Corruption on any great scale was impossible. The public accounts passed under so many eyes that the King of Prussia could never, like Charles VI., be deprived of three-fourths of his revenue before it reached the exchequer. It was useless to bribe Frederick’s ministers to betray him, for they had not the power. They were there to give him information and to obey his behests. He seldom asked them for advice. “Good counsel does not come from a great number,” was his maxim. Newton, he maintained, could not have discovered the law of gravitation if he had been collaborating with Leibnitz and Descartes. As Minerva sprang armed from the head of Jupiter, so must a policy spring from the head of the prince. Frederick, therefore, admitted no man or body of men as his colleague, in the work of government. The officers of the Directory, Justice, and Foreign Affairs were not allowed to form a conclave which might meddle with questions of general welfare. As a body they were wont to appear before the King only once a year. As individuals they seldom communicated with him save in writing. The ministers of Foreign Affairs had not even the privilege of writing about all of the important matters which fell within the scope of their department. Their master kept the conduct of weighty negotiations within his own Cabinet and corresponded with his ambassadors direct. Eichel was his sole familiar. Secrecy, which the King termed the soul of public business, was thus preserved inviolable. “To pry into my secrets,” he boasted, “they must first corrupt me.” This is not the place to marshal the disadvantages to the State which the Prussian system of administration involved. At this stage it is sufficient to note that it placed absolute power in Frederick’s hands and that he regarded it as a monument of the highest wisdom. “If you depart from the principles and the system that our father has introduced,” ran his warning to his brother and heir, “you will be the first to suffer by it.” The ten years of peace were therefore not devoted to structural reform. In the first year of his reign Frederick had created a fifth department of the General Directory. To it he entrusted first the trade and manufactures of the whole kingdom and later the posts and the settlement of immigrants from other lands. In 1746 he established in like manner a sixth department, that of Military Affairs. These changes merely developed the system of Frederick William a little further. By a new departure, however, the Government of Silesia was made independent of the General Directory. For reasons which the King never stated, Münchow became the only minister for the province, and he was responsible to Frederick alone. With this addition the whole framework of government was stereotyped by an ordinance of 1748.