Men looked upon this astonishing calamity with various sentiments, according as they considered it with relation to the Prussian administration alone, or as connected with the character of the King and kingdom, and the general interests of Europe. In the former point of view, the mind could not avoid acknowledging, with a feeling of embittered satisfaction, that the crooked and selfish policy of Prussia's recent conduct,--as shortsighted as it was grasping and unconscientious,--had met in this present hour of disaster with no more than merited chastisement. The indifference with which the Prussian Cabinet had viewed the distresses of the House of Austria, which their firm interposition might probably have prevented--the total want of conscience and decency with which they accepted Hanover from France, at the moment when they meditated war with the power at whose hand they received it--the shameless rapacity with which they proposed to detain the Electorate from its legal owner, at the very time when they were negotiating an alliance with Britain--intimated that contempt of the ordinary principles of justice, which, while it renders a nation undeserving of success, is frequently a direct obstacle to their attaining it. Their whole procedure was founded on the principles of a felon, who is willing to betray his accomplice, providing he is allowed to retain his own share of the common booty. It was no wonder, men said, that a government setting such an example to its subjects, of greediness and breach of faith in its public transactions, should find among them, in the hour of need, many who were capable of preferring their own private interests to that of their country. And if the conduct of this wretched administration was regarded in a political instead of a moral point of view, the disasters of the kingdom might be considered as the consequence of their incapacity, as well as the just remuneration of their profligacy. The hurried and presumptuous declaration of war, after every favourable opportunity had been suffered to escape, and indeed the whole conduct of the campaign, showed a degree of folly not far short of actual imbecility, and which must have arisen either from gross treachery, or something like infatuation. So far, therefore, as the ministers of Prussia were concerned, they reaped only the reward due to their political want of morality, and their practical want of judgment.