This good stock was evidently lying fallow, and humanity is neither dignified nor pleasant in the part of fertilizer. Frederick the Great, it should be remembered, was a Prussian and for Prussia only. He cared no more about a united Germany than we care for a united America to include Canada, Mexico, and the Argentine. He cared no more for Bavarians and Saxons than for Swedes and Frenchmen, and, as we know, he was utterly contemptuous of German literature or the German language. He redeemed the shallowness and the torpidity of those other mediocre rulers by resisting, and resisting successfully, for what must have been to him seven very long years, the whole force of Austria and some of the lesser German powers, with the armies of Russia and France back of them.
He had a turbulent home life; his father on one occasion even attempted to hang him with his own hands with the cords of the window curtains, and when he fled from home he captured him and proposed to put him to death as a deserter, and only the intervention of the Kings of Poland and Sweden and the Emperor of Germany prevented it. His accomplice, however, was summarily and mercilessly put to death before his eyes. There is no illustration in all history, of such a successful outcome of the rod theory in education, as this of Frederick the Great. The father put into practice what Wesley preached: "Break their wills betimes, whatever it costs; break the will if you would not damn the child. Let a child from a year old be taught to fear the rod and to cry softly."
The meanness and cruelty, the parsimony and the eccentricities, of the father left the son an army of eighty thousand troops, troops as superior to other troops in Europe as are the Japanese infantry to-day, to the Manchu guards that pick the weeds in the court-yards of the palace at Mukden; and he left him, too, a kingdom with no debts and an overflowing treasury. It is seldom that such insane vanities leave such a fair estate and an heir with such unique abilities for its skilful exploitation. Of Frederick's wars against Austria, against France, Russia, Saxony, Sweden, and Poland; of his victories at Prague, Leuthen, Rossbach, and Zorndorf; of his addition of Siberia and Polish Prussia to his kingdom; of his comical literary love affair with Voltaire; of his brutal comments upon the reigning ladies of Russia and France, which brought upon him their bitter hatred; of his restoration and improvement of his country; of his strict personal economy and loyalty to his own people, scores of volumes have been written. The hero-worshipper, Carlyle, and the Jove of reviewers, Macaulay, have described him, and many minor scribes besides.