The King brought the great summer
manoeuvres on the Mockerauer Heath to a tech-
nical completeness which the art of manoeuvres
has probably never reached since then.
manoeuvres on the Mockerauer Heath to a tech-
nical completeness which the art of manoeuvres
has probably never reached since then.
Treitschke - 1915 - Confessions of Frederick the Great
He declared
openly that he would not defend Hanover for
ungrateful England a second time: he even once
forbade the passage through his dominions of the
English mercenaries, bought in Germany, because
he was revolted by this sordid traffic in human
beings, and still more because he needed the young
men of the Empire for his own army.
He made use of the distress of the Ocean-Queen
to preserve the naval rights of the smaller Powers
by an alliance of armed neutrality; after the
peace, he, first among the European princes, con-
cluded a commercial treaty with the young Re-
public, and in it acknowledged that free, human
comprehension of international law which has
since then remained a faithfully preserved tradition
of the Prussian State. But neither his hate of
the "God-damn Government," nor the boundless
popularity which saluted him in the (American)
colonies, ever moved him to go one step beyond
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? Frederick the Great 169
the interests of his State. His old enemy Kaunitz
still could explain the proud course of the Fred-
erician policy only as springing from the im-
measurable cunning of a demoniacal nature.
But in the Empire the old mistrust gradually
disappeared; its people observed that nowhere
were their affairs weighed so soberly, so exactly,
so watchfully, and so coldly as in the hermitage of
Sans Souci.
So the impossible happened -- the high nobility
of the Empire gathered round Frederick's flag of
its own free will. Kaiser Joseph resumed his
Bavarian plans -- to shatter Prussia's power, as he
himself admitted. He at the same time threatened
the stability of his ecclesiastical neighbours with
rash thoughts of secularization. A sudden terror
gripped the small States when they saw their
natural protector become an enemy; an alliance
of the Central Powers was discussed, a league of
the ecclesiastical princes, until at last the acknow-
ledgment was forced that nothing could be done
without Prussia's help.
With youthful zeal the old King entered into
the quarrel. All the alluring proposals which were
put forward that he should share the possession of
Germany with the Emperor he rejected as bait
for "the common greed. " He conquered his
contempt for the minor princes, and realized that
only through strict justice could he attach these
people to himself. He succeeded in winning the
great majority of the electors, and most of the
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? 170 The Life of
more powerful princes, for his German Princes*
Bund, and in maintaining the old Imperial Con-
stitutions and the status quo of the Imperial States
against the Kaiser.
"Only the love of my Fatherland, and the duty
of a good citizen," he wrote, "drive me at my
age to this undertaking. " What he had dreamt
in his youth had an even more brilliant fulfilment
for the patriarch: no longer hidden behind a
Bavarian shadow-Emperor, as in the Silesian wars,
but in the face of the whole world, the King of
Prussia now came into the arena as the protector
of Germany. All the neighboiu-ing Powers, who
counted on Germany's weakness, saw the unex-
pected turn of the Imperial policy with grave
anxiety. France and Russia approached the Court
of Vienna; the Alliance of 1756 bade fair to be
renewed. The Tiu*in Cabinet, on the contrary,
hailed the Princes' Bund with joy as "the tutelary
god of the Italian States. "
For two hundred years the policy of federalism
in the Empire had not got beyond a half start;
but now that it leaned on the power of Prussia
it suddenly won a large following. The memory
of the times of Maximilian I and the Elector
Berthold's attempts at reform rose again to the
surface. The Princes' Bimd was formed to up-
hold the Imperial theocratic Germany. But if it
lasted, if Prussia maintained her position of leader
at the head of the great Imperial States, the old
forms of the Imperial Diet had to lose their mean-
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? Frederick the Great 171
ing; the prospect was opened up of shattering the
Austrian system to its foundations, and as Graf
Hertzberg joyfully proclaimed, of excluding the
Archdukes from the great German institutions, of
transferring the Imperial Crown to another house at
the next election, and of placing the guidance of the
Empire in the hands of the most powerful States.
The young Karl August of Weimar proposed to
submit the old privileges which ensured the House
of Austria its unique position to an Imperial test.
It almost seemed as if the great problem of Ger-
many's future would be solved in peace. But the
Princes' Bund could not last; and this bitter truth
was hidden least of all from the common-sensible
mind of the old King. Only a series of chance
circumstances, only the defection of Kaiser Joseph
from the old approved traditions of Austrian state-
craft, had scared the minor princes into Frederick's
arms; their trust of Prussia went no further than
their fear of Austria. With the utmost reluctance
the Electorate of Saxony submitted to the guidance
of the younger and less aristocratic House of
Brandenburg; Hanover showed itself hardly less
mistrustful; even the humblest and weakest of
the allied States, Weimar and Dessau, secretly
discussed, so Goethe tells us, how they could
protect themselves against their Prussian pro-
tector's lust of power.
As soon as the Hofburg (the Court of Vienna)
dropped their covetous plans, the old natural
formation of parties must revive ; the ecclesiastical
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? 172 The Life of
princes, who now sought help in Berlin, could
see in Protestant Prussia only the sworn enemy of
their authority. Since Frederick knew this, since
he penetrated his faithful confederates to the
very marrow with his piercing gaze, he did not
let himself be deceived by the success of the minute
into imagining that this Schmalkaldic League was
anything but a makeshift, a means of preserving
the momentary balance. Karl August, in large-
hearted enthusiasm, sketched bold plans for the
building-up of the new Imperial Association; he
thought of a customs' union, of military conven-
tions, of a German code ; Johannes Miiller extolled
the Princes' Bund in the most high-flown pam-
phlets, Schubart in stirring lyrical effusions, and
Dohm concluded a clever pamphlet with these
words: "German and Prussian interests can never
stand in one another's way. " The discerning
mind of the old King was not moved by such
dreams; he knew that only a colossal war could
break the power of Austria in the Empire; it
sufficed him to keep it within the bounds of justice,
because he needed peace for his country.
For a serious reform of the Empire there were
still lacking all the preliminary conditions; there
was lacking, above all, the will of the nation.
Even the Imperialist defenders of the Princes'
Bund could not get beyond the old chimera of
German freedom. The Josephin policy, so Hertz-
berg stirringly protested, threatened to agglomer-
ate the powers of Germany into a mass, to subject
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? Frederick the Great 173
free Europe to a universal monarchy; and in
Dohm's eyes it appears as a praiseworthy aim of
the new Bund to keep open the western borders of
Austria, so that France can stride into it at any
time on behalf of German freedom.
The nation realized dimly that the existing con-
ditions were not worthy to exist; in Schubart's
writings the small Swabian territories are often
described as an open dove-cot, which lay close to
the claws of the royal weasel. But all these ideas
and presentiments were held under by a feeling
of hopeless resignation which modern energy can
hardly understand ; the Germans felt as if an in-
scrutable Providence had condemned this people
to continue for all eternity in an abnormal State
which had long lost every right to exist.
When the great King departed, it is true, he left
behind a generation which looked on the world
more joyfully and proudly than its fathers, and
enormously had the State power which might in
the future bring Germany a new day been raised.
But the question : By what ways and means could
a vital scheme for the German community be cre-
ated? appeared at Frederick's death still almost
as problematical as it had been at his ascension to
the throne; indeed, it had not once been seriously
raised by the great majority of Germans. The
first beginnings of a formation of parties in the
nation scarcely existed; it seemed as if only a
miracle from heaven could help the helpless. The
terrible confusion of the situation was shown with
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? 174 The Life of
sinister clearness by the one fact, that the hero
who with his good sword had once proved the
futiHty of the institutions of the Empire had come
himself to defend these lifeless forms against the
head of the Empire.
If Frederick could only prepare, and not com-
plete, the settlement of the German constitution,
he had, on the other hand, deeply and lastingly
influenced the inner policy of the German terri-
tories, and brought our nation to a nobler public
spirit and a worthier view of the character of the
State. He stood at the end of the great days
of unlimited monarchy, and yet appeared to his
contemporaries as the representative of a new
conception of the State, an enlightened despotism.
