My Constitutional Historian of England, musing on Belleisle and his
Anti-Pragmatic industries and grandiosities,--"how Chief-Bully
Belleisle stept down into the ring as a gay Volunteer, and foolish
Chief-Defender George had to follow dismally heroic, as a Conscript
of Fate,"--drops these words: in regard to the Wages they
respectively had:--

"Nations that go into War without business there, are sure of
getting business as they proceed; and if the beginning were
phantasms,--especially phantasms of the hoping, self-conceited
kind,--the results for them are apt to be extremely real! As was
the case with the French in this War, and those following, in which
his Britannic Majesty played chief counter-tenor. From 1741, in
King Friedrich's First War, onwards to Friedrich's Third War,
1756-1763, the volunteer French found a great deal of work lying
ready for them,--gratuitous on their part, from the beginning.
And the results to them came out, first completely visible, in the
World-Miracles of 1789, and the years following!

"Nations, again, may be driven upon War by phantasm TERRORS, and go
into it, in sorrow of heart, not gayety of heart; and that is a
shade better. And one always pities a poor Nation, in such case;--
as the very Destinies rather do, and judge it more mercifully.
Nay, the poor bewildered Nation may, among its brain-phantasms,
have something of reality and sanity inarticulately stirring it
withal. It may have a real ordinance of Heaven to accomplish on
those terms:--and IF so, it will sometimes, in the most chaotic
circuitous ways, through endless hazards, at a hundred or a hundred
thousand times the natural expense, ultimately get it done!
This was the case of the poor English in those Wars.