the monarch who had borne the burden of seven campaigns—a burden of which his ten great battles formed but a trifling fraction—might well have been pardoned for appropriating to himself some share in the repose which his labours had won for prussia. even if it is difficult to couple the thought of frederick with that of repose, it might at least be expected that after a triumph of defence hardly surpassed in human history he would delight his army by praising their achievements and his people by accepting their plaudits. relaxation for himself and courtesy towards others were, however, equally distasteful to the king. he slunk into his capital by back streets and thus frustrated the preparations of the citizens to express their loyalty and joy. yet in the darkest moments of the war he had been devising plans for the improvement of prussia and he hardly waited for the peace to be signed before plunging into a rapid career of reform. after kunersdorf, while his despair was gradually giving place to hope and hope to confidence, he was not too absorbed in strategy to lay to heart the defects which302 he observed in the schooling of the peasants near the spree. the weeks which passed while his envoy at hubertusburg was harvesting the fruits of the war were spent by frederick in planning reforms for the army which had proved its matchless quality through all the seven campaigns.
his first desire was to get rid of those helpers whose services he had accepted only because of pressing need. twenty-one free battalions had been raised and had proved immensely serviceable. now the king bade two-thirds of them go their ways without reward. his learned friend and servant, colonel guichard, upon whom in consequence of a dispute about the battle of pharsalia he had inflicted the name quintus icilius, appealed to him to repay to his officers part at least of the money which they had spent from their own pockets in enlisting their men. “thy officers have stolen like ravens,” replied the king; “they shall not have a farthing.” still more ungenerous was his treatment of a section of his army whose only fault was their lack of noble birth. during the long war many students and schoolboys of the citizen class entered the army as volunteers and received commissions. in the hour of triumph they were ruthlessly sacrificed to frederick’s principle that his officers, save perhaps among the garrison regiments, must belong to the caste of nobles. prussians who had served him in his extremity must submit to be cashiered, while foreigners of rank were enlisted to atone for the dearth of natives whose pedigrees satisfied his requirements.
at the same time the army as a whole was303 wounded by harsh criticism and harsh reforms. this, like much of frederick’s conduct, may be ascribed to the contempt for mankind which experience only increased, and to the almost inevitable effect upon himself of the unbridled absolutism described in the sixth chapter of this book. “dogs, would ye live for ever?” he shrieked at his men in the crisis of one of his fights. he was forced to confess that, as his strength became less and the number of his subjects greater, he could not hope to look into all affairs of government with his own eyes. yet he shrank more and more from creating an official or a system in anywise independent of his own immediate control. in 1763 he therefore appointed inspectors of cavalry and of infantry in every province and endowed them with wide powers of supervision of the officers and all that they did. this measure, it need hardly be said, roused the utmost bitterness among the regimental staff, which had hitherto enjoyed a great measure of independence on the sole condition that the king was satisfied with the results of its work. it was the more distasteful for the very reason which made it acceptable to frederick—that the new inspectors were appointed at the royal pleasure without regard to seniority. the chief officer of a regiment, who had been wont to rule it like a patriarch, was now subjected to the control of a rival, perhaps his junior, who did not resign his own command and could favour it as he pleased.
the captains, too, suffered in pocket from another unpopular reform. they had hitherto received from the treasury the full wages of every man on the304 muster-roll of their company. in time of peace, however, the native-born soldiers spent nine or ten months of the year on furlough without pay. each captain defrayed the cost of recruiting foreigners for his company out of what he received and pocketed the balance. now, at the moment when war ceased, frederick cut off this source of income. by retaining regiments of special merit on the old footing he insulted the rest, and by graduating according to his opinion of the regiment’s efficiency the trifling allowances paid by way of compensation he cast a slur upon the professional honour of officers and men alike. the king paid his officers ten thalers a month and their pensions depended entirely upon his caprice. many captains were thenceforward unable to resist the temptation to falsify the muster-rolls so as to receive pay for soldiers who did not exist.
