required to be educated, and regulated by examination and strict inspection. It is the duty of the historian to enumerate and praise all this, if also to mention some unsuccessful attempts of the King, which were inevitable owing to his endeavor to control everything himself. The King cared for all his lands, and by no means least for his child of sorrow, the newly won Silesia. When he conquered this great district it had a few more than a million inhabitants. They realized vividly the contrast between the easy-going Austrian management and the precise, restless, stirring rule of Prussia. In Vienna the catalogue of prohibited books had been larger than at Rome; now bales of books came incessantly from Germany into the province, reading and buying were astonishingly free, even printed attacks upon the sovereign himself. In Austria it was the privilege of the aristocracy to wear foreign cloth. When the father of Frederick the Great of Prussia had forbidden the importation of cloth, he had first of all dressed himself and his princes in domestic goods. In Vienna no office had been considered aristocratic if it implied anything but a nominal function; all the actual work was a matter for subordinates. A chamberlain stood higher than a veteran general or minister. In Prussia even the highest born was little esteemed if he was not useful to the State, and the King himself was a most exact official, who watched and scolded over every thousand thalers saved or spent. Any one in Austria who left the Catholic Church was punished with confiscation of property and banishment; under the Prussians anybody could leave or join any church--that was his own affair. Under the imperial rule the government had been, on the whole, negligent if it had been forced to occupy itself with any matter; the Prussian officials had their noses and their hands in everything. In spite of the three Silesian wars the province grew to be far more prosperous than it had been under the Empire. Up to this time a hundred years had not been sufficient to wipe out the visible traces of the Thirty Years' War. The people remembered well how in the cities the heaps of rubbish from the time of the Swedish invasions had lain about, and between the remaining houses there were patches of waste ground blackened by fire. Many small cities still had log houses in the old Slavic style, with thatched or shingled roofs, patched up shabbily from time to time. In a few decades the Prussians removed the traces not only of former devastations, but also of the recent Seven Years' War. Frederick laid out several hundred new villages, had fifteen good-sized towns rebuilt in regular streets--largely with funds from the royal treasury--and had compelled the landed proprietors to restore several thousand farms which they had abolished as individual holdings, and install upon them tenants with rights of succession. Under the Empire the taxes had been lower, but they had been unfairly