“Have we not too many officials,” the King enquires. “Could not several places be merged into one? We must see if some of the officials cannot be put down. Why is not the beer so good everywhere as at Potsdam? In order to have wool we must have sheep. Now in Prussia there are nearly as many wolves as sheep. Quick, let me have a minute upon the destruction of wolves. How comes it that the salt tax has brought in less money this year than last from the district of Halberstadt? The number of officials has not diminished, has it? They must have eaten as much salt as last year. There must therefore be fraud or waste somewhere. The Superintendent of the Salt Department must be warned to manage matters better than he has done of late. Can it be that my subjects buy salt in Hanover or Poland? Every importer of salt must be hanged.” His violence was and still is notorious. He flung plates at his children, caned his son in public, cudgelled the inhabitants of his capital, and flung the judges down-stairs. He forced his queen, the sister of the English King, to drink to the downfall of England. He vilified everything French, and insulted the British Ambassador so seriously that he conceived himself bound to leave Berlin. Yet he kept Prussia at peace steadily enough to earn for himself the reputation of a mere bully whom the Emperor could lead by the nose. In spite of the contradictions of his character, however, the broad principles of his reign are clear. Having stripped the state of the veneer of luxury with which Frederick I. had disguised its poverty, he took up and developed further the ideals of the Great Elector. He made the royal power absolute in the state, and increased the army till a population of about two and a half million souls supported the unheard-of number of 83,000 men under arms. These were drilled to such a pitch of perfection that Macaulay could say that, placed beside them, the household regiments of Versailles and St. James’s would have appeared an awkward squad. Yet this mighty force was used for little save to secure the frontiers of Prussia and the rights of all German Protestants. In territory the “Sergeant King” gained only from the wreck of Sweden part of the prize which the Great Elector had grudgingly relinquished at the behest of Louis XIV.—the mouth of the Oder and with it the islands of Usedom and Wollin, and Western Pomerania as far as the river Peene (1720). [Illustration: PRUSSIA After the Congress of Vienna, 1815]