Only genius possesses the strength for propa-
ganda, is capable of gathering the resisting world
round the banner of new ideas. As the ideas of
the Revolution were first circulated effectively by
Napoleon, so was that serious comprehension of
the duties of the kingdom which governed the
Prussian throne from the time of the Great Elector
first transferred to the consciousness of the people
by Frederick. Only after the brilliant successes
of the Silesian wars was the gaze of the world,
which so far had hung wonderingly on the mag-
nificence of the Coiurt of Versailles, turned seriously
to the imostentatious crown of the Hohenzollerns.
In war and in his foreign policy the King showed
the incomparable creative power of his genius;
in the inner administration he was the son of his
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? Frederick the Great 175
father. He invigorated the traditional forms of
the State with the strength of genius, developed
the free and incomplete in a free and comprehen-
sive spirit ; he did not imdertake to erect anything
new. And yet he knew how to unite the idea of
a political kingdom, which his father, as a firm,
practical man, had realized, with the civilizing
influences of the century ; incessantly he gave him-
self and others an account of his doings. Already
as Crown-Prince he had won a place among the
political thinkers of the age; his Anti-Machiavel-
lism remains, in spite of all the weakness of
immaturity, surely the best and deepest exposition
of the duties of the princely office in an absolute
monarchy which was ever penned. Afterwards,
in the first years of the joy of conquest, he wrote
the Furstenspiegel ("Mirror for Princes") for the
young Duke of Wiirttemberg; but louder than all
theories spoke his actions, as he proved his words
in the days of trial, and showed the world what it
meant "to think, live, and die as a King. "
Lastly, Providence showed him that favour
which even genius needs, if it is to impress its
seal on a whole age : the good fortune of adequately
living up to his gifts until a ripe old age. He was
now the Nestor, the recognized first man of the
Eiiropean princes. His fame raised the prestige
of all thrones; from his words and deeds other
Kings learned to think highly of their vocation.
The old-established conception of the minor
princes, that the land and the people belonged to
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? 176 The Life of
the Most Serene Princely House, lost ground after
Frederick drily observed: "The Sovereign has no
nearer relation than his State, whose interests must
always stand before the ties of blood. "
The dynastic overweening conceit of the Bour-
bons showed up in its futility when he, on his
ascension to the throne, turned his back to the
light pleasures of life with the words: "My duty
is my only god, " and then for half a century served
this one god with all his strength, and to the thanks
of his people gave always the deliberate answer:
"For that I am here. " With such secular impar-
tiality no crowned head had ever spoken of the
princely dignity as this autocrat, who unhesitat-
ingly recognized the right of a Republic as of a
parliamentary kingdom, and sought the greatness
of absolute monarchy only in the arduousness of its
duties: "The Prince should belong to the State
head and heart ; he is the Pope of the Civil Religion
of the State. "
The new generation of the high nobility fash-
ioned itself by Frederick's example and the social
ideas of the new civilization. The small sultans
who raged in the time of Frederick William I were
followed by a long succession of well-meaning,
dutiful fathers of their peoples, such as Charles
Frederick of Baden and Frederick Christian of
Saxony,
Already it often happened that, in the Prussian
fashion, the princes had a military education;
Christian toleration, the advancement of schools,
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? Frederick the Great 177
and the well-being of his people, were considered
princely duties; individual minor States, like
Brunswick, granted to the Press even greater
freedom than Prussia itself. Even in certain
ecclesiastical districts there was a change for the
better ; the Miinster district extolled the mild and
careful administration of Fiirstenberg. ^
Of course, it was not everywhere, and at one
blow, that the deeply rooted offences of minor-
princely despotism disappeared; the old bad
practice of selling soldiers now, during the Amer-
ican war, reached the summit of its infamy, and
showed what the German princes were capable of.
The Frederician system of benevolent absolutism
for the benefit of the people often led in the narrow
spheres of the minor States to empty sport, or to
oppressive guardianship. The Margrave of Baden
called his exchequer shortly: "the natural trustee
of our subjects"; many a well-meaning minor
prince abused his dominions by the new-fangled
physiocratic system of taxation, by all sorts
of unripe philanthropic experiments, and the
Oettingen- Oettingen -Landesdirektorium had to
give the inquisitive reigning prince an accurate
account of the "names, breed, use, and external
appearance" of the collective dogs to be found in
princely lands, besides "additional, unpresuming,
most humble advice. "
' There is a noble Westphalian family called Furstenberg,
one of whom was Prince-Bishop of Miinster about this time,
who effected important reforms in the administration.
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? 178 The Life of
But, on the whole, the generation of princes of
those eighty years formed the most honourable
which had sat on German thrones for a long time.
Wherever he could, the King opposed the excesses
of his compeers, freed old Moser from prison, and
ensured the Wiirttembergers the continuance of
their constitution. The Empire as a whole lay
hopeless, but in many of its members a new hopeful
life was pulsing.
And far beyond Germany's borders the example
of Frederick carried influence. Maria Theresa
became his most docile pupil; she spread the idea
of the Frederician monarchy in the Catholic world.
Surrounded by weak neighbours, old Austria had
so far lived on careless and sleepy; only the
strengthening of her ambitious rival in the north
forced the Imperial State to exert her powers boldly.
The North-German Haugwitz fashioned the ad-
ministration of Austria, as far as was possible,
according to the Prussian pattern, and from these
Austrian reforms, in turn, came the enlightened
despotism which from now on began its impetuous,
violent attempts at a millennium in all Latin
countries, in Naples and Tuscany, in Spain and
Portugal.
The pride of the Bourbons stood out longest
against the new conception of the monarchy;
at Versailles, with jeering smiles, it was told how
at the Court of Potsdam the lord-high-chamber-
lain had never yet handed the King his shirt.
Only when it was too late, when the forces of the
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? Frederick the Great 179
Revolution were already knocking at the doors,
did the French Court begin to surmise something
of the duties of the kingdom.
The Crown of the Bourbons never wholly
emerged from the dull atmosphere of smug self-
adulation and contempt of the people ; therefore it
collapsed shamefully. But among the Germans
the spirit of monarchism, which lay in the blood of
our people, and even in the centuries of polycracy
was never wholly lost, was strengthened anew by
King Frederick. In no other nation of modern
history has a kingship had such a large and high-
minded view of its problems; therefore the Ger-
man people remained, even when the time of
the Parliamentary struggles came, the most faith-
ful of the great civilized peoples to the idea of
monarchy.
The love of peace of the House of HohenzoUem
remained alive even in its greatest war-princes.
Frederick valued power, but only as a means
for the well-being and civilization of the nations;
that it should be an end in itself, that the struggle
for power as such should bestow historic fame,
seemed to him as an insult to the honour of a
sovereign. Therefore he wrote his passionate
polemic treatise against Machiavelli. Therefore,
in his writings, he returned again and again to the
terrible warning of Charles XII of Sweden.
He might have felt secretly that in his own breast
were working irresistible forces which might lead
Jiim to similar errors ; and he was never tired of por-
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? i8o The Life of
traying the hollowness of objectless military fame,
and had the bust of the King of Sweden contemptu-
ously erected beneath the feet of the Muse in the
round hall at Sans Souci.
Already in his impetuous youth he had made
up his mind about the moral objects of power.
This State must become strong [he wrote at that
time], that it may play the lofty role of preserving
peace only from love of justice, and not from fear.
But if ever injustice, bias, and vice gain the upper
hand in Prussia, then I wish the House of Branden-
burg a speedy downfall. That says all.
When at the end of the Seven- Years' War he felt
strong enough to preserve peace out of justice,
then he turned his attention to the restoration of
the national prosperity with such zeal that the
army was actually injured.
It is a fact: the general who had overwhelmed
the Flag of Prussia with laurels left the army in
a worse condition than he had found it on his
ascension to the throne; he could not approach
his father as a military organizer. He needed the
industrial population for his devastated country,
and therefore patronized on principle the enlisting
of troops for his army in foreign countries. The
regimental commanders were to draw up the
register of their recruiting-districts in agreement
with the Landrdte (sheriffs) and surveyors^ of
taxes.
From that time there occurred in every district
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? Frederick the Great i8i
each year that struggle between the military claims
and the civil interests which, afterward, in chang-
ing forms, occurred again and again in Prussian
history. This time the struggle was decided
in favour of political economy. The civil author-
ities sought to preserve every man who was in
any way capable or well-to-do from the red can-
tonal collar. The King himself interfered to
help, and freed from compulsory service numerous
classes of the population -- the new immigrants,
the families of all traders and manufacturers, the
household servants of landowners. Many cities
-- nay, whole provinces, as Ostfriesland -- obtained
privileges. Soon after the peace the majority of
the army consisted of foreigners.
