"I wanted the peace to be a serious and a durable one," said the English minister in reply to Pitt's attacks; "if we had increased our demands, it would have been neither the one nor the other." M.de Choiseul submitted in despair to the consequences of the long-continued errors committed by the government of Louis XV.

"Were I master," said he, "we would be to the English what Spain was to the Moors; if this course were taken, England would be destroyed in thirty years from now." The king was a better judge of his weakness and of the general exhaustion.

"The peace we have just made is neither a good one nor a glorious one; nobody sees that better than I," he said in his private correspondence; "but, under such unhappy circumstances, it could not be better, and I answer for it that if we had continued the war, we should have made, a still worse one next year." All the patriotic courage and zeal of the Duke of Choiseul, all the tardy impulse springing from the nation's anxieties, could not suffice even to palliate the consequences of so many years' ignorance, feebleness, and incapacity in succession.
Prussia and Austria henceforth were left to confront one another, the only actors really interested in the original struggle, the last to quit the battle-field on to which they had dragged their allies.

By an unexpected turn of luck, Frederick II.

had for a moment seen Russia becoming his ally; a fresh blow came to wrest from him this powerful support.