citizen.  He himself subordinated his comfort and his expenditures to the welfare of the State, meeting the whole expense of the royal household with some two hundred thousand thalers; thinking first of the advantage of his people and last of himself.  His subjects, in their turn, he felt should bear cheerfully whatever duties and burdens he imposed upon them.  Every one was to remain in the station in which birth and education had placed him.  The noblemen were to be landholders and officers; to the citizens belonged the towns, trade, manufacturing, instruction, and invention; to the peasant, the land and the menial work.  But in his sphere each one was to be prosperous and happy.  Equal, strict, ready justice for every one; no favors to the highborn and rich—­rather, in case of doubt, the humble should have the preference.  To increase the number of useful men; to make every activity as profitable and as perfect as possible; to buy as little as possible abroad; to produce everything at home, exporting the surplus—­these were the leading principles of his social and economic theories.  He exerted himself incessantly to increase the acreage of arable land, and to provide new places for settlers.  Swamps were drained, lakes drawn off, dikes thrown up.  Canals were dug and money advanced to found new factories.  At the instigation and with the financial support of the government cities and villages were rebuilt, more solid and sanitary than they had been before.  The farmers’ credit system, fire insurance societies, and the Royal Bank were founded.  Everywhere public schools were established.  Educated people were brought in from abroad; the government officials everywhere were required to be educated, and regulated by examination and strict inspection.  It is the duty of the historian to enumerate and praise all this, if also to mention some unsuccessful attempts of the King, which were inevitable owing to his endeavor to control everything himself.

The King cared for all his lands, and by no means least for his child of sorrow, the newly won Silesia.  When he conquered this great district it had a few more than a million inhabitants.  They realized vividly the contrast between the easy-going Austrian management and the precise, restless, stirring rule of Prussia.  In Vienna the catalogue of prohibited books had been larger than at Rome; now bales of books came incessantly from Germany into the province, reading and buying were astonishingly free, even printed attacks upon the sovereign himself.  In Austria it was the privilege of the aristocracy to wear foreign cloth.  When the father of Frederick the Great of Prussia had forbidden the importation of cloth, he had first of all dressed himself and his princes in domestic goods.  In Vienna no office had been considered aristocratic if it implied anything but a nominal function; all the actual work was a matter for subordinates.  A chamberlain stood higher than a veteran general or minister.  In Prussia even the highest born