Russia
and Prussia had been created almost within memory; and Austria, though
not a new power, and even curtailed in territory, was, by the very
collision in which she lost that territory, greatly improved in her
military discipline and force. During the reign of Maria Theresa, the
interior economy of the country was made more to correspond with the
support of great armies than formerly it had been. As to Prussia, a
merely military power, they observed that one war had enriched her with
as considerable a conquest as France had acquired in centuries. Russia
had broken the Turkish power, by which Austria might be, as formerly she
had been, balanced in favor of France. They felt it with pain, that the
two Northern powers of Sweden and Denmark were in general under the sway
of Russia,--or that, at best, France kept up a very doubtful conflict,
with many fluctuations of fortune, and at an enormous expense, in
Sweden. In Holland the French party seemed, if not extinguished, at
least utterly obscured, and kept under by a Stadtholder, leaning for
support sometimes on Great Britain, sometimes on Prussia, sometimes on
both, never on France. Even the spreading of the Bourbon family had
become merely a family accommodation, and had little effect oh the
national politics. This alliance, they said, extinguished Spain by
destroying all its energy, without adding anything to the real power of
France in the accession of the forces of its great rival.
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