Frederick thought highly of the army, and liked
to call it the Atlas who carried this State on his
strong shoulders; the military fame of the seven
years had an after-effect; the service of the com-
mon soldier, it is true, was counted in Prussia,
as everywhere else in the world, as a misfortune,
but not as a disgrace, as it was in the rest of the
Empire.
The King brought the great summer
manoeuvres on the Mockerauer Heath to a tech-
nical completeness which the art of manoeuvres
has probably never reached since then. He was
never tired of impressing on his officers "to love
the detail, which also has its distinction," and
wrote for their instruction his military handbook,
the most mature of all his works.
Not one improvement in military affairs escaped
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? i82 The Life of
him; at a great age he yet adopted a new arm
of the service, the light infantry, the green Fusiliers
according to the pattern of the American riflemen.
The fame of the Potsdamer parade-ground drew
spectators from all countries. In Turin Victor
Amadeus and his generals faithfully copied every
movement of the great Prussian drill-sergeant
down to the bent carriage of the head; and when
the young Lieutenant Gneisenau saw the pointed
helmets of the grenadiers on parade glittering in
the sun, he cried enthusiastically: "Say, which
of all nations could well copy this marvellous
sight. ? "
In spite of that, in Frederick's last years the
army sank undoubtedly. The flower of the old
officers' corps lay on the battle-fields; during the
seven years -- an unprecedented occurrence in the
history of war -- all the renowned generals, with
scanty exceptions, were left on the field or were
disabled; their successors had known war only in
subalterns' positions, and looked for the secret of
the Frederician conquests only in the mechanical
exercises of the parade-ground. Among the for-
eign officers were many doubtful adventurers who
only courted favour; for the proud frankness of a
York or a Bliicher there was no more room.
The King, less friendly to the bourgeoisie than
his father, believed that only the aristocracy had
a sense of honour, and dismissed the bourgeois
officers from the majority of the regiments. In the
noble officers* corps there arose an aristocratic
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? Frederick the Great 183
arrogance (Junkersinn) , which soon became more
intolerable to the people than the coarse roughness
of earlier times. The old hired soldiers lived
in the end comfortably with wife and child, in
civil employment, and abominated war for a
country which had always remained foreign to
them. Frederick had already noticed with aston-
ishment in the war of the Bavarian Succession how
little this army accomplished; the reason for the
deterioration he did not penetrate. The Eudae-
monism of his age made it impossible for him to
recognize the moral forces which swayed the army.
He had once, after the custom of the period, formed
Prussian regiments from Austrian and Saxon
prisoners of war, and could not even learn by the
desertions en masse of these imfortimate men; he
had in the last years of the war sufficiently experi-
enced what an army of his own people was capable
of, yet such forcible calling out of the entire
national strength always remained to him only an
expedient for desperate days, "when the defence
of the Fatherland and an imminent danger depends
on it. "
Of his statesmen, Hertzberg alone had religiously
observed the daring ideas of Frederick William I ;
he wanted to gradually purge the army of all
foreigners. "Then we shall be as imconquerable
as the Greeks and the Romans! " But the old
King saw with satisfaction how his tmfortunate
land was being strengthened agriculturally, and
now defined the ideal of the army with the astound-
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? 1 84 The Life of
ing words: "The peaceful citizen shall not even
notice when the nation is at war. " So one of the
pillars which upheld the edifice of State -- universal
service -- began slowly to totter.
The traditional class-system of the estates of the
realm and the organization of government de-
pendent from it the King upheld more strictly
than his father; he helped with instruction and
ruthless coercion, with gifts and loans, as often
as the role which was prescribed for the peasant,
the citizen, or the nobleman in the household of
the nation no longer seemed to suffice him.
The nobility was to remain the first rank in the
State, since "I need them for my army and my
civil administration. " By the mortgage institu-
tions, and by considerable support with ready
money, Frederick attained the conservation of the
large estates of the nobles after the devastation
of the years of war. Therefore he made as little
attempt as his father to abolish the serfdom of the
peasants, which was so repugnant to his magna-
nimity. By the common law, it is true, the
harsher forms of serfdom were done away with,
but there still remained the somewhat less op-
pressive hereditary rights of the dynasty. The
Government contented itself with modifying the
harshness of the existing lordship.
Unnoticed and undesired by the older princes,
in the meantime there began a displacement of
the conditions of social power, which was rich in
results. The new literatiu-e drew an educated
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? Frederick the Great 185
public from all classes ; the merchants and trades-
people of the great cities, the simple tenants of
the enlarged dominions of the monarchy, gradually-
attained to an assured position and to a conviction
that the privileges of the nobility could not endure
much longer. The nobility lost by degrees the
moral as well as the economic foundations of their
rank. The structure of the old class-organization
was imperceptibly undermined.
The administrative arrangements of the father
remained unchanged under the son, except that
he added to the provincial departments of the
General Direktorium four new ones, embracing the
entire State, for the administration of War, Mer-
cantile Policy, Mining Matters, and Forestry, and
thus made another step on the way to a united
State. The Crown still stood high above the
people. Gensdarmes had to force the peasants to
use the seed-potatoes presented by the King; the
command of the Sheriff (Landrat) and the Board
enforced against the tenacious passive opposi-
tion of the parties concerned communal drainage
and other enterprises, and all improvements of
agricultural appliances. The wholly exhausted
energies of the people for civil industries could
only be reawakened by a violent system of
protection.
The flaws of the Frederician political economy
were not due to the eternal and well-meant inter-
ference of the supreme power, which the age had
in no way outlived, but in the fiscal deceptions
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? 1 86 The Life of
which the King was compelled to resort to through
the embarrassments of his affairs; he had to use
fully three quarters of his revenue for the army,
and sought to make up what was necessary for his
administration by monopolies and indirect taxes.
The finances in their clumsiness resembled those
of a large private household. Almost half the
regular revenues came from the Crown lands and
forests; only this rich property of the State ren-
dered his high expenditure possible; it served at
the same time for the technical education of the
peasants. The amount of the principal taxes was
fixed by statute; the movable revenue of the ad-
ministration had to be drawn on for the extra-
ordinary expenses of settling people on the soil
and cultivating.
The carefully accumulated treasure sufficed for
several short campaigns; but old Prussia could
not carry on a long severe war without a foreign
subsidy, since the laws of the Landtag, the tradi-
tional views of the bureaucracy, and the crude
financial system, forbade every loan. Strong as
was the growth of the wealth and well-being of
the middle-classes, the greater advance of the
more fortunate neighbouring peoples was not
easily caught up. The Prussian State still re-
mained the poorest of the Great Powers of the
West; essentially an agricultural land, it played a
modest role in international commerce, even after
Frederick had opened up an avenue to the North
Sea by the conquest of Ostf riesland ; for the
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? Frederick the Great 187
mouth of the Ems, like the mouth of the Oder,
had no rich industrial Hinterland.
As a reformer, Frederick was effective only in
those spheres of the inner affairs of the State
which his predecessor had not understood. He
created the new Prussian Bench of Judges, as his
father formed the modern German Bureaucracy.
He knew that the administration of justice is a
political function, which is inseparably connected
with the State; he made all his dominions inde-
pendent of the Imperial High Court of Justice,
forbade the introduction of the interpretations of
the Faculty of Jurists, created a Ministry of Justice
in addition to the General Direktorium, gave the
entire administration of justice into the hands of
a hierarchically organized State Bureaucracy,
which itself educated its rising generation, and
took under strict superintendence that private
(or independent) jurisdiction which still continued
to exist in some minor departments.
The absolute independence of the courts of
justice in relation to the Administration was
solemnly promised, and kept inviolably, with the
exception of a few cases of well-meaning despotic
high-handed justice. The new Bench preserved
in a modest domestic position an honourable
class-feeling, and while the Imperial courts were
full of corruption, the proud saying was coined in
Prussia, and that against the King: II y a des
juges a Berlin. The desire often obtruded itself
upon the friend of Enlightenment, to whom the
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? i88 The Life of
State was the work of the conscious human will,
that not an inherited and traditional law but a
law founded on experience, such as was generally
desired, must reign in the State; all his life Fred-
erick cherished the idea of carrying out the first
comprehensive codification of the law which had
been attempted since the time of Justinian.
