When the province of Prussia was forced, in the Seven Years’ War, to do homage to Empress Elizabeth, and remained for several years incorporated in the Russian Empire, the officers of the district found means nevertheless to raise money and grain for their King in secret, and in spite of a foreign army and government.  Great skill was used to accomplish the transportation.  There were many in the secret, but not a traitor among them.  In disguise they stole through the Russian lines at the risk of their lives, although they knew that they would reap small thanks from the King, who did not care for his East Prussians at all.  He spoke contemptuously of them, and showed them unwillingly the favors which he bestowed on the other provinces.  His face turned to stone whenever he learned that one of his young officers was born between the Memel and the Vistula, and after the war he never trod on East Prussian soil.  But this conduct did not disturb the East Prussians in their admiration.  They clung with faithful love to their ungracious lord, and his best and most enthusiastic eulogist was Emanuel Kant.

Life in the King’s service was serious, often hard—­work and deprivation without end.  It was difficult even for the best to satisfy the strict master; and the greatest devotion received but curt thanks.  If a man was worn out he was likely to be coldly cast aside.  There was work without end everywhere:  something new, something beginning, some scaffolding of an unfinished structure.  To a foreign visitor this life did not seem at all graceful; it was austere, monotonous, and rude, with little beauty or carefree cheerfulness.  And as the King’s bachelor household, his taciturn servants, and the submissive intimates under the trees of the quiet garden, gave a foreign guest the impression of a monastery, so in all Prussian institutions he found something of the renunciation and the discipline of a great busy monastic brotherhood.

For something of this spirit had been transmitted even to the people themselves.  Today we honor in this an undying merit of Frederick II., for this spirit of abnegation is still the secret of the greatness of the Prussian State, and the final and best guarantee of its permanence.  The artfully constructed machine which the great King had set up with so much intelligence and effectiveness was not to last forever; twenty years after his death it broke down; but in the fact that the State did not perish with it, that the intelligence and patriotism of the citizens were able of their own accord to establish under his successors a new life on a new basis, we see the secret of Frederick’s greatness.

Nine years after the close of the last war which was fought for the possession of Silesia, Frederick increased his domain by a new acquisition, not much less in area, but thinly populated—­the Polish districts which have since become German territory under the name of West Prussia.