Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/21

HISTORY.] PRUSSIA friendly to Sweden, lie was forced by circumstances to take up arms against it. In September 1713 Stettin was captured by the allies and handed over to the custody of Frederick William, who paid the expenses of the siege and undertook to retain possession of the town until the end of the war. But Charles XII. refused to recognize this arrangement and returned from his exile in Turkey to demand the immediate restitution of the town. With this demand the Prussian monarch naturally declined to comply, unless the money he had advanced was reimbursed, and the upshot was the outbreak of the only war in which Frederick William ever engaged. The struggle was of short dura- tion and was practically ended in 1715 by the capture of Stralsund by the united Prussians, Saxons, and Danes under the command of the king of Prussia. The Swedes were driven from Pomerania, and at the peace of 1720 Frederick William received the greater part of Vorpom- mern, including the important seaport of Stettin. Sweden now disappeared from the ranks of the great powers, and Prussia was left without a rival in northern Germany. A detailed history of Frederick William's reign would necessitate the recital of a long and tedious series of diplomatic proceedings, centring in the question of the succession to the duchies of Jiilichand Berg. In 1725 we find the king trusting for support to an alliance with England, while the queen has set her heart on a double marriage between her eldest son and daughter and an English princess and prince. The treaty of Wusterhausen between Austria and Prussia was concluded in the follow- ing year, and was confirmed with some modifications by the treaty of Berlin in 1728. Frederick William engaged to recognize the Pragmatic Sanction, while the emperor on his side undertook to support Prussia's claims to Jiilich and Berg. The policy of the latter, however, was far from straightforward, as he had already entered into a similar compact with the count palatine of Sulzbach, the rival claimant to the succession, who was a Roman Catholic and therefore a more sympathetic ally. Frederick William's intervention in the matter of the succession to the throne of Poland, rendered vacant by the death of Augustus II. in 1733, proved barren of advantage to Prussia and failed to secure the hoped-for reversion of the duchy of Cour- land. A Prussian contingent took part none the less in the ensuing war between Austria and France, but Austria concluded peace in 1735 without consulting her ally. In 1737 the king was resolute enough to withstand the pressure brought to bear upon him by England, France, Holland, and Austria in order to induce him to submit to their settlement of the Jiilich-Berg question ; and in 1739, convinced at last of the confirmed duplicity of the emperor, he turned to his hereditary enemy for help and concluded a defensive alliance with France. This action may be looked upon as marking the end of that phase in the rela- tions of the houses of Hapsburg and Hohenzollern in which the latter regarded the former with simple loyalty as its natural suzerain; the rivalry between Austria and Prussia had begun, and for the rest of the century formed the pivot on which the politics of Europe mainly turned. Frederick William died in 1740, conscious of his diplo- matic failures, but confident that his son would repair his errors. If the external history of Frederick William's reign is not especially glorious, and if in diplomacy he was worsted lliam ky the emperor, the country at least enjoyed the benefits of a twenty-five years' peace and those of a well-meaning, though somewhat too patriarchal, government. During this reign the revenues of Prussia were doubled, and the king left at his death a well-filled treasury and an army of 85,000 men. Though not ranking higher than twelfth among the European states in extent and population, ler Prussia occupied the fourth place in point of military power. The king himself took the greatest interest in the management of his army, in which the discipline was of the strictest ; and he carried the habits of the military martinet into all departments of the administration. His untiring industry occupied itself with the minutest details of government, and his downright blunt character showed there to greater advantage than in diplomatic circles. His chief innovation was the abolition of the distinction between the military and civil funds, and the assignment of the entire financial management of the country to a general directory of finance, war, and domains. Hitherto the proceeds of the excise and contribution had been paid into the military chest, while those of the royal monopolies and domains belonged to the civil service, deficiencies in one department being made good by the surplus of the other. Now, however, the directory was instructed to pay for everything out of a common fund, and so to regulate the expenditure that there should invariably be a surplus at the end of the year. As the army absorbed five-sevenths of the revenue, the civil administration had to be conducted with the greatest economy. The king himself set the ex- ample of the frugality which he expected from his officials, and contented himself with a civil list of 52,000 thalers (7800). The domains were now managed so as to yield a greater income than ever before, and important reforms were made in the system of taxation. By the substitution of a payment in money for the obsolete military tenure the nobles were deprived of their practical exemption from taxation, and they were also required to pay taxes for all the peasant holdings they had absorbed. Attempts were made to better the condition of the peasants, and the worst features of villainage were abolished in the crown domains. The military system of cantonment, according to which each regiment was allotted a district in which to recruit, was of constitutional as well as military importance, since it brought the peasants into direct contact with the royal officials. The collection of the taxes of the peasantry was removed from the hands of the landowners. The duties of the state officials were laid down with great detail, and their performance was exacted with great severity. Official corruption was punished with extreme rigour. Justice seems to have been administered in an upright if somewhat Draconian manner, though the frequent and often arbitrary inflic- tion of the penalty of death by the king strikes us with astonishment. The agricultural and industrial interests of the country were fostered with great zeal. The most important industrial undertaking was the introduction of the manufacture of woollen cloth, the royal factory at Berlin supplying uniforms for the entire army. The com- mercial regulations, conceived in a spirit of rigid pro- tection, were less successful. In the ecclesiastical sphere the king was able to secure toleration for the Protestants in other parts of Germany by reprisals on his own Roman Catholic subjects, and he also gave welcome to numerous Protestant refugees, including 18,000 exiled peasants from. Salzburg. For art, science, and the higher culture he had no respect, but he has the credit of founding the common- school system of Prussia and of making elementary educa- tion compulsory. After- the accession of Frederick the Great (1740-1786) Frederick the external history of Prussia coincides to such an extent n - with that of the German empire that it has already been treated with considerable detail in the article GERMANY (vol. x. pp. 503-4 ; see also FREDERICK II.). The outline of Frederick's foreign policy was probably determined in some degree by the events of the later years of his father's reign, and Austrian duplicity in the matter of Jiilich gave him a colourable pretext for his hostile attitude in reviving XX. 2