Only after his death did the Allgemeine Land-
reclif come in force, which shows more clearly than
any other work of the epoch the double-sidedness
of the Frederician conception of the State. On
the one side, the code preserved the traditional
social distinctions so carefully that the entire
legal system had to accommodate itself to the
class organization, and even -- against the common
law -- the nobilit}^ were granted special marriage
laws, and on the other it carried the idea of the
sovereignty of the State to its logical conclusion
with such daring, that many a passage anticipated
the ideas of the French Revolution, which made
IMirabeau say that with these ideas Prussia hurried
on a century ahead of the rest of Europe.
The aim of the State is the general well-being,
and only for the sake of this end may the State
limit the natural freedom of the citizens -- and
repeal any existing privilege. The King is only
the head of the State, and has duties and rights
only as such -- and this in the days when Biener
and other renowned lawyers were fighting for the
privileges and rights of the German princes to
' The common law of the period.
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? Frederick the Great 189
their land and serfs as an incontestable legal maxim
in the face of the whole country. The supreme
power, exempt from the sphere of the civil law,
interfered, ruling and advising, in all private af-
fairs, and dictated moral duties to parents and
children, landowners and servants; they ventured
through their all-embracing legislative wisdom
to settle every possible lawsuit of the future at
the outset.
With this code the old absolutism said its last
word: it surrounded its power with fixed barr'ers,
raised the commonwealth to a constitutional
State; and at the same time it unsuspectingly
entered upon the path which must lead to a new
juridical union of the German people, in that it
destroyed the validity of the Roman law. The
mechanical conception of the State of the Fred-
erician period was soon afterwards replaced by
a deeply penetrating philosophy, the incomplete
jurist training of Carmer and Suarez by the work
of historical jurisprudence; but the Allgcmeine
Landrecht ^ nevertheless remained for some decades
the firm foundation from which sprang all further
reforms of the Prussian State.
The belief in the authority of the law, a prelimi-
nary condition of all political freedom, became a
living power in the bureaucracy as well as among
the people. If the State existed for the general
welfare, an irresistible necessity, of which Fred-
erick suspected nothing, led to the desire for the
' The common law of the period.
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? 190 The Life of
removal of the privileges of the upper classes and
the participation of the nation in the government
of the State. And sooner or later these conclu-
sions had to be drawn, since already now only the
genius and strength of a great man could deal
with the difficult problems which this enlarged
kingdom presented.
Frederick did not promote the spiritual life of
his people to nearly the same extent. We know
from Goethe's confessions how fruitfully and in
the interests of freedom the heroism of the seven
years operated on the German civilization: how
in those years of military glory a new import, an
increasing sense of vitality, asserted itself in the
exhausted literature, how the impoverished lan-
guage, which had long sought to express mighty
sentiments, now at last struggled up out of the
insipidity an emptiness and found great words
for great emotions: really, the first German
comedy, Minna von Barnhelm, was created be-
neath the beating of the drums of the Prussian
camp. The Prussian people took a rich share in
the wonderful awakening of the spirit, and pre-
sented the literary movement with several of its
pioneers, from Winckelmann down to Hamann and
Herder. And wholly filled with the Prussian
spirit was that new maturer form of German
Protestantism which at last emerged victoriously
out of the philosophical disputes of this "effer-
vescing period" and became a common property
of t' e North-German peoples: the ethics of Kant.
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? Frederick the Great 191
The categorical imperative of Kant could only
be imagined on this ground of Evangelical free-
dom and faithful self-sacrificing work. Where
before rough commands extorted silent submission,
now every free judgment was challenged, through
the example of the King, who relied fearlessly on
the strength of the enquiring mind and gladly
confessed : who grumbles the most, goes farthest.
Frederick carried on the old Prussian policy of
Christian toleration liberally, and he proclaimed
in his code the principle : ' ' The people's conceptions
of God and godly things cannot be the subject
of a coercive law. " Nor did the Free-thinker
give up the attempts at union of his ancestors,
but strongly maintained that the two Evangelical
Churches should not refuse each other the Holy
Communion in case of necessity. The supreme
ecclesiastical authority of the throne, which he
claimed, ensured him against political intrigues
on behalf of the clergy, and even allowed him to
tolerate in his State the Society of Jesus, suspended
by the Pope.
He accorded the Press an almost unlimited
freedom, since "newspapers, in order to be inter-
esting, must not be interfered with. " He defined
all schools as "organizations of the State," and
spoke readily and spiritedly of the State's duty
to bring up the younger generation to independent
thought and a sacrificing love of the Fatherland.
He constantly extolled the illustriousness of learn-
ing and poetry as the greatest ornament of the
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? 192 The Life of
kingdom: he showed himself a German and a
prince of peace in that he regarded the classics,
and not the exact sciences, lilce the soldier
Napoleon, as the spring of all higher education.
Nevertheless, the King accomplished very little
for the promotion of national education directly.
The scarcity of money, the lack of competent
board-school teachers, and the imceasing struggles
now with foreign enemies, now with the economic
question at home, rendered the carrying out of
his plans more difficult; and in the end the dry
utilitarianism of the father always broke out
again in the son. This economical Prince would
provide means for anything rather than for the
purposes of instruction.
When the Germans in the Empire sneered that
this Prussia had starved itself into greatness, they
thought chiefly of the Prussian teachers and
scholars. Only what was absolutely necessary
was done for the national schools; the repeatedly
enjoined discipline of compulsory general attend-
ance at school remained a dead letter for wide
stretches of the country. None of the Prussian
Universities attained the fame of the new Georgia
Augusta. '^ Only towards the end of the Frederi-
cian period, when Zedlitz, the friend of Kant,
took over the direction of the educational organi-
zations, did a somewhat freer impulse enter into
the public instruction. At that time the worthy
Abbot Felbiger reformed the Catholic national
' The University at Gottingen, named after its founder.
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? Frederick the Great 193
schools, and found enthusiastic supporters in the
Empire, so that in the end Catholic Germany
participated in the greatest blessing of the Refor-
mation.
It seemed an easy thing to gather in Berlin a
brilliant circle of the best intellects of Germany
for pregnant activity. Every young genius in the
Empire angled for the eye of the national hero.
Even Winckelmann, who had once fled from the
country in hot hatred, now experienced with what
strong bands this State fettered the hearts of its
sons. "For the first time," he wrote, "the voice
of the Fatherland makes itself heard within me,
which was iinknown to me before. " He burned
with an eager desire to show the Aristotle of mili-
tary art that a born subject could achieve some-
thing worthy, and negotiated for years for an
appointment in Berlin.
But in Frederick's French academy there was no
place for German thinkers. The Medicean days,
which one had once awaited from the inspired
Prince of the Rheinsberger Parnassus, only came
for the foreign intellects at the table of Sans Souci ;
the pupil of French culture would not and could
not understand the young unruly life which stirred
in the depths of his own people. While the Ber-
liner company intoxicated themselves to over-
refinement with the idea of the new literature,
and jeering scepticism and refined epicureanism
were almost crowding out the old strict moral
simplicity, the Prussian administration main-
13
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? 194 The Life of
tained their one-sided utilitarian bias which only
troubled itself about everyday matters. That
intolerably stiff, home-baked, prosaic spirit which
was instilled into the State of the old Soldiei-King
was somewhat humanized by Frederick but not
broken ; only the baroque glory of the New Palace
and the mighty cupolas of the Gensdarmenkirche^
made it possible to recognize that at least the
barbaric culture-hatred of the thirties had begun
gradually to give way.
But still the Prussian State represented only
the one half of our national life; the delicacy and
the yearning, the profoundness and the enthusiasm
of the German character, could not obtain just
recognition in this prosaic world. The centre-
point of the German policy was not the home of
the intellectual work of the nation; the classical
period of our poetry found its scene of action in
the minor States.
In this momentous fact lies the key to many
puzzles of modern German history. To the coolly
averted attitude of King Frederick our Literature
owes the most precious thing it possesses -- ^its
imequalled freedom; but this indifference of the
' I cannot find out about this anywhere, but there is the
Gensdarmenmarkt, with the French Church and the New
Church, because Frederick was fond of French things. But in
Baedeker, it does not say anything about the change of name,
though it does say that the two churches with the theatre form
the finest group of buildings in Berlin. In an 1893 Baedeker, it
says that they are of the last century, which would make it
about the time. -- L. S.
