A paper of this kind, brilliant, concise, astute, and even eloquent, is worth many thousand lines of the rhymed platitudes by which the author set greater store. We might expect to hear that it was followed at once by a spring at the throat of the enemy. It is true that Kaunitz, who was not yet ready for war, and who wished that if war must come Frederick should be the aggressor, held the Russians back. But he was pressing forward warlike preparations in Bohemia and Moravia, and Frederick was not likely to ignore the advantage of striking swiftly and of waging war outside his own borders. The military men, when they saw the evidence in the King’s hands, were all for action. “Schwerin,” says Carlyle, “much a Cincinnatus since we last saw him, has laid down his plough again, a fervid ‘little Marlborough’ of seventy-two.” He urged the immediate seizure of Saxony, as a base of operations against Bohemia.
Cooler heads, indeed, counselled Frederick to have patience. On behalf of England, a Power always singularly dispassionate when the interests of a German ally were at stake, Mitchell urged that many chances of war and politics might swiftly change the face of affairs, and that to attack Austria would give unnecessary provocation to France. The faithful Podewils ventured to spend a summer afternoon at Potsdam in labouring to turn the King from his purpose. In his letter of July 22, 1756, to Eichel, he speaks of the “respectful freedom” with which he begged the King not to drive France and Russia to do what they had no desire to do that year if Austria were not attacked. Let him rather use the ten months’ grace before the next campaign in securing allies within and without the Empire, in trying to reconcile France and England, and in preparing an imposing defence.
“But all this,” says the poor man, “was completely rejected as arising from far too great timidity, and at last I was dismissed coldly enough with the words, ‘_Adieu, Monsieur de la timide politique_.’” His concluding phrases, however, have in them so much of prophecy that they may be cited here.
“That it was not doubtful that progress and success might at first be brilliant, but that the complication of enemies, at a time when the King was isolated and deprived of all foreign help, which had never happened to him yet, at least in regard to the diversions which had been made in his favour in the two preceding wars, would, perhaps, make him remember one day what I took the respectful liberty of representing to him for _the last time_.”