Even were he to make himself master of the centre, dangers clustered thick on either wing, while behind the Polish problems of the East and the Netherlandish problems of the West a seer might have discerned the double peril that encompasses modern Germany. Peter the Great and his Russia lay yet in the womb of time, but Richelieu and his France were in the full flood of successful ambition. Thus the organiser of a North German power must work while his horizon was already darkening. In grasping the lands which formed his birthright the Great Elector was defying, though as yet he knew it not, two of the greatest forces of modern times. Hohenzollern rule on the Niemen was to become a challenge to Russia and to the Slavic advance, while the Hohenzollern lord of Cleves must ultimately reckon with the belief of Frenchmen that the Rhine is the boundary designed by nature for their state. [Illustration: FREDERICK THE GREAT. AFTER THE PAINTING BY CHRISTIAN WOLFFGANG.] During the first critical years of his rule, however, the plans of the Great Elector were of the humblest. Striving for existence rather than for empire, he was not too proud to beg for help in every likely quarter. Among our own State-papers are to be seen his letters suing for petty favours which Charles I., so long as diplomacy would serve, was very willing to grant. The King of England marked the small esteem in which he held the untried and obscure Elector by pressing upon him the hand of his niece, a princess of the fugitive and bankrupt House of the Palatinate. Frederick William’s relations with Poland, the suzerain of whom he held Ost-Preussen, show yet more clearly how slight was his power at his accession. When the Lutherans of Königsberg threatened riot because a Calvinist was chosen to preach the funeral sermon of George William, the Elector did not blush to solicit the Papist King, Wladislaus IV., to admonish these unruly Protestants. To this end he bade his minister at Warsaw “make humble request to His Majesty that His Majesty would in friendly—cousinly fashion let it please him to send a letter to our chief Councillors (but as if His Majesty had been informed of this from other quarters and not from us) and thereby to order them to reprove and repress this folly of the unquiet theologians.... It will perhaps be best if you solicit this work only after the departure of the Diet.” The request was made and granted, and the minister instructs the Elector how he may palm off the document as a mandate approved by the Diet behind whose backs it had been obtained.