?
openly that he would not defend Hanover for
ungrateful England a second time: he even once
forbade the passage through his dominions of the
English mercenaries, bought in Germany, because
he was revolted by this sordid traffic in human
beings, and still more because he needed the young
men of the Empire for his own army.
He made use of the distress of the Ocean-Queen
to preserve the naval rights of the smaller Powers
by an alliance of armed neutrality; after the
peace, he, first among the European princes, con-
cluded a commercial treaty with the young Re-
public, and in it acknowledged that free, human
comprehension of international law which has
since then remained a faithfully preserved tradition
of the Prussian State. But neither his hate of
the "God-damn Government," nor the boundless
popularity which saluted him in the (American)
colonies, ever moved him to go one step beyond
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? Frederick the Great 169
the interests of his State. His old enemy Kaunitz
still could explain the proud course of the Fred-
erician policy only as springing from the im-
measurable cunning of a demoniacal nature.
But in the Empire the old mistrust gradually
disappeared; its people observed that nowhere
were their affairs weighed so soberly, so exactly,
so watchfully, and so coldly as in the hermitage of
Sans Souci.
So the impossible happened -- the high nobility
of the Empire gathered round Frederick's flag of
its own free will. Kaiser Joseph resumed his
Bavarian plans -- to shatter Prussia's power, as he
himself admitted. He at the same time threatened
the stability of his ecclesiastical neighbours with
rash thoughts of secularization. A sudden terror
gripped the small States when they saw their
natural protector become an enemy; an alliance
of the Central Powers was discussed, a league of
the ecclesiastical princes, until at last the acknow-
ledgment was forced that nothing could be done
without Prussia's help.
With youthful zeal the old King entered into
the quarrel. All the alluring proposals which were
put forward that he should share the possession of
Germany with the Emperor he rejected as bait
for "the common greed. " He conquered his
contempt for the minor princes, and realized that
only through strict justice could he attach these
people to himself. He succeeded in winning the
great majority of the electors, and most of the
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? 170 The Life of
more powerful princes, for his German Princes*
Bund, and in maintaining the old Imperial Con-
stitutions and the status quo of the Imperial States
against the Kaiser.
"Only the love of my Fatherland, and the duty
of a good citizen," he wrote, "drive me at my
age to this undertaking. " What he had dreamt
in his youth had an even more brilliant fulfilment
for the patriarch: no longer hidden behind a
Bavarian shadow-Emperor, as in the Silesian wars,
but in the face of the whole world, the King of
Prussia now came into the arena as the protector
of Germany. All the neighboiu-ing Powers, who
counted on Germany's weakness, saw the unex-
pected turn of the Imperial policy with grave
anxiety. France and Russia approached the Court
of Vienna; the Alliance of 1756 bade fair to be
renewed. The Tiu*in Cabinet, on the contrary,
hailed the Princes' Bund with joy as "the tutelary
god of the Italian States. "
For two hundred years the policy of federalism
in the Empire had not got beyond a half start;
but now that it leaned on the power of Prussia
it suddenly won a large following. The memory
of the times of Maximilian I and the Elector
Berthold's attempts at reform rose again to the
surface. The Princes' Bimd was formed to up-
hold the Imperial theocratic Germany. But if it
lasted, if Prussia maintained her position of leader
at the head of the great Imperial States, the old
forms of the Imperial Diet had to lose their mean-
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? Frederick the Great 171
ing; the prospect was opened up of shattering the
Austrian system to its foundations, and as Graf
Hertzberg joyfully proclaimed, of excluding the
Archdukes from the great German institutions, of
transferring the Imperial Crown to another house at
the next election, and of placing the guidance of the
Empire in the hands of the most powerful States.
The young Karl August of Weimar proposed to
submit the old privileges which ensured the House
of Austria its unique position to an Imperial test.
It almost seemed as if the great problem of Ger-
many's future would be solved in peace. But the
Princes' Bund could not last; and this bitter truth
was hidden least of all from the common-sensible
mind of the old King. Only a series of chance
circumstances, only the defection of Kaiser Joseph
from the old approved traditions of Austrian state-
craft, had scared the minor princes into Frederick's
arms; their trust of Prussia went no further than
their fear of Austria. With the utmost reluctance
the Electorate of Saxony submitted to the guidance
of the younger and less aristocratic House of
Brandenburg; Hanover showed itself hardly less
mistrustful; even the humblest and weakest of
the allied States, Weimar and Dessau, secretly
discussed, so Goethe tells us, how they could
protect themselves against their Prussian pro-
tector's lust of power.
As soon as the Hofburg (the Court of Vienna)
dropped their covetous plans, the old natural
formation of parties must revive ; the ecclesiastical
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? 172 The Life of
princes, who now sought help in Berlin, could
see in Protestant Prussia only the sworn enemy of
their authority. Since Frederick knew this, since
he penetrated his faithful confederates to the
very marrow with his piercing gaze, he did not
let himself be deceived by the success of the minute
into imagining that this Schmalkaldic League was
anything but a makeshift, a means of preserving
the momentary balance. Karl August, in large-
hearted enthusiasm, sketched bold plans for the
building-up of the new Imperial Association; he
thought of a customs' union, of military conven-
tions, of a German code ; Johannes Miiller extolled
the Princes' Bund in the most high-flown pam-
phlets, Schubart in stirring lyrical effusions, and
Dohm concluded a clever pamphlet with these
words: "German and Prussian interests can never
stand in one another's way. " The discerning
mind of the old King was not moved by such
dreams; he knew that only a colossal war could
break the power of Austria in the Empire; it
sufficed him to keep it within the bounds of justice,
because he needed peace for his country.
For a serious reform of the Empire there were
still lacking all the preliminary conditions; there
was lacking, above all, the will of the nation.
Even the Imperialist defenders of the Princes'
Bund could not get beyond the old chimera of
German freedom. The Josephin policy, so Hertz-
berg stirringly protested, threatened to agglomer-
ate the powers of Germany into a mass, to subject
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? Frederick the Great 173
free Europe to a universal monarchy; and in
Dohm's eyes it appears as a praiseworthy aim of
the new Bund to keep open the western borders of
Austria, so that France can stride into it at any
time on behalf of German freedom.
The nation realized dimly that the existing con-
ditions were not worthy to exist; in Schubart's
writings the small Swabian territories are often
described as an open dove-cot, which lay close to
the claws of the royal weasel. But all these ideas
and presentiments were held under by a feeling
of hopeless resignation which modern energy can
hardly understand ; the Germans felt as if an in-
scrutable Providence had condemned this people
to continue for all eternity in an abnormal State
which had long lost every right to exist.
When the great King departed, it is true, he left
behind a generation which looked on the world
more joyfully and proudly than its fathers, and
enormously had the State power which might in
the future bring Germany a new day been raised.
But the question : By what ways and means could
a vital scheme for the German community be cre-
ated? appeared at Frederick's death still almost
as problematical as it had been at his ascension to
the throne; indeed, it had not once been seriously
raised by the great majority of Germans. The
first beginnings of a formation of parties in the
nation scarcely existed; it seemed as if only a
miracle from heaven could help the helpless. The
terrible confusion of the situation was shown with
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? 174 The Life of
sinister clearness by the one fact, that the hero
who with his good sword had once proved the
futiHty of the institutions of the Empire had come
himself to defend these lifeless forms against the
head of the Empire.
If Frederick could only prepare, and not com-
plete, the settlement of the German constitution,
he had, on the other hand, deeply and lastingly
influenced the inner policy of the German terri-
tories, and brought our nation to a nobler public
spirit and a worthier view of the character of the
State. He stood at the end of the great days
of unlimited monarchy, and yet appeared to his
contemporaries as the representative of a new
conception of the State, an enlightened despotism.
Only genius possesses the strength for propa-
ganda, is capable of gathering the resisting world
round the banner of new ideas. As the ideas of
the Revolution were first circulated effectively by
Napoleon, so was that serious comprehension of
the duties of the kingdom which governed the
Prussian throne from the time of the Great Elector
first transferred to the consciousness of the people
by Frederick. Only after the brilliant successes
of the Silesian wars was the gaze of the world,
which so far had hung wonderingly on the mag-
nificence of the Coiurt of Versailles, turned seriously
to the imostentatious crown of the Hohenzollerns.