the king’s despotic power, however, enabled him to make light of military discontent in time of peace. he resolved to keep up an army of 150,000 men, to drill it as it had never been drilled before, to educate the officers, to review all the troops every year, to build new fortresses, and to establish stores of money and munitions sufficient to enable prussia to enter at a moment’s notice upon a war of eight campaigns. it is a highly significant fact that in frederick’s secret estimates for the future struggle the annual contribution of prussia was set down at 4,700,000 thalers and the sum to be extorted from saxony at 5,000,000. the balance of the 12,000,000 thalers, which was the price of a campaign, must come from the royal accumulations. frederick’s own expenses305 were only 220,000 thalers a year. at the close of his reign, when the total revenue of the state was not quite 22,000,000 thalers, the treasure amounted to more than 51,000,000, a sum fully five times as great as that which he had inherited from his father.
frederick was compelled by his past to stand to arms all his life through. with advancing years he became more lonely and more subject to disease. in 1765 he lost his sister, the margravine of schwedt, and next year the aged madame de camas, whom he always called mamma. his old friends died one by one and the french wits had vanished. his brothers, henry and ferdinand, were often estranged from him by his bitter words. yet to the end of his life he prided himself on his cheerfulness between the attacks of gout and he permitted no disease to interrupt his labours. these were devoted first, as we have seen, to making the land secure from attack by means of the army, and also to guarding it from famine by methods which may next be considered. close on the heels of these essential duties came tasks of fresh development and reform, the acquisition of west-preussen in 1772, and new endeavours to uphold prussian prestige against the house of hapsburg.
it is of course impossible to calculate exactly the damage which a country suffers in time of war. moral gains and losses count in the long run for more than material, and no statistics even of material losses are truly satisfactory. as between one prussian province and another, however, a rough comparison may be made by means of the growth or306 decline of the population. silesia and the lands east of the oder had naturally suffered most, since, in addition to their quota of soldiers slain, they had long endured the presence of invading armies. in silesia the numbers fell by 50,000, about one in twenty-three, but further north, in the districts in which the russians had encamped, the proportion was nearly five times as heavy. frederick’s own estimate was that one-ninth of his subjects had perished.
the loss of property had undoubtedly been very great. the conscience of the age forbade massacre, but was lenient towards pillage and devastation. but the king surpassed himself by what carlyle terms “the instantaneous practical alacrity with which he set about repairing that immense miscellany of ruin.” so far as the material losses sustained by individual prussians could be ascertained, they were set down by the careful hands of royal commissioners and mitigated by royal gifts. the king had at his disposal depreciated coin to the amount of nearly 30,000,000 thalers, the sum which had been accumulated to pay for the eighth and ninth campaigns. this more than sufficed for the needs of the army and the repayment of the trifling loans, less than five and a half million thalers in all, that frederick had contracted during the war. with the residue and with the surplus revenues of the state the king set to work to prevent a single one of his subjects from falling into absolute ruin. his doles were graduated not by any standard of abstract justice, but by the rule that the minimum amount of307 help should be given that would serve the purpose of the state. many towns had paid ransoms to the enemy to avoid being sacked. that of berlin, two million thalers, was repaid out of the treasury, but halle received less than one-sixth of what it claimed, and in the majority of cases the burghers were left to bear the loss themselves.
in the country districts, however, there was less power of recuperation than among the comparatively wealthy towns. according to frederick’s opinion, it was therefore necessary that the state should make it possible for nobles and peasants alike to resume their normal duties. the spare horses from the army, to the number of 35,000, and many rations for man and beast from the magazines were at once distributed to the most needy. officials allotted to the peasants wood to rebuild their houses and sums of money to assist the work. their rents were remitted for a time, and oxen, cows, sheep, meal, and seed-corn were supplied to them free of charge. the state reaped its reward in the rents and taxes which speedily flowed into the royal coffers, as well as in the rapid growth of population.
