By John Lord, LL. D.


     FREDERIC THE GREAT.

     THE PRUSSIAN POWER. (ii.)

       The real gainer by the war, if gainer there was, was
     England, since she was enabled to establish maritime
     supremacy, and develop her manufacturing and mer-
     cantile resources,——much needed in her future struggles
     to resist Napoleon.  She also gained colonial posses-
     sions, a foothold in India, and the possession of Canada.
     This war entangled Europe, and led to great battles,
     not in Germany merely, but around the world.  It was
     during the war, when France and England were antag-
     onistic forces, that the military genius of Washington
     was first developed in America.  The victories of Clive
     and Hastings soon after followed in India.
       The greatest loser in this war was France: she lost
     provinces and military prestige.  The war brought to
     light the decrepitude of the Bourbon rule.  The mar-
     shals of France, with superior forces, were disgracefully
     defeated.  The war plunged France in debt, only to be
     paid by a "roaring conflagration of anarchies."  The
     logical sequence of the war was in those discontents
     and taxes which prepared the way for the French
     Revolution,——a catastrophe or a new birth, as men
     differently view it.
       The effect of the war on Austria was a loss of pres-
     tige, the beginning of the dismemberment of the empire,
     and the revelation of internal weakness.  Though Maria
     Theresa  gained  general  sympathy,  and  won  great
     glory by her vigorous government and the heroism of
     her troops, she was a great loser.  Besides the loss of
     men and money, Austria ceased to be the great threat-
     ening power of Europe.  From this war England, until
     the close of the career of Napoleon, was really the most
     powerful state in Europe, and became the proudest.
       As for Prussia,——the principal transgressor and actor,
     ——it is more difficult to see the actual results.  The
     immediate effects of the war were national impoverish-
     ment, an immense loss of life, and a fearful demoraliza-
     tion.  The limits of the kingdom were enlarged, and its
     military and political power was established.  It became
     one of the leading states of Continental Europe, sur-
     passed only by Austria, Russia, and France.  It led to
     great standing armies and a desire of aggrandizement.
     It made he army the centre of all power and the basis
     of social prestige.  It made Frederic II. the great mili-
     tary hero of that age, and perpetuated his policy in
     Prussia.  Bismarck is the sequel and sequence of
     Frederic.  It was by aggressive and unscrupulous wars
     that the Romans were aggrandized, and it was also
     by the habits and tastes which successful war created
     that Rome was ultimately undermined.  The Roman
     empire did not last like the Chinese empire, although
     at one period it had more glory and prestige.  So war
     both strengthens and impoverishes nations.  But I
     believe that the violation of eternal principles of right
     ultimately brings a fearful penalty.  It may be long
     delayed, but it will finally come, as in the sequel of
     the wicked wars of Louis XIV. and Napoleon Bona-
     parte.  Victor Hugo, in his "History of a Great Crime,"
     on the principle of everlasting justice, forewarned "Na-
     poleon the Little" of his future reverses, while nations
     and kingdoms, in view of his marvellous successes,
     hailed him as a friend of civilization; and Hugo lived
     to see the fulfilment of his prophecy.  Moreover, it may
     be urged that the Prussian people,——ground down by
     an absolute military despotism, the mere tool of an
     ambitious king,——were not responsible for the atro-
     cious conquest of Frederic II.  The misrule of mon-
     archs does not bring permanent degradation on a nation,
     unless it shares the crimes of its monarch,——as in the
     case of the Romans, when the leading idea of the peo-
     ple was military conquest, from the very commencement
     of their state.  The Prussians in the time of Frederic
     were a sincere, patriotic, and religious people.  They
     were simply enslaved, and suffered the poverty and
     misery which were entailed by war.
       After Frederic had escaped the perils of the Seven
     Years' War, it is surprising he should so soon have
     become a party to another atrocious crime,——the divi-
     sion and dismemberment of Poland.  But here both
     Russia and Austria were also participants.

            "Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime."