In war and in his foreign policy the King showed
the incomparable creative power of his genius;
in the inner administration he was the son of his
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? Frederick the Great 175
father. He invigorated the traditional forms of
the State with the strength of genius, developed
the free and incomplete in a free and comprehen-
sive spirit ; he did not imdertake to erect anything
new. And yet he knew how to unite the idea of
a political kingdom, which his father, as a firm,
practical man, had realized, with the civilizing
influences of the century ; incessantly he gave him-
self and others an account of his doings. Already
as Crown-Prince he had won a place among the
political thinkers of the age; his Anti-Machiavel-
lism remains, in spite of all the weakness of
immaturity, surely the best and deepest exposition
of the duties of the princely office in an absolute
monarchy which was ever penned. Afterwards,
in the first years of the joy of conquest, he wrote
the Furstenspiegel ("Mirror for Princes") for the
young Duke of Wiirttemberg; but louder than all
theories spoke his actions, as he proved his words
in the days of trial, and showed the world what it
meant "to think, live, and die as a King. "
Lastly, Providence showed him that favour
which even genius needs, if it is to impress its
seal on a whole age : the good fortune of adequately
living up to his gifts until a ripe old age. He was
now the Nestor, the recognized first man of the
Eiiropean princes. His fame raised the prestige
of all thrones; from his words and deeds other
Kings learned to think highly of their vocation.
The old-established conception of the minor
princes, that the land and the people belonged to
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? 176 The Life of
the Most Serene Princely House, lost ground after
Frederick drily observed: "The Sovereign has no
nearer relation than his State, whose interests must
always stand before the ties of blood. "
The dynastic overweening conceit of the Bour-
bons showed up in its futility when he, on his
ascension to the throne, turned his back to the
light pleasures of life with the words: "My duty
is my only god, " and then for half a century served
this one god with all his strength, and to the thanks
of his people gave always the deliberate answer:
"For that I am here. " With such secular impar-
tiality no crowned head had ever spoken of the
princely dignity as this autocrat, who unhesitat-
ingly recognized the right of a Republic as of a
parliamentary kingdom, and sought the greatness
of absolute monarchy only in the arduousness of its
duties: "The Prince should belong to the State
head and heart ; he is the Pope of the Civil Religion
of the State. "
The new generation of the high nobility fash-
ioned itself by Frederick's example and the social
ideas of the new civilization. The small sultans
who raged in the time of Frederick William I were
followed by a long succession of well-meaning,
dutiful fathers of their peoples, such as Charles
Frederick of Baden and Frederick Christian of
Saxony,
Already it often happened that, in the Prussian
fashion, the princes had a military education;
Christian toleration, the advancement of schools,
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? Frederick the Great 177
and the well-being of his people, were considered
princely duties; individual minor States, like
Brunswick, granted to the Press even greater
freedom than Prussia itself. Even in certain
ecclesiastical districts there was a change for the
better ; the Miinster district extolled the mild and
careful administration of Fiirstenberg. ^
Of course, it was not everywhere, and at one
blow, that the deeply rooted offences of minor-
princely despotism disappeared; the old bad
practice of selling soldiers now, during the Amer-
ican war, reached the summit of its infamy, and
showed what the German princes were capable of.
The Frederician system of benevolent absolutism
for the benefit of the people often led in the narrow
spheres of the minor States to empty sport, or to
oppressive guardianship. The Margrave of Baden
called his exchequer shortly: "the natural trustee
of our subjects"; many a well-meaning minor
prince abused his dominions by the new-fangled
physiocratic system of taxation, by all sorts
of unripe philanthropic experiments, and the
Oettingen- Oettingen -Landesdirektorium had to
give the inquisitive reigning prince an accurate
account of the "names, breed, use, and external
appearance" of the collective dogs to be found in
princely lands, besides "additional, unpresuming,
most humble advice. "
' There is a noble Westphalian family called Furstenberg,
one of whom was Prince-Bishop of Miinster about this time,
who effected important reforms in the administration.
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? 178 The Life of
But, on the whole, the generation of princes of
those eighty years formed the most honourable
which had sat on German thrones for a long time.
Wherever he could, the King opposed the excesses
of his compeers, freed old Moser from prison, and
ensured the Wiirttembergers the continuance of
their constitution. The Empire as a whole lay
hopeless, but in many of its members a new hopeful
life was pulsing.
And far beyond Germany's borders the example
of Frederick carried influence. Maria Theresa
became his most docile pupil; she spread the idea
of the Frederician monarchy in the Catholic world.
Surrounded by weak neighbours, old Austria had
so far lived on careless and sleepy; only the
strengthening of her ambitious rival in the north
forced the Imperial State to exert her powers boldly.
The North-German Haugwitz fashioned the ad-
ministration of Austria, as far as was possible,
according to the Prussian pattern, and from these
Austrian reforms, in turn, came the enlightened
despotism which from now on began its impetuous,
violent attempts at a millennium in all Latin
countries, in Naples and Tuscany, in Spain and
Portugal.
The pride of the Bourbons stood out longest
against the new conception of the monarchy;
at Versailles, with jeering smiles, it was told how
at the Court of Potsdam the lord-high-chamber-
lain had never yet handed the King his shirt.
Only when it was too late, when the forces of the
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? Frederick the Great 179
Revolution were already knocking at the doors,
did the French Court begin to surmise something
of the duties of the kingdom.
The Crown of the Bourbons never wholly
emerged from the dull atmosphere of smug self-
adulation and contempt of the people ; therefore it
collapsed shamefully. But among the Germans
the spirit of monarchism, which lay in the blood of
our people, and even in the centuries of polycracy
was never wholly lost, was strengthened anew by
King Frederick. In no other nation of modern
history has a kingship had such a large and high-
minded view of its problems; therefore the Ger-
man people remained, even when the time of
the Parliamentary struggles came, the most faith-
ful of the great civilized peoples to the idea of
monarchy.
The love of peace of the House of HohenzoUem
remained alive even in its greatest war-princes.
Frederick valued power, but only as a means
for the well-being and civilization of the nations;
that it should be an end in itself, that the struggle
for power as such should bestow historic fame,
seemed to him as an insult to the honour of a
sovereign. Therefore he wrote his passionate
polemic treatise against Machiavelli. Therefore,
in his writings, he returned again and again to the
terrible warning of Charles XII of Sweden.
He might have felt secretly that in his own breast
were working irresistible forces which might lead
Jiim to similar errors ; and he was never tired of por-
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? i8o The Life of
traying the hollowness of objectless military fame,
and had the bust of the King of Sweden contemptu-
ously erected beneath the feet of the Muse in the
round hall at Sans Souci.
Already in his impetuous youth he had made
up his mind about the moral objects of power.
This State must become strong [he wrote at that
time], that it may play the lofty role of preserving
peace only from love of justice, and not from fear.
But if ever injustice, bias, and vice gain the upper
hand in Prussia, then I wish the House of Branden-
burg a speedy downfall. That says all.
When at the end of the Seven- Years' War he felt
strong enough to preserve peace out of justice,
then he turned his attention to the restoration of
the national prosperity with such zeal that the
army was actually injured.
It is a fact: the general who had overwhelmed
the Flag of Prussia with laurels left the army in
a worse condition than he had found it on his
ascension to the throne; he could not approach
his father as a military organizer. He needed the
industrial population for his devastated country,
and therefore patronized on principle the enlisting
of troops for his army in foreign countries. The
regimental commanders were to draw up the
register of their recruiting-districts in agreement
with the Landrdte (sheriffs) and surveyors^ of
taxes.
From that time there occurred in every district
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? Frederick the Great i8i
each year that struggle between the military claims
and the civil interests which, afterward, in chang-
ing forms, occurred again and again in Prussian
history. This time the struggle was decided
in favour of political economy. The civil author-
ities sought to preserve every man who was in
any way capable or well-to-do from the red can-
tonal collar. The King himself interfered to
help, and freed from compulsory service numerous
classes of the population -- the new immigrants,
the families of all traders and manufacturers, the
household servants of landowners. Many cities
-- nay, whole provinces, as Ostfriesland -- obtained
privileges. Soon after the peace the majority of
the army consisted of foreigners.
