Not since the infamous Irene's deposition at Byzantium had there been a woman on the throne of the Cæsars. When Karl VI. issued the decree called the "Pragmatic Sanction," providing that the crown should descend to female heirs in the absence of male, he forged one of the most important links in the chain of events. This secured the succession to his little daughter Maria Theresa, who was born in 1717. The link had need to be a strong one, for there were to be twenty years of effort to break it. But it held. At about this same time there was another important link forging in Prussia, where Frederick William I. had succeeded his father Frederick I. as king. By these two events the long spell was to be broken. Volumes have been written about this fierce, miserly King Frederick William and his coarse brutalities. But his reign was the rough, strong bridge which led to a Frederick the Great, and the reign of the Great Frederick was that other bridge which led to a powerful and dominating kingdom of Prussia,--from which was to spring a new German Empire! If Frederick William was a tyrant of the most savage sort, on the other hand he organized industry, finance, and an army. If he was a miser in his family, he brought wealth and prosperity to his people. If he beat and cudgeled his own son for playing the flute, he left that son a kingdom and an army which were the foundation of his greatness. His hatred for all that was French, for art, for the formalities and even the decencies of life, was an enraged protest against the prevailing affectations and artificiality of his time. We can imagine how the polished and refined Court at Vienna must have regarded this Prussian King. Austria, entirely Catholic, in a state of moral and intellectual decline, sat looking backward and sighing for the return of the spirit of the Middle Ages. Prussia, altogether Protestant, had set her face toward a future which was to be greater than she dreamed. In 1736 Maria Theresa was married to Francis of Lorraine. In 1740 she succeeded her father Karl VI., on the Imperial throne; and that very same year Frederick William of Prussia died, and was succeeded by his son, who was to be known as Frederick the Great. Through the barren period succeeding the Thirty Years' War some vital processes were going on; indeed that most vital of all processes, thought, was active. Broken into fragments as by an earthquake, the people had been left without one healing touch from the hands of their infatuated rulers. It was a sorry spectacle to see those German princes gayly arraying themselves in French finery while their country was a ruin. Did they not know that a wound might better not heal at all, than to begin by forming new tissue at the top! Whatever capacity Germany had for being, was in those neglected fragments. If she ever developed into greatness it must be along the line of their elemental tendencies, and by being German, not French.