If the claims of the King on Silesia had been doubtful, it required all the acuteness of his officials to put a plausible appearance on the uncertain rights to a portion of the new acquisition. The King himself cared little about it; he had, with almost superhuman heroism, defended the possession of Silesia in the face of the world; that province had been bound to Prussia by streams of blood; but in this case, political shrewdness was almost all that had been required. Long, in the opinion of men, was the conqueror deficient in that justification which it appeared was only given by the horrors of war and the accidental fortune of the battle-field. But this last acquisition of the King, which was made without the thunder of cannon or the flourish of victory, was, of all the great gifts for which the German people had to thank Frederic II., the greatest and most beneficial. During many hundred years the much-divided Germans were confined and injured by ambitious neighbours; the great King was the first conqueror who extended the German frontier further to the east. A century after his great ancestor had in vain defended the Rhine fortresses against Louis XIV., he again gave the Germans the emphatic admonition, that it was their task to carry laws, education, freedom, cultivation, and industry into the east of Europe. His whole country, with the exception of some old Saxon territory, had been won from the Sclavonians by force and colonisation; never since the great migration of the Middle Ages had the struggle for the wide plains on the east of the Oder ceased; never had his house forgotten that it was the guardian of the German frontier. Whenever the struggle of arms ceased, politicians contended. The Elector Frederic William had freed the Prussian territories of the Teutonic order from the Polish suzerainty. Frederic I. had brought this isolated colony under the crown. But the possession of East Prussia was insecure; the danger was not, however, from the degenerate Republic of Poland, but from the rising greatness of Russia. Frederic had learnt to consider the Russians as enemies; he knew the high-flown plans of the Empress Catherine; the clever Prince knew how to grasp at the fitting moment. The new domain--Pommerellen, the Woiwodschaft of Kulm and Marienburg, the Bishopric of Ermland, the city of Elbing, a portion of Kujavien, and a part of Posen--united East Prussia with Pomerania and the Marches of Brandenburg. It had always been a frontier land; since ancient times people of different races had thronged to the coast of the Northern Sea: Germans, Sclavonians, Lithuanians, and Finns. Since the thirteenth century, the Germans had forced themselves into this debatable ground as founders of cities and agriculturists; orders of knights, merchants, pious monks, German noblemen, and peasants congregated there. On both sides of the Vistula arose towers and boundary stones of the German colonists. Above all rose the splendid