Frederick thought highly of the army, and liked
to call it the Atlas who carried this State on his
strong shoulders; the military fame of the seven
years had an after-effect; the service of the com-
mon soldier, it is true, was counted in Prussia,
as everywhere else in the world, as a misfortune,
but not as a disgrace, as it was in the rest of the
Empire.
The King brought the great summer
manoeuvres on the Mockerauer Heath to a tech-
nical completeness which the art of manoeuvres
has probably never reached since then. He was
never tired of impressing on his officers "to love
the detail, which also has its distinction," and
wrote for their instruction his military handbook,
the most mature of all his works.
Not one improvement in military affairs escaped
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? i82 The Life of
him; at a great age he yet adopted a new arm
of the service, the light infantry, the green Fusiliers
according to the pattern of the American riflemen.
The fame of the Potsdamer parade-ground drew
spectators from all countries. In Turin Victor
Amadeus and his generals faithfully copied every
movement of the great Prussian drill-sergeant
down to the bent carriage of the head; and when
the young Lieutenant Gneisenau saw the pointed
helmets of the grenadiers on parade glittering in
the sun, he cried enthusiastically: "Say, which
of all nations could well copy this marvellous
sight. ? "
In spite of that, in Frederick's last years the
army sank undoubtedly. The flower of the old
officers' corps lay on the battle-fields; during the
seven years -- an unprecedented occurrence in the
history of war -- all the renowned generals, with
scanty exceptions, were left on the field or were
disabled; their successors had known war only in
subalterns' positions, and looked for the secret of
the Frederician conquests only in the mechanical
exercises of the parade-ground. Among the for-
eign officers were many doubtful adventurers who
only courted favour; for the proud frankness of a
York or a Bliicher there was no more room.
The King, less friendly to the bourgeoisie than
his father, believed that only the aristocracy had
a sense of honour, and dismissed the bourgeois
officers from the majority of the regiments. In the
noble officers* corps there arose an aristocratic
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? Frederick the Great 183
arrogance (Junkersinn) , which soon became more
intolerable to the people than the coarse roughness
of earlier times. The old hired soldiers lived
in the end comfortably with wife and child, in
civil employment, and abominated war for a
country which had always remained foreign to
them. Frederick had already noticed with aston-
ishment in the war of the Bavarian Succession how
little this army accomplished; the reason for the
deterioration he did not penetrate. The Eudae-
monism of his age made it impossible for him to
recognize the moral forces which swayed the army.
He had once, after the custom of the period, formed
Prussian regiments from Austrian and Saxon
prisoners of war, and could not even learn by the
desertions en masse of these imfortimate men; he
had in the last years of the war sufficiently experi-
enced what an army of his own people was capable
of, yet such forcible calling out of the entire
national strength always remained to him only an
expedient for desperate days, "when the defence
of the Fatherland and an imminent danger depends
on it. "
Of his statesmen, Hertzberg alone had religiously
observed the daring ideas of Frederick William I ;
he wanted to gradually purge the army of all
foreigners. "Then we shall be as imconquerable
as the Greeks and the Romans! " But the old
King saw with satisfaction how his tmfortunate
land was being strengthened agriculturally, and
now defined the ideal of the army with the astound-
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? 1 84 The Life of
ing words: "The peaceful citizen shall not even
notice when the nation is at war. " So one of the
pillars which upheld the edifice of State -- universal
service -- began slowly to totter.
The traditional class-system of the estates of the
realm and the organization of government de-
pendent from it the King upheld more strictly
than his father; he helped with instruction and
ruthless coercion, with gifts and loans, as often
as the role which was prescribed for the peasant,
the citizen, or the nobleman in the household of
the nation no longer seemed to suffice him.
The nobility was to remain the first rank in the
State, since "I need them for my army and my
civil administration. " By the mortgage institu-
tions, and by considerable support with ready
money, Frederick attained the conservation of the
large estates of the nobles after the devastation
of the years of war. Therefore he made as little
attempt as his father to abolish the serfdom of the
peasants, which was so repugnant to his magna-
nimity. By the common law, it is true, the
harsher forms of serfdom were done away with,
but there still remained the somewhat less op-
pressive hereditary rights of the dynasty. The
Government contented itself with modifying the
harshness of the existing lordship.
Unnoticed and undesired by the older princes,
in the meantime there began a displacement of
the conditions of social power, which was rich in
results. The new literatiu-e drew an educated
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? Frederick the Great 185
public from all classes ; the merchants and trades-
people of the great cities, the simple tenants of
the enlarged dominions of the monarchy, gradually-
attained to an assured position and to a conviction
that the privileges of the nobility could not endure
much longer. The nobility lost by degrees the
moral as well as the economic foundations of their
rank. The structure of the old class-organization
was imperceptibly undermined.
The administrative arrangements of the father
remained unchanged under the son, except that
he added to the provincial departments of the
General Direktorium four new ones, embracing the
entire State, for the administration of War, Mer-
cantile Policy, Mining Matters, and Forestry, and
thus made another step on the way to a united
State. The Crown still stood high above the
people. Gensdarmes had to force the peasants to
use the seed-potatoes presented by the King; the
command of the Sheriff (Landrat) and the Board
enforced against the tenacious passive opposi-
tion of the parties concerned communal drainage
and other enterprises, and all improvements of
agricultural appliances. The wholly exhausted
energies of the people for civil industries could
only be reawakened by a violent system of
protection.
The flaws of the Frederician political economy
were not due to the eternal and well-meant inter-
ference of the supreme power, which the age had
in no way outlived, but in the fiscal deceptions
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? 1 86 The Life of
which the King was compelled to resort to through
the embarrassments of his affairs; he had to use
fully three quarters of his revenue for the army,
and sought to make up what was necessary for his
administration by monopolies and indirect taxes.
The finances in their clumsiness resembled those
of a large private household. Almost half the
regular revenues came from the Crown lands and
forests; only this rich property of the State ren-
dered his high expenditure possible; it served at
the same time for the technical education of the
peasants. The amount of the principal taxes was
fixed by statute; the movable revenue of the ad-
ministration had to be drawn on for the extra-
ordinary expenses of settling people on the soil
and cultivating.
The carefully accumulated treasure sufficed for
several short campaigns; but old Prussia could
not carry on a long severe war without a foreign
subsidy, since the laws of the Landtag, the tradi-
tional views of the bureaucracy, and the crude
financial system, forbade every loan. Strong as
was the growth of the wealth and well-being of
the middle-classes, the greater advance of the
more fortunate neighbouring peoples was not
easily caught up. The Prussian State still re-
mained the poorest of the Great Powers of the
West; essentially an agricultural land, it played a
modest role in international commerce, even after
Frederick had opened up an avenue to the North
Sea by the conquest of Ostf riesland ; for the
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? Frederick the Great 187
mouth of the Ems, like the mouth of the Oder,
had no rich industrial Hinterland.
As a reformer, Frederick was effective only in
those spheres of the inner affairs of the State
which his predecessor had not understood. He
created the new Prussian Bench of Judges, as his
father formed the modern German Bureaucracy.
He knew that the administration of justice is a
political function, which is inseparably connected
with the State; he made all his dominions inde-
pendent of the Imperial High Court of Justice,
forbade the introduction of the interpretations of
the Faculty of Jurists, created a Ministry of Justice
in addition to the General Direktorium, gave the
entire administration of justice into the hands of
a hierarchically organized State Bureaucracy,
which itself educated its rising generation, and
took under strict superintendence that private
(or independent) jurisdiction which still continued
to exist in some minor departments.
The absolute independence of the courts of
justice in relation to the Administration was
solemnly promised, and kept inviolably, with the
exception of a few cases of well-meaning despotic
high-handed justice. The new Bench preserved
in a modest domestic position an honourable
class-feeling, and while the Imperial courts were
full of corruption, the proud saying was coined in
Prussia, and that against the King: II y a des
juges a Berlin. The desire often obtruded itself
upon the friend of Enlightenment, to whom the
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? i88 The Life of
State was the work of the conscious human will,
that not an inherited and traditional law but a
law founded on experience, such as was generally
desired, must reign in the State; all his life Fred-
erick cherished the idea of carrying out the first
comprehensive codification of the law which had
been attempted since the time of Justinian.
