The greater war which we have summarised is a sufficient tangle. Leslie Stephen calls it 'that complicated series of wars which lasted some ten years, and passes all power of the ordinary human intellect to understand or remember. For what particular reason Englishmen were fighting at Dettingen, or Fontenoy, or Lauffeld is a question which a man can only answer when he has been specially crammed for examination, and his knowledge has not begun to ooze out.'[150] This is the exact truth, as the ill-fated chronicler who gropes about among the treaties and conventions is fain to confess. But apart from its complications this war is not in itself very memorable or exalted, though it has left an indelible result in the great Prussian monarchy. It was not beautiful or glorious. The guarantors of Austria at the first sign of her weakness had hurried, most of them, to divide her spoils, at the same time betraying each other from time to time without scruple, as their immediate interests required. Frederick had a business-like candour which almost disarms criticism. Macaulay in a famous passage has pointed out that innocent peasants perished in thousands all over the world that he might obtain and retain an Austrian province. And Maria Theresa, with all her maternal charm, is not wholly admirable. It was natural that she should fight for her rights, and induce all she could to fight for her; natural, perhaps, that she should be content that all Europe should bleed so that she might retain her territory. But we cannot forget that she who was ready that myriads should perish, not of Austrians or Magyars alone, but of all the nations that she could enlist in her cause, to maintain the sanctity of her rights to Silesia, was later on an accomplice in the partition of Poland; a reluctant accomplice, it is fair to add, as she herself was awake to the inconsistency of her position. Among all these stately figures and famous slaughters we see the central fact of the period, the shameless and naked cynicism of the eighteenth century, which, turning its back for ever on the wars of faith and conviction, looked only to contests of prey. And so it continued till the great Revolution cleared the air, and, followed up by the poignant discipline of Napoleon, made way for the wars of nationality. CHAPTER X.