A long period of peace had softened the minds, and deadened those hereditary hatreds that oppose the communication of feelings and the similarity of ideas between different nations.  Europe, since the treaty of Westphalia, had become a republic of perfectly balanced powers, where the general equilibrium of power resulting from each formed a counterpoise to the other.  One glance sufficed to show the solidity and unity of this European building, every beam of which, opposing an equal resistance to the others, afforded an equal support by the pressure of all the states.

Germany was a confederation presided over by Austria, the emperors were the chiefs only of this ancient feudalism of kings, dukes, and electors.  The house of Austria was more powerful through itself and its vast possessions than through the imperial dignity.  The two crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, the Tyrol, Italy, and the Low Countries, gave it an ascendency, which the genius of Richelieu had been able to fetter, but not to destroy.  Powerful to resist, but not to impel, Austria was more fitted to sustain than to act; her force lies in her situation and immobility, for she is like a block in the middle of Germany,—­her power is in her weight; she is the pivot of the balance of European power.  But the federative diet weakened and enervated its designs by those secret influences all federations naturally possess.  Two new states, unperceived until the time of Louis XIV., had recently risen, out of reach of the power, and the long rivalry of the houses of Bourbon and Austria:  the one in the north of Germany, Prussia; the other in the east, Russia.  The policy of England had encouraged the rise of these two infant powers, in order to form the elements of political combinations that would admit of her interests obtaining a firm footing.

III.

A hundred years had hardly elapsed since an emperor of Austria had conferred the title of king on a margrave of Prussia, a subordinate sovereign of two millions of men, and yet Prussia already balanced in Germany the influence of the house of Austria.  The Machiavelian genius of Frederic the Great had become the genius of Prussia.  His monarchy, composed of territories acquired by victory, required war to strengthen itself, still more of agitation and intrigue to legitimise itself.  Prussia was in a ferment of dissolution amidst the German states.  Scarcely had it risen into existence than it abdicated all German feeling by leaguing with England and Russia; and England, always on the watch to widen these breaches, had used Prussia as her lever in Germany.  Russia, whose two-fold ambition already had designs on Asia on the one hand, on Europe on the other, had made it an advanced guard on the west, and used it as an advanced camp on the borders of the Rhine.  Thus Prussia was the point of the Russian sword in the very heart of France.  Military power was every thing; its government was only discipline, its people only an army.  As for its ideas, its policy was to place itself at the head of the Protestant states, and offer protection, assistance, and revenge to all those whose interest or whose ambition was threatened by the house of Austria.  Thus by its nature Prussia was a revolutionary power.