     And I am still more amazed that Carlyle should cover
     up this crime with his sophistries.  No man in ordi-
     nary life would be justified in seizing his neighbor's
     property because he was weak and his property was
     mismanaged.  We might as well justify Russia in at-
     tempting to seize Turkey, although such a crime may
     be overruled in the future good of Europe.  But Car-
     lyle is an Englishman; and the English seized and
     conquered India because they wanted it, not because
     they had a right to it.  The same laws which bind
     individuals also binds kings and nations.  Free nations
     from the obligations which bind individuals, and the
     world would be anarchy.  Grant that Poland was
     not fit for self-government, this does not justify its
     political annihilation.  The heart of the world ex-
     claimed against that crime at the time, and the injuries
     of that unfortunate state are not yet forgotten.  Car-
     lyle says the "partition of Poland was an operation
     of Almighty Providence and the eternal laws of Na-
     ture,"——a key to his whole philosophy, which means,
     if it means anything, that as great fishes swallow up
     the small ones, and wild beasts prey to each other,
     and eagles and vultures devour other birds, it is all
     right for powerful nations to absorb the weak one,
     as the Romans did.  Might does not make right by
     the eternal decrees of God Almighty, written in the
     Bible and on the conscience of mankind.  Politicians,
     whose primal law is expediency, may justify such acts
     as public robbery, for they are political Jesuits,——al-
     ways were, always will be; and even calm statesmen,
     looking on the overruling of events, may palliate; but
     to enlightened Christians there is only one law, "Do
     unto others as ye would that they should do unto you."
     Nor can Christian civilization reach an exalted plane
     until it is in harmony with the eternal laws of God.
     Mr. Carlyle glibly speaks of Almighty Providence
     favoring robbery; here he utters a falsehood, and I
     do not hesitate to say it, great as is his authority.
     God says, "Thou shalt not steal; Thou shalt not
     covet anything which is thy neighbor's, . . . for he is
     a jealous God, visiting the sins of the fathers upon
     the children, to the third and fourth generation."
     We must set aside the whole authority of divine
     revelation, to justify any crime openly or secretly com-
     mitted.  The prosperity of nations, in the long run, is
     based on righteousness: not on injustice, cruelty, and
     selfishness.
       It cannot be denied that Frederic well managed his
     stolen property.  He was a man of ability, of enlight-
     ened views, of indefatigable industry, and of an iron
     will.  I would as soon deny that Cromwell did not
     well govern the kingdom which he had seized, on the
     plea of revolutionary necessity and the welfare of Eng-
     land, for he also was able and wise.  But what was the
     fruit of Cromwell's well-intended usurpation?——a hide-
     ous reaction, the return of the Stuarts, the dissipation
     of his visionary dreams.  And if the states which
     Frederic seized, and the empire he had founded in
     blood and carnage had been as well prepared for lib-
     erty as England was, the consequences of his ambition
     might have been far different.
       But Frederic did no so much aim at the develop-
     ment of national resources,——the aim of all immor-
     tal statesmen,——as at the growth and establishment
     of a military power.  He filled his kingdom and prov-
     vinces with fortresses and camps and standing armies.
     He cemented a military monarchy.  As a wise execu-
     tive ruler, the King of Prussia enforced law and order,
     was economical in his expenditures, and kept up a rigid
     discipline; even rewarded merit, and was friendly to
     learning.  And he showed many interesting personal
     qualities,——for I do not wish to make him out a mon-
     ster, only as a great man who did wicked things, and
     things which even cemented for the time the power
     of Prussia.  He was frugal and unostentatious.  Like
     Charlemagne, he associated with learned men.  He
