No foreign subject was ever retained in the Hessian service against his will. All those who voluntarily enlisted for the American war were, on their return, regularly and honorably discharged, and received as a reward half a month's pay at the high English rate as the personal gift of the Elector. All of this is proved by the official records. During his whole reign the Elector made a steadfast effort to prevent forcible enlistment, and went so far in opposition to neighboring sovereigns, who acted differently, that once, at least, this led to a formal declaration of war. His conduct was met by false reports industriously spread abroad to his injury. Frederick of Prussia knew that the Hessian government neither could nor would allow Hessian subjects to be enlisted against their will in foreign service. With consent of the Parliament, Hessian troops could serve as allies for a time regulated by treaty with any friendly power, but the State could never sell its individual citizens into foreign service. King Frederick could never introduce in Hesse the servitude that put his Brandenburg and Pomeranian subjects at his beck and nod. As early as 1760 the Hessian troops took the oath under the Hessian constitution, but the Prussian and Brandenburg people were helplessly bound to the nobility and princes as chattels down to 1808, and it was not until 1848 that the Prussian constitution, as the outcome of a revolution, gave the people the protection which the Hessians had always enjoyed. The Elector was libelled as no prince was ever before in history. He spent freely and largely of his own private means to help his subjects, yet an American, in his "History of the Trade in Soldiers by German Princes," tries to show that the Elector of Hesse enriched himself by many millions out of the treasury. The German historian Schlosser, with equal indifference to the truth, charges the Elector with putting in his own pocket the money earned with blood and wounds and life by the brave Hessians in the Seven Years' War, and that given as compensation for the injury done his country and its capital, making no return to the poor sufferers, and that the American war produced still worse results,--neither the English pay nor the money for wounds received by the soldiers enriched anybody but the Prince. This charge is utterly baseless. The fact is that compensation for wounds was first introduced in the wars of Napoleon, and the money paid for dead and wounded soldiers under all the treaties of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was given as compensation for the bounty lost by the enlisted men, and was used for the military hospitals, and never intended for the soldiers. The Elector, whose statue still stands in Cassel, was worthy of his great ancestors, and kept alive the grateful memory of his and their subjects. They have always been free men, without any trace of bad government. Their conduct during the French Revolution showed their patriotism.