In that age of unstable alliances and easy wars it was certain that a conviction shared by so many states would sooner or later lead to action. It was equally certain that, while Frederick was king, Prussia would strike back. Hence we may regard with some indifference nice balancings of moral judgment upon the great fact of 1756, when Frederick suddenly made war upon Austria and treated Saxony with almost greater violence. It seems idle to maintain that because Austria had yielded up Silesia by treaty she was debarred for ever from retaliating upon Frederick in the fashion which he had set. Who would apply such a rule to the problems of the present? If it be lawful, in our own day, for France to hope to recover Alsace and Lorraine, or for Spain to hope to recover Gibraltar, it is not easy to understand why, in 1756, Maria Theresa might not lawfully hope to reverse the verdict of 1742 and 1745. And if she and her neighbours contemplated something more than a recovery of lands actually lost, if they sought to reduce the King of Prussia to the harmless level of a Margrave of Brandenburg, who can be indignant or even surprised? A new coalition against Frederick would be merely the Austrian answer to his own riddle, “If I have an advantage, am I to use it or not?” [Illustration: THE EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF MARIA THERESA IN THE VIENNA HOFFBURG. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF A. F. CZIHAKS NACHFLG, VIENNA.] But if, as seems undeniable, Austria and her neighbours had good grounds for hoping to attack Prussia, and if, as Frederick had reason to believe, the danger was becoming imminent in 1756, what could be more futile than the statement that none the less he was not justified in striking the first blow? It is true that for reasons of current politics the Austrian Chancellor, Kaunitz, schemed with success to shape events so as to make Prussia seem the aggressor, and that he thus established the conditions under which Austria could claim the fulfilment of a treaty of defensive alliance. At a distance of a century and a half, however, such subtleties can be appraised at their true value. Though in 1756 war emerges from as dense a cloud of diplomacy as ever befogged the path of European history, our generation may regard the Third Silesian War as the natural result of the original aggression of Frederick and of the abiding interests of other Powers.