Frederick’s task of holding what he had so lightly seized in 1740 therefore grew no less difficult as time went on. He had good reason for remaining constant to the principle which he professed at Dresden: “I would not henceforth attack a cat, except to defend myself.” His policy, as he wrote in his Testament of 1752, was to maintain peace as long as might be possible without lowering the dignity of Prussia. “We have drawn upon ourselves the envy of Europe by the acquisition of Silesia,” he confessed. “It has put all our neighbours on the alert; there is none who does not distrust us.” The ink of the Treaty of Dresden was hardly dry ere new plans were mooted to blot it out. The attitude of Russia towards the victor was menacing, that of Poland defiant, and it was easy to see that Austria and Saxony had an understanding with the Northern Powers which boded him no good. Frederick was, however, no longer a novice in diplomacy and he knew his own mind. Evading all efforts to tempt him back into the whirlpool of war, he watched its successive phases till the Peace of 1748. He saw the Queen turn her energies to Italy, while the Sea Powers, who could not maintain themselves in the Netherlands without her aid, hired troops in the only market open to them and brought 35,000 Russians to the Rhine. But the value of this new factor in the politics of Western Europe had not been tested when the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was patched up. Then the exhausted combatants entered upon the task of reconstruction, in which Frederick had more than two years’ start of them. To him the peace brought a guarantee by all Europe of the treaty by which he held Silesia. Imperfect as it was, for it settled no great question, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle gave pause to the armed strife of Europe for eight years. Prussia therefore enjoyed a full decade of rest before 1756, when the third and greatest of her struggles for Silesia began. She dared not put off her harness, but she stood at ease. After the peace her army still numbered 135,000 men. But the crowned commander-in-chief had now a leisure unattainable in time of war. His excuse for deserting his ally at Dresden was that he wished to enjoy life and to labour for the good of his subjects. Now his opportunity had come. It would be strange if a reign of less than six years had destroyed the ideal which Frederick championed in his early treatise on kingcraft. Prussia and Europe might well expect that he would be, like the great-grandfather of whom he wrote the words, “as great in peace as in the bosom of victory,” and that he would apply his untrammelled power to remedy whatever defects his enlightened insight might still discover in the Prussian State. Frederick the Warrior had cleared the way for Frederick the Reformer. Ought not Prussian history in the fifties to be a story of regeneration?