In an earlier generation and with smaller means the Great Elector had perceived that the true path for Prussia lay across the seas. Balked of Stettin, he strove to make Pillau and Memel his London and Amsterdam. His little Armada of ten frigates attacked the Spaniards with success. In a humble way there began to be Brandenburgish West Indies, and in 1683 Fort Great-Fredericksburgh was built upon the Brandenburgish Gold Coast. But the Great Elector’s son and grandson lacked either his firm hand or his imagination. While Frederick I. was squabbling with the Dutch about armchairs, the Dutch were driving his subjects from West Africa. Frederick William, the apostle of domestic economy, was impatient of flunkeys, universities, and colonies, the several extravagances of his father and of his grandfather. Would Frederick II. prove himself more enlightened? We see with amazement that he did not. A prince who was accounted clever, who had spent the first decade of manhood in pondering on high politics, who revered the memory of the Great Elector, and followed the fortunes of England with keen interest—how could such an one ignore what the movement of the times and the course of after events seem to point out so clearly? Among his first acts was the establishment of a new department of manufactures. He commanded the head of it to take measures for improving the condition of existing industries, for introducing new ones, and for bringing in foreign capital and foreign hands. Why did he not at the same time establish a department of marine? Why did he wait till East Frisia fell to Prussia before making even a half-hearted effort to win profit from the sea? A partial explanation may lie in the fact that Frederick lacked the inspiration drawn from travel. The stupid fears of Frederick William that his son would become too Frenchified in his life or too Austrian in his politics had closed to Frederick the doors of the best school of his time. Who knows how much profit the Great Elector brought to his State from his education in Holland, or Peter the Great from his journeys in the West? Save at Danzig, Frederick had hardly seen with his own eyes the dignity which commerce might create. Save for two stolen days in Strasburg in the first months of his reign, a secret visit to Holland in 1755, and a meeting with the Emperor in Moravia in 1770, he was fated never to gain fresh knowledge of what would now be foreign lands except at the head of his army.