[Footnote 876:  Green, History of the English People, IV. 193 (London, 1880).]

So far, however, as concerns the war in the Germanic countries, it was to outward seeming but a mad debauch of blood and rapine, ending in nothing but the exhaustion of the combatants.  The havoc had been frightful.  According to the King of Prussia’s reckoning, 853,000 soldiers of the various nations had lost their lives, besides hundreds of thousands of non-combatants who had perished from famine, exposure, disease, or violence.  And with all this waste of life not a boundary line had been changed.  The rage of the two empresses and the vanity and spite of the concubine had been completely foiled.  Frederic had defied them all, and had come out of the strife intact in his own hereditary dominions and master of all that he had snatched from the Empress-Queen; while Prussia, portioned out by her enemies as their spoil, lay depleted indeed, and faint with deadly striving, but crowned with glory, and with the career before her which, through tribulation and adversity, was to lead her at last to the headship of a united Germany.

Through centuries of strife and vicissitude the French monarchy had triumphed over nobles, parliaments, and people, gathered to itself all the forces of the State, beamed with illusive splendors under Louis the Great, and shone with the phosphorescence of decay under his contemptible successor; till now, robbed of prestige, burdened with debt, and mined with corruption, it was moving swiftly and more swiftly towards the abyss of ruin.

While the war hastened the inevitable downfall of the French monarchy, it produced still more notable effects.  France under Colbert had embarked on a grand course of maritime and colonial enterprise, and followed it with an activity and vigor that promised to make her a great and formidable ocean power.  It was she who led the way in the East, first trained the natives to fight her battles, and began that system of mixed diplomacy and war which, imitated by her rival, enabled a handful of Europeans to master all India.  In North America her vast possessions dwarfed those of every other nation.  She had built up a powerful navy and created an extensive foreign trade.  All this was now changed.  In India she was reduced to helpless inferiority, with total ruin in the future; and of all her boundless territories in North America nothing was left but the two island rocks on the coast of Newfoundland that the victors had given her for drying her codfish.  Of her navy scarcely forty ships remained; all the rest were captured or destroyed.  She was still great on the continent of Europe, but as a world power her grand opportunities were gone.

In England as in France the several members of the State had battled together since the national life began, and the result had been, not the unchecked domination of the Crown, but a system of balanced and adjusted forces, in which King, Nobility, and Commons all had their recognized places and their share of power.  Thus in the war just ended two great conditions of success had been supplied:  a people instinct with the energies of ordered freedom, and a masterly leadership to inspire and direct them.