[Footnote: So Rivarol, writing in 1783 (OEuvres, i.pp.4 and 52): "Never did the world offer such a spectacle.

Europe has reached such a high degree of power that history has nothing to compare with it.

It is virtually a federative republic, composed of empires and kingdoms, and the most powerful that has ever existed."] All the powerful nations are burdened with debt.
War, too, is a much more difficult enterprise than it used to be; every campaign of the king of Prussia has been more arduous than all the conquests of Attila.

It looks as if the Peace of 1762-3 possessed elements of finality.

The chief danger he discerns in the overseas policy of the English--auri sacra fames.