With France the case was quite different. The peace is but one step on the long road of territorial aggrandisement on which she had definitely entered at the bidding of Richelieu and Mazarin. She became by the war the first military power in Europe. By the peace she was planted securely upon the Rhine and acquired not merely a scientific frontier for offence and defence in the virgin fortress of Metz, the mountains of the Vosges, and the strongholds of Breisach and Philipsburg, but an incentive to future exertion, and a spur to criminal ambition, in the desire to make her hold upon the Rhine but the beginning of a vaster scheme of conquest. The _damnosa hereditas_ of the Rhine frontier for France, sanctioned in part by the peace of Westphalia, has been the chief disturbing element in European politics for nearly two centuries and a half, and the malignancy of its poison shows even now no signs of abatement. The great questions, which have agitated Europe during the years which have elapsed since the Thirty Years’ War, have mainly centred round the rivalry of Russia and of Austria for the command of the Danube and the inheritance of the Turk, and the rivalry of France and Germany for the possession of the Rhine. The great settlements of European affairs, which have taken place since that time at Utrecht, at Vienna, at Paris, and at Berlin, have been but the hatching of the fully developed chicks from the eggs laid in Westphalia in 1648. [Sidenote: =Desperate condition of Spain, 1648.=]