Poland none the less promised much to a king of Prussia who could wait. Her artificial connexion with Saxony, established by foreign Powers against the will of a majority of the Poles, could only weaken the frail bonds which bound the State together. Poland, all the world had long known, would one day fall in pieces, and who should hinder Prussia from gathering some of them? For the moment, however, Augustus could defend his new dominions. A king of Prussia in a fever to act at once could not assail Poland without laying bare his flank to Saxony and to her Imperial ally.
But could Prussia in 1740 afford to wait? If Augustus’s dream were to be fulfilled would not she be in jeopardy? The Elector hoped that the Emperor would cede to him a part of Lower Silesia, so that Prussia might be for ever divided and hemmed in by a Saxon-Polish State. Had we no other guide than the map, we might be tempted to guess that it was to avert this peril that Frederick seized Silesia. If it were true it were a grievous fault. Augustus, who was no statesman, might dream of a hereditary crown, but a firm Saxony-Poland was in fact impossible. Dresden and Warsaw were centuries apart. Out of two such halves no strong whole could be compounded. The one was German, the other Slav; the one industrial, the other primitive; the one Lutheran, the other partly Romanist and partly Orthodox. Compounds so discordant could have found no abiding unity in a monarchy based on the treason of their common head against the constitution of each. Nor could such a State have barred for a decade the path of the Muscovite Colossus which Peter had already roused and which Catherine and Alexander were soon to reinspire.
In weighing Frederick’s wisdom we must not forget that the share of Poland which he might expect that Prussia was destined to acquire, and which did, in fact, fall to her during his own lifetime, would change Ost-Preussen from an isolated province into a strong limb of a well-knit State. It gave her the lower waters of a third great arterial river—the Vistula. But it came to her in 1774 shorn of its chief glory, the old portal of the Vistula and strong tower of Poland, the matchless town of Danzig. Frederick had seen that fair city, a hearth of German culture among the Slavs, with its giant Marienkirche towering over a mass of battlements and gates and churches of stately civic halls and mansions hardly less stately, the whole forming a Venice of the North beside which his capital was but a market town. He must have taken note of the foundation of all this grandeur, great warehouses on busy wharves, canals crowded with masts and hulls from many lands. And he cannot have been blind to the fact that within a few miles of this prize lay Ost-Preussen, and that, since Augustus had surrendered Curland, within a few miles of Ost-Preussen lay Russia. Seldom has a king had clearer warning to look before he leaped.