFRIEDBERG-KUNERSDORF-FREDERICK IN A HUT WITH WOUNDED IF on a F the pirate in Shakespeare, who rased the eighth commandment from the decalogue when he started on a cruise, attended well to his piratical business, and was bold, able, energetic, prompt, adroit, he would have had more. success than pirates who played their game less cleverly, and might have been in many points an instructor. Even his history, therefore, might be worth reading. But Frederick was no mere pirate, and in describing his campaigns Carlyle brings into view far higher than mere piratical virtues. Frederick, in point of fact, was a hero of the Homeric type, armed with the science of the eighteenth century. The sacking of any town that came in his way did not expose Ulysses to the slightest disapprobation from Homer, and the seizure of Silesia would have excited enthusiastic admiration in the camp of Agamemnon. Not till we rise to the law of chivalry binding every true knight to defend a woman, or to the law of Christ enjoining every man to do to others as he would have others do to him, do we meet with a clear repudiation of such actions as Frederick's seizure. Frederick fell back upon the heroism of physical force. His views on chivalry were pretty much |