was little esteemed if he was not useful to the State, and the King himself was a most exact official, who watched and scolded over every thousand thalers saved or spent.  Any one in Austria who left the Catholic Church was punished with confiscation of property and banishment; under the Prussians anybody could leave or join any church—­that was his own affair.  Under the imperial rule the government had been, on the whole, negligent if it had been forced to occupy itself with any matter; the Prussian officials had their noses and their hands in everything.  In spite of the three Silesian wars the province grew to be far more prosperous than it had been under the Empire.  Up to this time a hundred years had not been sufficient to wipe out the visible traces of the Thirty Years’ War.  The people remembered well how in the cities the heaps of rubbish from the time of the Swedish invasions had lain about, and between the remaining houses there were patches of waste ground blackened by fire.  Many small cities still had log houses in the old Slavic style, with thatched or shingled roofs, patched up shabbily from time to time.  In a few decades the Prussians removed the traces not only of former devastations, but also of the recent Seven Years’ War.  Frederick laid out several hundred new villages, had fifteen good-sized towns rebuilt in regular streets—­largely with funds from the royal treasury—­and had compelled the landed proprietors to restore several thousand farms which they had abolished as individual holdings, and install upon them tenants with rights of succession.  Under the Empire the taxes had been lower, but they had been unfairly distributed and had fallen chiefly upon the poor, the nobility being exempt from the greater part of them.  The collection was imperfect, much was embezzled or poorly applied; relatively little came into the imperial treasury.  The Prussians, on the contrary, divided the country into small districts, appraised every acre of land, and in a few years abolished almost all exemptions.  The outlying country now paid its land taxes and the cities their excise duties.  So the province bore the double burden with greater ease, and no one but the privileged classes grumbled; and with all this, it could maintain forty thousand soldiers, whereas formerly there had been in the province only about two thousand.  Before 1740 the nobility had lived en grand seigneur.  All who were Catholic and rich lived in Vienna.  Everybody else who could raise enough money betook himself to Breslau.  Now the majority of landholders lived on their estates, the poverty-stricken nobles disappeared, the nobility knew that the King honored them if they looked after the cultivation of the land, and that the new master showed cold contempt to those who neither managed their estates nor filled civil or military positions.  Formerly lawsuits had been endless and expensive, hardly to be carried through without bribery and sacrifice of money.  Now it was observed that the number