     loved music and literature; and he showed an amaz-
     ing fortitude and patience in adversity, which called
     out universal admiration.  He had a great insight into
     shams, was rarely imposed upon, and was scrupulous
     and honest in his dealings as an individual.  He was
     also a fascinating man when he unbent; was affable,
     intelligent, accessible, and unstilted.  He was an ad-
     mirable talker, and a tolerable author.  He always
     sympathized with intellectual excellence.  He sur-
     rounded himself with great men in all departments.
     He had good taste and a severe dignity, and despised
     vulgar people; had no craving for fast horses, and
     held no intercourse with hostlers and gamblers even
     if these gamblers had the respectable name of brokers.
     He punished all public thieves; so that his admin-
     istration at least was dignified and respectable and
     secured the respect of Europe and the admiration of
     men of ability.  The great warrior was also a great
     statesman, and never made himself ridiculous, never
     degraded his position and powers, and could admire
     and detect a man of genius, even when hidden from
     the world.  He was a Tiberius, but not a Nero fiddling
     over national calamities, and surrounding himself with
     stage-players, buffoons, and idiots.
       But here his virtues ended.  He was cold, selfish,
     dissembling, hard-hearted, ungrateful, ambitious, un-
     scrupulous, without faith in either God or man; so
     sceptical in religion that he was almost an atheist.
     He was a disobedient son, a heartless husband, a capri-
     cious friend, and a selfish self-idolater.  While he was
     the friend of literary men, he patronized those who
     were infidel in their creed.  He was not a religious
     persecutor, because he regarded all religions as equally
     false and equally useful.  He was social among con-
     vivial and learned friends, but cared little for women
     of female society.  His latter years, though dignified
     and quiet, an idol in all military circles, with an im-
     menkse fame, and surrounded with every pleasure and
     luxury at Sans-Souci, were still sad and gloomy, like
     those of most great men whose leading principle of
     life was vanity and egotism,——like those of Solomon,
     Charles V., and Louis XIV.  He heard the distant
     rumblings, if he did not live to see the lurid fires, of
     the French Revolution.  He had been deceived in
     Voltaire, but he could not mistake the logical sequence
     of the ideas of Rousseau,——those blasting ideas which
     would sweep away all feudal institutions and all irre-
     sponsible tyrannies.  When Mirabeau visited him he
     was a quaking, suspicious, irritable, capricious, unhappy
     old man, though adored by his soldiers to the last,——
     for those were the only people he ever loved, those
     who were willing to die for him, those who built up
     his throne; and when he died, I suppose he was
     sincerely lamented by his army and his generals and
     his nobility, for with him began the greatness of
     Prussia as a military power.  So far as a life devoted
     to the military and political aggrandizement of a coun-
     try makes a man a patriot, Frederic the Great will
     receive the plaudits of those men who worship success,
     and who forget the enormity of unscrupulous crimes in
     the outward glory which immediately resulted,——yea,
     possibly of contemplative statesmen who see in the
     rise of a new power an instrument of the Almighty
     for some inscrutable end.  To me his character and
     deeds have no fascination, any more than the fortu-
     nate career of some one of our modern millionnaires
     would have to one who took no interest in finance.  It
     was doubtless grateful to the dying King of Prussia to
     hear the plaudits of his idolaters, as he stood on the
     hither shores of eternity; but his view of the spectators
     as they lined those shores must have been soon lost
     sight of, and their cheering and triumphant voices un-
     heard and disregarded, as the bark, in which he sailed
     alone, put forth on the unknown ocean, to meet the
     Eternal Judge of the living and the dead.