while the king was thus doling out relief to a great part of his subjects, he indulged in a singular extravagance which has been the subject of much criticism and conjecture. though he inequitably threw upon the people the expense of restoring the coinage, though his subjects were sending him sheaves of petitions for aid, though he was of all monarchs the least addicted to pomp, none the less, three months after peace had been signed he began308 to build a third palace at potsdam. the astonished prussians believed that the cost was 22,000,000 thalers. if no more than one-tenth of this was actually expended, the king lavished on a superfluity more than one-third of the sum that he assigned to the restoration of the land.
those who insist that he did nothing without a motive of state may find it in his desire to convince foreign powers that it was dangerous to attack a nation which could afford luxuries while its enemies were deep in debt. other conjectures are possible. frederick loved to indulge the hope that the sciences, which had visited greece and italy, france and england, in turn, might settle for a while in prussia, and the new palace, like the salary paid to voltaire, might be regarded as a sacrifice at their altar. the claims of the new prussian industries, especially the manufacture of silk, which was largely used in adorning the interior, may have induced the king to provide an artificial market in this way. frederick’s versailles, however, remains to this day both a monument to his absolutism and an enigma.
the new palace at potsdam.
absolutism and diligence are still the hall-marks of all his measures. the military reforms, the work of restoration, and the attention paid to the arts taxed him but lightly when compared with his labours for the development of the agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and finance of his dominions. no sooner was the war at an end and the work of restoration set on foot than frederick began to pour forth a flood of edicts for the regulation and advance of every department of national life, and to309 engage in incessant labours of inspection to see that they were carried out.
in promoting agriculture he was guided by principles with which we are already familiar. his prime rule was still to increase the number of tillers of the soil and to make them safe against starvation. he therefore continued to bring in colonists from far and near, to drain marshes, to reclaim wastes, and to build new habitations. it is computed that at the close of his reign one-fifth or one-sixth of his subjects were immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. besides a knowledge of husbandry and handicraft which in many cases surpassed that of the prussians, the aliens brought with them substantial additions to the material wealth of the land. the official inventory of their belongings, though incomplete, shows that 6392 horses, 7875 head of cattle, 20,548 sheep, 3227 pigs, and upwards of 2,000,000 thalers in money were thus added to the capital of the nation.
to provide for the accommodation of the recruits to his army of agriculture, the king applied every art of government to bring new land under cultivation and to increase the fertility of the old. the superior enlightenment of prussia was attested by the curt refusal of brunswick and hanover to co-operate in works of drainage. no site for a farmstead was to be left vacant and in the forests—so ran the decree—“no place where a tree can stand, unplanted.” the sterile nature of the soil challenged the unwearied industry of the king. many centuries before blotting-paper came to be known,310 brandenburg was nicknamed “the sand-box of the holy roman empire.” thousands of acres had to be set with bushes to prevent its surface from being blown over the neighbouring fields.
“i confess,” wrote frederick to voltaire, “that with the exception of libya few states can boast that they equal us in the matter of sand. yet we are bringing 76,000 acres under cultivation this year as pasture. this pasture feeds 7,000 cows, whose dung will manure and improve the land, and the crops will be of more value.”
the spectacle of the royal philosopher writing to voltaire about manure and walking almost daily from sans souci to his turnip-field is a visible proof of frederick’s devotion to this branch of his stewardship. he was wont to speak with authority as the leading agriculturist of the realm. here, as elsewhere, his breadth of view often enabled him to discern the best product or practice in other lands, and his command of resources to transport it to his own. having once attained his object by teaching his subjects to produce an article at home, he imperatively forbade them to import it from abroad. the full reward of his policy would be reaped when prussia began to supply it to other countries in exchange for gold and silver.
a single instance of the minuteness and imperiousness with which the king applied this policy to agriculture may be cited from professor koser’s history of the reign. the berlin egg-market was still dependent on foreign supply. in 1780 a royal hen-census showed that there were 324,175 hens in the311 electoral mark and that 36,300 more were required to meet the demand for eggs. “what will it matter,” asked the king, “if every peasant keep ten or twelve more hens? their food does not cost much; they can pick up most of it in the straw and dung of the farmyard.” prohibition of the import of foreign eggs followed. this caused the market price to rise and the ministers expressed the fear that the supply would not be sufficient. the king rejoined:
“it is all the fault of the farmers and peasants for not setting about it. i have laboured forty years to introduce things of this kind. if the ministers want to eat eggs, let them take more trouble with the chambers to carry it through. the prohibition of foreign eggs remains as before.”
