One reason for the immense popularity of Fénelon's Telemachus during the eighteenth century was its clarity about the prospects for Europe's future. As Fénelon presented it, Europe had to find a way to promote trade and prevent war. The problem, from Louis XIV's wars onwards, was that trade had become deeply entangled with war because of the increasing use of public credit to fund the costs of war, turning trade into a source of tax revenue for interest payments and generating a deadly competition between the great powers to acquire, or prevent others from acquiring, the resources needed to fund their debts. As one of the principal agents of the Stuart pretender to the British throne informed the marquis d'Argenson in 1755, on the eve of the Seven Years War, the rivalry between England and France was ‘like an affair of grocer to grocer, whose quarrel will come to an end only when they have each discredited one another’ (Voyer de Paulmy 1852–67: 59–60). In the British case, d'Argenson noted, this could be achieved by a Jacobite rising accompanied by a Stuart proclamation to cancel all the debts contracted by the house of Hanover. He did not bother to record what the French equivalent might be, but it is not too difficult to imagine. As Arthur Young noted soon after the end of the Seven Years War, the French system of absolute government was a powerful advantage in ‘an affair of grocer to grocer’.