The common people, however, could not but gain from the introduction of that policy of developing all the resources of the land which formed the Hohenzollern ideal of domestic government. Slavery was abolished and serfdom regulated. New waterways were dug. Colonists were brought in by thousands. Prussian soldiers scoured the country in search of gipsies, tramps, and begging Jews. Toleration, justice, and education were established where all three had been far to seek. The peasants and townsmen were subjected to the Prussian system of taxation, which laid upon their shoulders a burden heavy indeed, but steady and not beyond their strength. Soon the royal revenue from West-Preussen amounted to more than two million thalers a year. But for a timely revival of energy in her royal House, it is not impossible that Sweden, like Poland, would have been the poorer for the Russo-Prussian alliance. In 1769 Catherine and Frederick had pledged themselves to maintain anarchy in Stockholm as well as in Warsaw. Should the existing constitution be modified, Russia would take up arms and Frederick’s contribution to the war was to be the invasion of Swedish Pomerania. It is easy to imagine that with Russia and Prussia in cordial agreement and France and England embroiled or apathetic, a war with Sweden might have resulted in the annexation of Finland and the remainder of Pomerania by the allies. In 1772, however, young Gustavus III., the son of Frederick’s sister Ulrica, delivered Sweden from the trammels of her constitution by an unlooked-for _coup d’état_. Russia, which was still hampered by the Turkish war, was unable to wage war against the revolution, and Frederick, who for once was taken by surprise, grudgingly accepted the apologies of his nephew. The remainder of Frederick’s life was dedicated to the defence of the position that he had already attained. He was determined to do nothing that could prejudice his cause in a future struggle with Austria. He therefore looked on while Russia and Austria despoiled the Turk in 1774, while England and her Colonies fell to blows in the next year, and while France joined in the fray in 1778. His private opinion, indeed, was that the country which could commit its destinies to a Bute could hardly fail to be in the wrong. He blamed the English both for political and military folly—for beginning a terrible civil war with no settled plans or adequate preparations, for underestimating the enemy’s force, for dividing her own and for trampling upon the rights of neutrals. But he avoided with the most scrupulous care any action that could give offence to either combatant, and declared to his ministers that he intended to await the issue quietly and to throw in his lot with the side which fortune favoured.