only a six months’ interval was allowed later to give the new establishments time to develop.
all through his reign frederick set his face firmly against any attempt to bridge over the gulf which divided the country from the town. the tobacco and sugar with which the peasant solaced himself, the clothes he wore, the plough and hoe which served him to till the fields were all made more costly in order that the towns might thrive. the vast majority of handicrafts might be practised only within their walls. on the other hand, the king’s ordinances against artisans who meddled with farming were so severe that they could not be strictly carried out. he also tried many measures with a view to conferring upon the peasant a secure position on the soil. he was successful in preventing the nobles from buying up312 the holdings of the class below them. he established some three hundred new villages by breaking up outlying farms. but in other directions even his autocratic power failed to overcome the passive resistance of the rural population.
in theory, frederick was a champion of human freedom. he condemned slavery in strong terms and viewed askance the legal position of the prussian countryfolk whom their lords regarded as so many head of labour. but he dared not shake the pillars of his army and of his treasury by giving the peasant leave to quit the soil. he desired to retain serfdom, but only in its mildest form. he set his heart on making every serf a hereditary tenant at a money rent. this was, however, repugnant both to the nobles, who feared that they would not be able to secure labourers for hire, and to the peasants, who feared that they would in future be obliged to bear the loss when their cattle died and to pay their arrears of taxation themselves. the proposed reform, as well as an attempt to assign limits to the labour that the lords might lawfully exact, had therefore to be given up.
a change of still more unquestionable benefit, of which england had enjoyed the fruits for fully two centuries, likewise proved impracticable in prussia, even on the domains of the crown. each holder, whether noble or peasant, had a number of scattered strips of land in huge fields which were unenclosed and were ploughed and sown in common by the labour of the whole village. the abuses of such a system were manifold. it stereotyped the succession313 of crops, checked individual enterprise, prevented the high cultivation which depended on the aid of walls or hedges, and exposed the strips of the industrious to the spreading tares of his slothful neighbour. frederick, once more guided by his loftier outlook on affairs, ordered commissioners to remedy this unprofitable system by a rearrangement of all the holdings. peasants, bailiffs, ministers, all protested in vain, but frederick in his turn commanded in vain. all that he could accomplish in his lifetime was the severance of noble from peasant land. he was compelled to content himself with abolishing practical slavery as distinguished from serfdom, with codifying the services due from the peasants, and with other minor reforms.
whatever may have been its effect in the long run, however, there can be little doubt that it was frederick’s deeds rather than his laws which conferred the greatest immediate benefit upon prussian agriculture. his subjects were assured, as were those of no other great monarch in europe, that there would be a market for their produce in years of plenty, relief of their necessities in years of dearth, and succour from the state where fire or flood or pest would otherwise have ruined them. this sense of security against starvation, though now so common that it is difficult to appreciate it, was then so rare that thousands of freemen left their native lands for the despotism and sterile soil of prussia.
in the sphere of industry frederick was less hampered than in that of agriculture by the inertia of his people. he found prussia making few commodities314 save the simplest and exporting only three,—wool, linen, and wood. before he died his minister, hertzberg, could boast that every conceivable manufacture found a home in his dominions.
the record of the steps by which the transformation was effected is simply a further series of illustrations of the autocracy and diligence of the king. he strove with might and main to reanimate and develop the old industries and to establish new ones. this involved incessant contrivance and inspection on his part, the free use of subsidies by the state, and the constant imposition of vexatious restrictions upon every form of trade.