Only after his death did the Allgemeine Land-
reclif come in force, which shows more clearly than
any other work of the epoch the double-sidedness
of the Frederician conception of the State. On
the one side, the code preserved the traditional
social distinctions so carefully that the entire
legal system had to accommodate itself to the
class organization, and even -- against the common
law -- the nobilit}^ were granted special marriage
laws, and on the other it carried the idea of the
sovereignty of the State to its logical conclusion
with such daring, that many a passage anticipated
the ideas of the French Revolution, which made
IMirabeau say that with these ideas Prussia hurried
on a century ahead of the rest of Europe.
The aim of the State is the general well-being,
and only for the sake of this end may the State
limit the natural freedom of the citizens -- and
repeal any existing privilege. The King is only
the head of the State, and has duties and rights
only as such -- and this in the days when Biener
and other renowned lawyers were fighting for the
privileges and rights of the German princes to
' The common law of the period.
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? Frederick the Great 189
their land and serfs as an incontestable legal maxim
in the face of the whole country. The supreme
power, exempt from the sphere of the civil law,
interfered, ruling and advising, in all private af-
fairs, and dictated moral duties to parents and
children, landowners and servants; they ventured
through their all-embracing legislative wisdom
to settle every possible lawsuit of the future at
the outset.
With this code the old absolutism said its last
word: it surrounded its power with fixed barr'ers,
raised the commonwealth to a constitutional
State; and at the same time it unsuspectingly
entered upon the path which must lead to a new
juridical union of the German people, in that it
destroyed the validity of the Roman law. The
mechanical conception of the State of the Fred-
erician period was soon afterwards replaced by
a deeply penetrating philosophy, the incomplete
jurist training of Carmer and Suarez by the work
of historical jurisprudence; but the Allgcmeine
Landrecht ^ nevertheless remained for some decades
the firm foundation from which sprang all further
reforms of the Prussian State.
The belief in the authority of the law, a prelimi-
nary condition of all political freedom, became a
living power in the bureaucracy as well as among
the people. If the State existed for the general
welfare, an irresistible necessity, of which Fred-
erick suspected nothing, led to the desire for the
' The common law of the period.
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? 190 The Life of
removal of the privileges of the upper classes and
the participation of the nation in the government
of the State. And sooner or later these conclu-
sions had to be drawn, since already now only the
genius and strength of a great man could deal
with the difficult problems which this enlarged
kingdom presented.
Frederick did not promote the spiritual life of
his people to nearly the same extent. We know
from Goethe's confessions how fruitfully and in
the interests of freedom the heroism of the seven
years operated on the German civilization: how
in those years of military glory a new import, an
increasing sense of vitality, asserted itself in the
exhausted literature, how the impoverished lan-
guage, which had long sought to express mighty
sentiments, now at last struggled up out of the
insipidity an emptiness and found great words
for great emotions: really, the first German
comedy, Minna von Barnhelm, was created be-
neath the beating of the drums of the Prussian
camp. The Prussian people took a rich share in
the wonderful awakening of the spirit, and pre-
sented the literary movement with several of its
pioneers, from Winckelmann down to Hamann and
Herder. And wholly filled with the Prussian
spirit was that new maturer form of German
Protestantism which at last emerged victoriously
out of the philosophical disputes of this "effer-
vescing period" and became a common property
of t' e North-German peoples: the ethics of Kant.
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? Frederick the Great 191
The categorical imperative of Kant could only
be imagined on this ground of Evangelical free-
dom and faithful self-sacrificing work. Where
before rough commands extorted silent submission,
now every free judgment was challenged, through
the example of the King, who relied fearlessly on
the strength of the enquiring mind and gladly
confessed : who grumbles the most, goes farthest.
Frederick carried on the old Prussian policy of
Christian toleration liberally, and he proclaimed
in his code the principle : ' ' The people's conceptions
of God and godly things cannot be the subject
of a coercive law. " Nor did the Free-thinker
give up the attempts at union of his ancestors,
but strongly maintained that the two Evangelical
Churches should not refuse each other the Holy
Communion in case of necessity. The supreme
ecclesiastical authority of the throne, which he
claimed, ensured him against political intrigues
on behalf of the clergy, and even allowed him to
tolerate in his State the Society of Jesus, suspended
by the Pope.
He accorded the Press an almost unlimited
freedom, since "newspapers, in order to be inter-
esting, must not be interfered with. " He defined
all schools as "organizations of the State," and
spoke readily and spiritedly of the State's duty
to bring up the younger generation to independent
thought and a sacrificing love of the Fatherland.
He constantly extolled the illustriousness of learn-
ing and poetry as the greatest ornament of the
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? 192 The Life of
kingdom: he showed himself a German and a
prince of peace in that he regarded the classics,
and not the exact sciences, lilce the soldier
Napoleon, as the spring of all higher education.
Nevertheless, the King accomplished very little
for the promotion of national education directly.
The scarcity of money, the lack of competent
board-school teachers, and the imceasing struggles
now with foreign enemies, now with the economic
question at home, rendered the carrying out of
his plans more difficult; and in the end the dry
utilitarianism of the father always broke out
again in the son. This economical Prince would
provide means for anything rather than for the
purposes of instruction.
When the Germans in the Empire sneered that
this Prussia had starved itself into greatness, they
thought chiefly of the Prussian teachers and
scholars. Only what was absolutely necessary
was done for the national schools; the repeatedly
enjoined discipline of compulsory general attend-
ance at school remained a dead letter for wide
stretches of the country. None of the Prussian
Universities attained the fame of the new Georgia
Augusta. '^ Only towards the end of the Frederi-
cian period, when Zedlitz, the friend of Kant,
took over the direction of the educational organi-
zations, did a somewhat freer impulse enter into
the public instruction. At that time the worthy
Abbot Felbiger reformed the Catholic national
' The University at Gottingen, named after its founder.
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? Frederick the Great 193
schools, and found enthusiastic supporters in the
Empire, so that in the end Catholic Germany
participated in the greatest blessing of the Refor-
mation.
It seemed an easy thing to gather in Berlin a
brilliant circle of the best intellects of Germany
for pregnant activity. Every young genius in the
Empire angled for the eye of the national hero.
Even Winckelmann, who had once fled from the
country in hot hatred, now experienced with what
strong bands this State fettered the hearts of its
sons. "For the first time," he wrote, "the voice
of the Fatherland makes itself heard within me,
which was iinknown to me before. " He burned
with an eager desire to show the Aristotle of mili-
tary art that a born subject could achieve some-
thing worthy, and negotiated for years for an
appointment in Berlin.
But in Frederick's French academy there was no
place for German thinkers. The Medicean days,
which one had once awaited from the inspired
Prince of the Rheinsberger Parnassus, only came
for the foreign intellects at the table of Sans Souci ;
the pupil of French culture would not and could
not understand the young unruly life which stirred
in the depths of his own people. While the Ber-
liner company intoxicated themselves to over-
refinement with the idea of the new literature,
and jeering scepticism and refined epicureanism
were almost crowding out the old strict moral
simplicity, the Prussian administration main-
13
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? 194 The Life of
tained their one-sided utilitarian bias which only
troubled itself about everyday matters. That
intolerably stiff, home-baked, prosaic spirit which
was instilled into the State of the old Soldiei-King
was somewhat humanized by Frederick but not
broken ; only the baroque glory of the New Palace
and the mighty cupolas of the Gensdarmenkirche^
made it possible to recognize that at least the
barbaric culture-hatred of the thirties had begun
gradually to give way.
But still the Prussian State represented only
the one half of our national life; the delicacy and
the yearning, the profoundness and the enthusiasm
of the German character, could not obtain just
recognition in this prosaic world. The centre-
point of the German policy was not the home of
the intellectual work of the nation; the classical
period of our poetry found its scene of action in
the minor States.
In this momentous fact lies the key to many
puzzles of modern German history. To the coolly
averted attitude of King Frederick our Literature
owes the most precious thing it possesses -- ^its
imequalled freedom; but this indifference of the
' I cannot find out about this anywhere, but there is the
Gensdarmenmarkt, with the French Church and the New
Church, because Frederick was fond of French things. But in
Baedeker, it does not say anything about the change of name,
though it does say that the two churches with the theatre form
the finest group of buildings in Berlin. In an 1893 Baedeker, it
says that they are of the last century, which would make it
about the time. -- L. S.
?
