It is very arguable that England must, in any case, have fought to keep her influence on the ports of the North Sea.  It is quite equally arguable that if she had been as heartily on the side of the French Revolution as she was at last against it, she could have claimed the same concessions from the other side.  It is certain that England had no necessary communion with the arms and tortures of the Continental tyrannies, and that she stood at the parting of the ways.  England was indeed an aristocracy, but a liberal one; and the ideas growing in the middle classes were those which had already made America, and were remaking France.  The fiercest Jacobins, such as Danton, were deep in the liberal literature of England.  The people had no religion to fight for, as in Russia or La Vendee.  The parson was no longer a priest, and had long been a small squire.  Already that one great blank in our land had made snobbishness the only religion of South England; and turned rich men into a mythology.  The effect can be well summed up in that decorous abbreviation by which our rustics speak of “Lady’s Bedstraw,” where they once spoke of “Our Lady’s Bedstraw.”  We have dropped the comparatively democratic adjective, and kept the aristocratic noun.  South England is still, as it was called in the Middle Ages, a garden; but it is the kind where grow the plants called “lords and ladies.”

We became more and more insular even about our continental conquests; we stood upon our island as if on an anchored ship.  We never thought of Nelson at Naples, but only eternally at Trafalgar; and even that Spanish name we managed to pronounce wrong.  But even if we regard the first attack upon Napoleon as a national necessity, the general trend remains true.  It only changes the tale from a tragedy of choice to a tragedy of chance.  And the tragedy was that, for a second time, we were at one with the Germans.

But if England had nothing to fight for but a compromise, Prussia had nothing to fight for but a negation.  She was and is, in the supreme sense, the spirit that denies.  It is as certain that she was fighting against liberty in Napoleon as it is that she was fighting against religion in Maria Theresa.  What she was fighting for she would have found it quite impossible to tell you.  At the best, it was for Prussia; if it was anything else, it was tyranny.  She cringed to Napoleon when he beat her, and only joined in the chase when braver people had beaten him.  She professed to restore the Bourbons, and tried to rob them while she was restoring them.  For her own hand she would have wrecked the Restoration with the Revolution.  Alone in all that agony of peoples, she had not the star of one solitary ideal to light the night of her nihilism.