one of the most conspicuous examples of frederick’s methods is the development of the porcelain industry of berlin. during the prussian occupation of saxony the secret of the far-famed dresden ware was extorted from the employees of augustus. the king spared no effort to make the most of his prize. he bought up the manufactory at berlin, forbade all purchase of rival goods from abroad, installed porcelain at his own table in place of the gold and silver associated with royal state, used porcelain snuffboxes, and bestowed samples of the finest products when convention prescribed a regal gift. to promote the welfare of prussia, jews who wished to marry were compelled to purchase a service of porcelain and to dispose of it abroad.
with the same unflinching resolution the king pursued his design of making berlin a great industrial centre, of establishing manufactures in all his towns, and of forcing prussia to provide for all her own315 needs and for many of the needs of foreign lands. every industry, silk and satin, cloth and linen, shipbuilding and mining, alike received the royal stimulus and was compelled to submit to the royal interference. frederick’s success varied, for in some cases it was more apparent than in others that precepts, prohibitions, and subsidies could not make good deficiencies of climate, skill, and enterprise. while the production of porcelain was firmly established, that of tobacco by no means fulfilled the expectations of the king. he commissioned a prussian chemist to find out a sauce which would make the home-grown leaf at least comparable with the virginian. the experiment, which occupied more than two and a half years, was furthered by all the resources of government. no less than 1180 samples were tested. the report of the general tobacco administration, however, stated that only 34 of these were in any way better for the treatment, and that these 34, “notwithstanding they made a brave show to outward seeming,” were too unsavoury even to be mixed with the products of virginia.
twice a year the king with the aid of his ministers was wont to take stock of his kingdom, and to measure the progress of all his schemes. in the interval he travelled through his provinces and issued instructions for the amendment of all that he found amiss. “schweidnitz and neisse are still very short of tiled roofs, n. b., someone will have to look to it” is one of fourteen points that he noted down in the course of a visit to silesia. no detail was too trifling for his attention. at the time when a paper316 manufactory was determined on, doubt was expressed whether sufficient raw material in the shape of fine rags would be forthcoming.
“the ill custom prevails among us,” rejoined the king, “that both in town and country the servant-girls make the best rags into tinder to light the fire. we must try to break people of it, and therefore the rag-collectors must be provided with touch-wood, which is just as good as tinder for lighting a fire, to give to the girls in exchange for rags.”
a king who took upon his own shoulders so vast a share as did frederick in regulating the agriculture and industry of his subjects could not avoid concerning himself also with their foreign trade. the general principles of commercial policy which he followed were simple. he was determined to see that prussian subjects sold as much as possible to foreigners and bought as little as possible from them in return. the latter part of his task could be, and was, accomplished by prohibiting the importation of certain commodities, such as salt, porcelain, and steel, and by appointing a host of customs-officers to make the prohibition effective. but to sell to foreigners goods which were produced in prussia chiefly because the king willed that his subjects should forego the convenience of buying them from foreigners was a feat which taxed frederick’s statecraft to the utmost.
in general it may be said that prussian commerce did not thrive. thanks to the strenuous efforts of king and ministers, who imported foreign artisans, endowed them with implements and homes, compelled317 natives to learn crafts, bought sheep in spain, forbade the export of raw material or the import of finished goods, forced the monasteries to support unprofitable industries, vetoed profitable industries that threatened in any way to prejudice their favourites, in short, exhausted the arts of government to foster production,—thanks to all this the silesian export of cloth and linen rose to between five and six million thalers a year.
this result was not achieved by domestic interference only. the king did not shrink from tariff wars with austria and saxony, nor from much toil to procure commercial treaties. it often appeared, however, that there were spheres in which statecraft, even when practised by a frederick, could accomplish little.
