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 much vaster and vaguer had from the first stirred against it.  What was it then that first made war—­and