By steady pressure, by force, and at times by fraud, the Great Elector guarded the future of the Hohenzollern power against the danger of obstructive provincial parliaments. To make the men of Cleves, Brandenburg, and Ost-Preussen feel themselves brethren was indeed beyond his power. But he ruthlessly suppressed the institutions which symbolised their mutual independence of each other and of himself. Carlyle, the great panegyrist of _coups d’état_, thus describes one example of “his measures, soft but strong, and ever stronger to the needful pitch, with mutinous spirits. One Bürgermeister of Königsberg, after much stroking on the back, was at length seized in open Hall, by Electoral writ,—soldiers having first gently barricaded the principal streets, and brought cannon to bear upon them. This Bürgermeister, seized in such brief way, lay prisoner for life; refusing to ask his liberty, though it was thought he might have had it on asking.” The Great Elector’s chief legacy was, however, the Prussian army. The ruler of mere patches of the great northern plain, “a country by nature the least defensible of all countries,” he girdled it laboriously with a wall of men. In an age when France alone possessed a large standing army, this obscure German prince raised his force from a few garrisons to a host some twenty-seven thousand strong, well drilled and well appointed. The lord of Brandenburg now became a _condottiere_ of ever-increasing reputation. His regiments brought security to his dominions and gold to his exchequer. In every European struggle their aid was welcome. On the frozen lagoons by the Baltic and on the shores of Torbay, on the torrid plain of Warsaw, and in the vine-clad valley of the Rhine—everywhere the men of the Mark approved themselves good soldiers and punctual allies. In 1660 the Great Elector netted his profit from the Northern war by receiving Ost-Preussen free from Polish suzerainty. The heroic moment of the whole reign came, however, in 1675, when all the threads of the Elector’s policy—ambition, vengeance against the Swedes, military creation, domestic organisation—guided him to the stricken field of Fehrbellin. While playing his part in the West as a member of the coalition against France, he learned that the Swedes, his hated neighbours in Pomerania, had been hurled upon his domains by their patron Louis XIV. He straightway turned his back upon the Rhine and stalked silently across Germany to rescue his helpless people. His troops had been beaten by Turenne and exhausted by the long struggle with rain and mud. Yet he dared to overrule his generals and to strike straight at superior forces trained in the school of Gustavus and posted with a river in their rear.