“when at that time a new republic arose across the ocean,” writes professor koser, “king frederick made haste to enter into commercial relations with it, in order to exchange cloth, woollen stuffs, and linen, iron goods and porcelain, for rice, indigo, and virginian tobacco. the ‘most favoured nation’ treaty of 10 september, 1785, between prussia and the united states of america fulfilled, it is true, few of the expectations which both parties formed of it, for the english, who from a seafaring and capitalist point of view were more competent, long continued to be the commercial intermediaries between those renegade colonies and the old world.”
in the course of his efforts the king endeavoured at different times to supplant hamburg, to ruin danzig, and to make silesia an impenetrable barrier318 between polish wool-growers and their customers in saxony. it was a peculiar feature of prussia that her straggling frontiers were crossed by many roads and rivers which connected foreign states. the hohenzollern laboured to turn this fact to account and to favour prussian merchants by hampering foreigners with enormous tolls. the result was that commerce was compelled to avoid the borders of his dominions.
frederick was indefatigable in inciting his subjects to take up new enterprises as well as in striving to procure for them advantages abroad. as a rule, however, the commercial companies which he formed either decayed or relapsed into the position of state undertakings. it may be surmised that what might have been possible to the frederick and the prussia of 1740 had been rendered well-nigh impossible by the changes in both which a generation of militarism had produced. the system of despotic command and automatic obedience was fatal to the growth of a class of self-reliant merchants, and the king complained bitterly that neither individuals nor corporations would act with enlightened patriotism in developing the commerce of prussia. able advisers of the crown, indeed, did something to atone for this lack of initiative. thanks to the talent of hagen, the bank, which was established in 1765, survived its early perils and became serviceable to prussian trade. the marine commercial company also outlived many of frederick’s semi-official creations.
it is perhaps in the sphere of taxation that frederick’s unflinching autocracy is most remarkably319 displayed. he claimed not only to regulate the consumption of his people according to his own standard of propriety, but also to select agents to enforce his rules without the smallest consideration for their feelings. frederick wished to make existence easier for the poor, especially for the soldier. he therefore abolished the tax on grain, but subjected meat, beer, and wine to progressive imposts. every prussian was forced to buy from the state a fixed quantity of inferior salt at a price equal to four times its cost of production. the king’s delight in coffee did not make him blind to the fact that the state would gain more profit if his subjects were forced to abandon it in favour of prussian beer. accordingly in 1781 coffee became, like salt and tobacco, a monopoly of state and a tax of 250 per cent. upon its value was imposed. frederick strove to refute the remonstrances of the pomeranian gentry with the words: “his majesty’s high person was reared in youth on beer-soup, therefore the people in that part can equally well be reared on beer-soup; it is much more wholesome than coffee.” the people, however, seem to have mitigated the inconvenience to which they were put by their king in part by brewing decoctions of herbs, but chiefly by smuggling. it has been estimated that no less than two-thirds of the coffee which they used was contraband. it boded ill for the state when to knock one of the king’s spies on the head excited none of the odium of murder.
the measure which most of all estranged the hearts of the prussians from their king dates,320 however, from the year 1766, when frederick resolved to introduce the french system of farming out the indirect taxes, or regie. not the system alone, but also the chief agents who carried it into effect, were brought from france. the lessee-in-chief, de launay, exercised great influence over the king, who accepted his opinion as to the possibilities of taxation in preference to that of his prussian commissioners.
the people, as was natural, detested an innovation which both wounded their teutonic sensibilities and raised the price of food. de launay and his assistants were caricatured as marching behind beasts laden with rackets, foils, and fiddles, to avenge the shame of rossbach on the inhabitants of berlin. patriots might well chafe at the thought that a new and foreign department was introduced into the general directory itself, and that whereas a prussian minister was paid only 4000 thalers a year, each of the four chief frenchmen received 15,000. less than ten per cent. of the 2000 tax-gatherers were foreigners, but the germans were insulted at being deemed fit for the lower grades alone.
their murmurs, however, were powerless to alter the purpose of the king. the innovation, indeed, was not recommended by conspicuous success. though it simplified the fiscal administration, a large proportion of the returns was still swallowed up by expenses of collection. on a review of the twenty years, 1766–1786, the proceeds of the regie seem to have been in no wise augmented by de launay’s hated invasion. yet frederick adhered to his plan, kept the taxes high, administered the funds of the321 state in secret, and crowned all by bringing coffee under the control of the french. to his fiscal measures more than to all else was it due that the state which he had exalted drew a deep breath of relief when he died.
