difficult to see the actual results. The immediate effects of the war
were national impoverishment, an immense loss of life, and a fearful
demoralization. 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, surpassed only by Austria, Russia,
and France. It led to great standing armies and a desire of
aggrandizement. It made the army the centre of all power and the basis
of social prestige. It made Frederic II. the great military 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 Bonaparte. Victor Hugo, in his "History of a
Great Crime," on the principle of everlasting justice, forewarned
"Napoleon 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 tools of an ambitious king,--were
not responsible for the atrocious conquests of Frederic II. The misrule
of monarchs 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 people 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 division 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 ordinary 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 attempting to seize
Turkey, although such a crime may be overruled in the future good of
Europe. But Carlyle 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 an anarchy. Grant that Poland was not fit for self-government,
this does not justify its political annihilation. The heart of the world
exclaimed against that crime at the time, and the injuries of that
unfortunate state are not yet forgotten. Carlyle says the "partition of
Poland was an operation of Almighty Providence and the eternal laws of
Nature,"--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 upon each other, and eagles and vultures devour other birds,
it is all right for powerful nations to absorb the weak ones, as the
Romans did. Might does not make right by the eternal decrees of God
Almighty, written in the Bible and on the consciences of mankind.
Politicians, whose primal law is expediency, may justify such acts as
public robbery, for they are political Jesuits,--always 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 committed.
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 enlightened 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 England, for he also was able and wise. But
what was the fruit of Cromwell's well-intended usurpation?--a hideous
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 liberty as
England was, the consequences of his ambition might have been far
different.
But Frederic did not so much aim at the development of national
resources,--the aim of all immortal statesmen,--as at the growth and
establishment of a military power. He filled his kingdom and provinces
with fortresses and camps and standing armies. He cemented a military
monarchy. As a wise executive 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 monster, 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 amazing 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 admirable talker, and a tolerable author. He always
sympathized with intellectual excellence. He surrounded 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
administration 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, unscrupulous, 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 capricious
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 convivial and learned friends,
but cared little for women or female society. His latter years, though
dignified and quiet, an idol in all military circles, with an immense
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 irresponsible 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 country 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 fortunate 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 unheard 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 materialistic 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 Jefferson as well as Hume and Gibbon, and which
finally culminated in Diderot and D'Alembert; the philosophy 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 Lutheranism 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 their learning in pulling down rather than supporting 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
speculations and sweeping criticism. I need not dwell on this
undisguised 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 principal people of the land are
generals. The resources of the kingdom are expended 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 genius of the nation
has been directed to the perfection of military discipline and military
weapons. The government 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 Germany 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, contemptuous. This
spirit pervades the nation. It despises other nations as much as France
did in the last century, 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 injuries, 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 insignificant and degenerate,
like Greece when it was incorporated with the Roman empire; but I have
no admiration of a nation perpetually arming and perpetually 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 aggrandizement. And yet,
has civilization no higher aim than the imitation of the ancient Romans?
Can nations progressively become strong by ignoring the spirit of
Christianity? Is a nation only to thrive by adopting 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 the 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. That 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 destroyed 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 predicted. 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 Essay 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; Oeuvres de Frédéric le Grand; Ranke's Neuc Bücher Preussischer
Geschichte; Pöllnitz's Memoirs and Letters; Walpole's Reminiscences;
Letters of Voltaire; 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; Biographic Universelle; Thronbesteigung; Holden.