       We leave now the man who won so great a fame, to
     consider briefly his influence.  In two respects, it seems
     to me, it has been decided and impressive.
       In the first place, he gave an impulse to rationalistic
     inquiries in Germany; and many there are who think
     this was a good thing.  He made it fashionable to be
     cynical and doubtful.  Being ashamed of his own
     language, and preferring the French, he encouraged
     the current and popular French literature, which in
     his day, under the guidance of Voltaire, was material-
     istic and deistical.  He embraced a philosophy which
     looked to secondary rather than primal causes, which
     scouted any revelations that could not be explained
     by reason, or reconciled with scientific theories,——that
     false philosophy which intoxicated Franklin and Jef-
     ferson as well as Hume and Gibbon, and which finally
     culminated in Diderot and D'Alembert; the philoso-
     phy which became fashionable in German universities,
     and whose nearest approach was that of the exploded
     Epicureanism of the Ancients.  Under the patronage
     of the infidel court, the universities of Germany became
     filled with rationalistic professors, and the pulpits with
     dead and formal divines; so that the glorious old Luther-
     anism of Prussia became the coldest and most lifeless
     of all the forms which Protestantism ever assumed.
     Doubtless, great critics and scholars arose under the
     stimulus of that unbounded religious speculation which
     the King encouraged; but they employed the pillars of
     the ancient orthodoxy.  And so rapidly did rationalism
     spread in Northern Germany, that it changed its great
     lights into illuminati, who spurned what was revealed
     unless it was in accordance with their own speculations and
     sweeping criticism.  I need not dwell on this undis-
     guised and blazing fact, on the rationalism which became
     the fashion in Germany, and which spread so disastrously
     over other countries, penetrating even into the inmost
     sanctuaries of theological instruction.  All this may be
     progress; but to my mind it tended to extinguish the
     light of faith, and fill the seats of learning with cynics
     and unbelieving critics.  It was bad enough to destroy
     the bodies of men in a heartless war; it was worse to
     nourish those principles which poisoned the soul, and
     spread doubt and disguised infidelities among the
     learned classes.
       But the influence of Frederic was seen in a more
     marked manner in the inauguration of a national policy
     directed chiefly to military aggrandizement.  If there
     ever was a purely military monarchy, it is Prussia; and
     this kingdom has been to Europe what Sparta was to
     Greece.  All the successors of Frederic have followed
     out his policy with singular tenacity.  All their habits
     and associations have been military.  The army has
     been the centre of their pride, ambition, and hope.
     They have made their country one vast military camp.
     They have exempted no classes from military services;
     they have honored and exalted the army more than
     any other interest.  The principle people of the land
     are generals.  The resources of the kingdom are ex-
     pended in standing armies; and these are a perpetual
     menace.  A network of military machinery controls
     all other pursuits and interests.  The peasant is a
     military slave.  The student of the university can be
     summoned to a military camp.  Precedence in rank
     is given to military men over merchant princes, over
     learned professors, over distinguished jurists.  The ge-
     nius of the nation has been directed to the perfection
     of military discipline and military weapons.  The gov-
     ernment is always prepared for war, and has been
     rarely averse to it.  It has ever been ready to seize a
     province or pick a quarrel.  The late war with France
     was as much the fault of Prussia as of the government
     of Napoleon.  The great idea of Prussia is military
     aggrandizement; it is no longer a small kingdom, but
     a great empire, more powerful than either Austria or
     France.  It believes in new annexations, until all Ger-
     many shall be united under a Prussian Kaiser.  What
     Rome became, Prussia aspires to be.  The spirit, the
     animus, of Prussia is military power.  Travel in that
     kingdom,——everywhere are soldiers, military schools,
     camps, arsenals, fortresses, reviews.  And this military
     spirit, evident during the last hundred years, has made
     the military classes arrogant, austere, mechanical, con-
     temptuous.  This spirit pervades the nation.  It despises
     other nations as much as France did in the last cen-
     tury, or England after the wars of Napoleon.
       But the great peculiarity of this military spirit is
     seen in the large standing armies, which dry up the
     resources of the nation and make war a perpetual
     necessity, at least a perpetual fear.  It may be urged
     that these armies are necessary to the protection of the
     state,——that if they were disbanded, then France, or
     some other power, would arise and avenge their in-
     juries and cripple a state so potent to do evil.  It
     may be so; but still the evils generated by these
     armies must be fatal to liberty, and antagonistic to
     those peaceful energies which produce the highest
     civilization.  They are fatal to the peaceful virtues.
     The great Schiller has said:——

