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resolution. The nobility,' he tells us, is in the last stage of exhaustion; the poor man is ruined; countless villages are burnt; many towns destroyed Prussia is like a man covered with wounds, who, weakened by severe loss of blood, is on the point of succumbing to the excess of his sufferings.' Yet Prussia he had not allowed to rest until the objects of the war were fully attained. Wearied out by her lengthened and gallant resistance, the enemies who had leagued to reduce her limits to the original marquisate from which she sprang, had one by one withdrawn from the strife. Last of all, even the bold Empress-Queen, who had entered on the contest determined not only to recover the province of Silesia, stolen by Frederic in the hour of Austria's weakness, but also to punish him for his personal share in opposing her imperial claims, had reluctantly resigned these objects to his fortitude, and left the real triumph of the war on the side of his exhausted but unyielding kingdom. Prussia was now the avowed rival and equal of Austria. Henceforth was established that extraordinary dualism in the government of Germany which has so powerfully influenced the politics of Europe for the past century, and ended only in thrusting out of the Empire the house which had presided over it for six hundred years, after a struggle of such dimensions as the world never witnessed save when all Europe armed to overthrow Napoleon.

The policy of aggrandisement by force or fraud which Frederic the Great had worked out in his seizure of Silesia was nothing new or original in the history of the state he ruled. The whole growth of

Prussia from the rank of a petty border state of the Empire to the strong and independent kingdom which he handed his successor, is founded on the tradition of claim followed by conquest. It would seem as though from the time when the Elector of Brandenburg, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, found his hereditary dominions strengthened by the addition of the dukedom of Prussia-an unimportant territory then in European view - the process began to which the treaty of Nicolsburg, two hundred and fifty years later, gives the crowning triumph. There is a theory favoured by many historians that the progress of empires and their decay can be little affected by the force of individual character. It may be true that revolutions are produced by an aggregate of circumstances independently of the men who take foremost place in them; but it is surely more certain that a persistent family purpose handed down from father to son in a reigning house, through ages in which the sovereign has almost absolute sovereignty, may so tone the policy of a state as to influence its own fortunes and that of all its neighbours. Why did the people of Northern Germany long since fix on Prussia as the Power round which to hang for safety, when intrigues threatened from within or an invasion from without? This land which, when first the Hohenzollern ruled it, was far more a Sclavish country occupied by a garrison of Teuton colonists than a truly German realm; why did it gradually become the rallying point for those who believed in the coming unity of the Fatherland? Why but that in the unchangeable purpose shown by the rulers of Prussia from the time

of the Great Elector to advance the bounds of their dominion, and in their earnest attention to the material welfare of their subjects, there was foreshadowed the rise of a kingdom having within it the seeds of such growth and advancement as should place those it embraced in the security which the elements of the dissolving Empire had elsewhere lost. The Thirty Years' war and its attendant calamities had, indeed, at the cost of terrible sacrifice, given freedom to religious opinion; but the smaller states of the Empire had been so enfeebled by it that their lands were offered a helpless prey to foreign invasion or to the newer civil dissensions which arose in the various Wars of Succession. French armies laid the Palatinate waste by royal decree; English generals fed their mixed levies from the fertile plains of Bavaria; Austria again and again made the western circles of the Empire the battle-ground of her pretensions; whilst the petty princes who had nominal sway within their borders could save their subjects neither by neutrality, nor by bringing their tiny contingents to join one of the contending forces. In the sufferings endured through these days, and in those which weighed more heavily still upon the minor principalities in the era of Napoleon, may be found the roots of that wish for a stronger nationality, and of the respect for Prussia as its only real representative, which have long been, in one shape or another, growing up in the German mind.

The Great Elector, Frederic William, is undoubtedly to be regarded as the real founder of the present grandeur of his successors. Under his able whole force of

but despotic rule (1640 to 1688) the

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Brandenburg and Prussia, now welded into one power, and much enlarged by the treaty of Westphalia, was directed to the enforcing the acknowledgment of the independence of the latter dukedom, originally held separately as a fief from Poland. His success in this was soon followed by claims on Juliers, Cleves, and Berg, skilfully urged, and boldly supported by the sword; and the limits of the dominions handed his son were thus extended from the Oder to the Rhine. Lower Pomerania had been among the additions gained in the great European settlement above mentioned; and Frederic William used the opening thus obtained to the Baltic to lay the foundation of the navy which Prussia's statesmen even thus early regarded as a necessity to her claim of a distinguished place among the Great European Powers. The same policy, doubtless, rather than a love for Austria or hatred of the Turk, led to his sending a contingent to the relief of Vienna when threatened by the Sultan in 1683.

Under his successor, grandfather of the Great Frederic and first king, the land, although ruled on despotic principles where the monarch was personally concerned, enjoyed a degree of municipal freedom favourable to the growth of the sturdy German element which was already swallowing up the traces of Sclavonic rule. His troops were in constant service as allies of Austria in her Turkish and French wars; and various small principalities, obtained as reward or purchased, swelled his now extensive though scattered dominions. The resources he left to his son, in 1713, while receiving no further additions in land, were strengthened by the care

which the new king, more than any other of this military family, bestowed on the personnel of his regiments, and on accumulating treasure to support the war which for his day was deferred, though his chief business seemed the preparing for it. Indulging freely his singular passion for filling his regiments with the largest soldiers in the world, the administration of Frederic William I. was in all else economical to parsimony; and without straining the resources of his five millions of subjects, he left his son, the Great Frederic, the most efficient army of Europe, to be at once the temptation and the instrument for continuing the family policy. For exercising his tall battalions in petty conquests, he had not the opportunities of his father, the first Frederic; but such gain would have given the kingdom but little new importance as compared with a step which he took in her military organisation, in which we may clearly trace the origin of her present formidable system of recruiting. In 1733, seven years before his death, the whole of his territories were parcelled out by decree into cantons, to each of which was allotted a regiment whose effective strength was to be maintained from its limits; and all subjects, beneath the rank of noble, were held bound to serve if required. With this ready instrument for supplying the losses of a war, and with an army more splendidly equipped and trained than any other of the time, his son (known then as Frederic II.) stepped into the field of European politics.

Exceeding the two former kings as much in the extent of his desires as in the ability for accomplishing them, no petty lordship, as that of Neufchatel or