Of the work he did in this world there need be no considerable debate.  It was romantic, if it be romantic that the dragon should swallow St. George.  He turned a small country into a great one:  he made a new diplomacy by the fulness and far-flung daring of his lies:  he took away from criminality all reproach of carelessness and incompleteness.  He achieved an amiable combination of thrift and theft.  He undoubtedly gave to stark plunder something of the solidity of property.  He protected whatever he stole as simpler men protect whatever they have earned or inherited.  He turned his hollow eyes with a sort of loathsome affection upon the territories which had most reluctantly become his:  at the end of the Seven Years’ War men knew as little how he was to be turned out of Silesia as they knew why he had ever been allowed in it.  In Poland, like a devil in possession, he tore asunder the body he inhabited; but it was long before any man dreamed that such disjected limbs could live again.  Nor were the effects of his break from Christian tradition confined to Christendom; Macaulay’s world-wide generalisation is very true though very Macaulayese.  But though, in a long view, he scattered the seeds of war all over the world, his own last days were passed in a long and comparatively prosperous peace; a peace which received and perhaps deserved a certain praise:  a peace with which many European peoples were content.  For though he did not understand justice, he could understand moderation.  He was the most genuine and the most wicked of pacifists.  He did not want any more wars.  He had tortured and beggared all his neighbours; but he bore them no malice for it.

The immediate cause of that spirited disaster, the intervention of England on behalf of the new Hohenzollern throne, was due, of course, to the national policy of the first William Pitt.  He was the kind of man whose vanity and simplicity are too easily overwhelmed by the obvious.  He saw nothing in a European crisis except a war with France; and nothing in a war with France except a repetition of the rather fruitless glories of Agincourt and Malplaquet.  He was of the Erastian Whigs, sceptical but still healthy-minded, and neither good enough nor bad enough to understand that even the war of that irreligious age was ultimately a religious war.  He had not a shade of irony in his whole being; and beside Frederick, already as old as sin, he was like a rather brilliant schoolboy.

But the direct causes were not the only causes, nor the true ones.  The true causes were connected with the triumph of one of the two traditions which had long been struggling in England.  And it is pathetic to record that the foreign tradition was then represented by two of the ablest men of that age, Frederick of Prussia and Pitt; while what was really the old English tradition was represented by two of the stupidest men that mankind ever tolerated in any age, George iii. and Lord Bute.  Bute