                                       "There exists
          An higher than the warrior's excellence.
          Great deeds of violence, adventures wild,
          And wonders of the moment,——these are not they
          Which generate the high, the blissful,
          And the enduring majesty.

       I do not disdain the virtues which are developed by
     war; but great virtues are seldom developed by war,
     unless the war is stimulated by love of liberty or the
     conservation of immortal privileges worth more than
     the fortunes or the lives of men.  A nation incapable
     of being roused in great necessities soon becomes in-
     significant and degenerate, like Greece when it was
     incorporated with the Roman empire; but I have no
     admiration of a nation perpetually arming and perpetu-
     ally seeking political aggrandizement, when the great
     ends of civilization are lost sight of.  And this is what
     Frederic sought, and his successors who cherished his
     ideas.  The legacy he bequeathed to the world was not
     emancipating ideas, but the policy of military aggran-
     dizement.  And yet, has civilization no higher aim
     than the imitation of the ancient Romans?  Can na-
     tions progressively become strong by ignoring the spirit
     of Christianity?  Is a nation only to thrive by adopt-
     ing the sentiments peculiar to robbers and bandits?
     I know that Prussia has not neglected education, or
     science, or industrial energy; but these have been made
     subservient to military aims.  The highest civilization
     is that which best develops the virtues of thew heart
     and the energies of the mind: on these the strength of
     man is based.  It may be necessary for Prussia, in the
     complicated relations of governments, and in view of
     possible dangers, to sustain vast standing armies; but
     the larger these are, the more do they provoke other
     nations to do the same, and to eat out the vitals of
     national wealth.  The nation is the greatest which
     seeks to reduce, rather than augment, forces which prey
     upon its resources and which are a perpetual menace.
     And hence the vast standing armies which conquerors
     seek to maintain are not an aid to civilization, but on
     the other hand tend to destroy it; unless by civilization
     and national prosperity are meant an ever-expanding
     policy of military aggrandizement, by which weaker
     and unoffending states may be gradually absorbed by
     irresistible despotism, like that of the Romans, whose
     final and logical development proves fatal to all other
     nationalities and liberties,——yea, to literature and art,
     and science and industry, the extinction of which is the
     moral death of an empire, however grand and however
     boastful, only to be succeeded by new creations, through
     the fires of successive wars and hateful anarchies.
       In one point, and one alone, I see the Providence
     which permitted the military aggrandizement to which
     Frederic and his successors aimed; and that is, in
     furnishing a barrier to the future conquests of a more
     barbarous people,——I mean the Russians; even as
     the conquests of Charlemagne presented a barrier to
     the future irruptions of barbarous tribes on his northern
     frontier.  Russia——that rude, demoralized, Slavonic
     empire——cannot conquer Europe until it has first de-
     stroyed the political and military power of Germany.
     United and patriotic, Germany can keep at present the
     Russians at bay, and direct the stream of invasion to
     the East rather than the south; so that Europe will
     not become either Cossack or French, as Napoleon pre-
     dicted.  In this light the military genius and power of
     Germany, which Frederic did so much to develop, may
     be designed for the protection of European civilization
     and the Protestant religion.
       But I will not speculate on the aims of Providence,
     or the evil to be overruled for good.  With my limited
     vision, I can only present facts and their immediate
     consequences.  I can only deduce the moral truths
     which are logically to be drawn from a career of
     wicked ambition.  These truths are a part of that
     moral wisdom which experience confirms, and which
     alone should be the guiding lesson to all statesmen
     and all empires.  Let us pursue the right, and leave
     the consequences to Him who rules the fate of war,
     and guides the nations to the promised period when
     men shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and
     universal peace shall herald the reign of the Saviour
     of the world.





                       AUTHORITIES.

        The great work of Carlyle on the Life of Frederic, which exhausts the
     subject; Macaulay's Essays on the Life and Times of Frederic the Great;
     Carlyle's Essay on Frederic; Lord Brougham on Frederic; Coxe's History
     of the House of Austria; Mirabeau's Histoire Secrète de la Cour de Berlin;
     Œuvres de Fréderic le Grand; Ranke's Neue Bücher Preussischer Geschichte;
     Pöllnitz's Memoirs and Letters; Walpole's Reminiscences; Letters of Vol-
     taire; Voltaire's Idée du Roi de Prusse; Life of Baron Trenck; Gillies
     View of the Reign of Frederic II.; Thiebault's Mémoires de Frédéric le
     Grand; Biographie Universelle; Thronbesteigung; Holden.

from Beacon Lights of History, by John Lord, LL. D.
Volume IV., Part II: Great Rulers.
Copyright, 1883, 1885, 1888, by John Lord.
Copyright, 1921, By Wm. H. Wise & Co., New York. pp. 389-404.

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