It was in reality an abandoned country without discipline, without law, without masters. It was a desert; on about 13,000 square miles 500,000 people lived, less than forty to a square mile. And the Prussian King treated his acquisition like an uninhabited prairie. He located boundary stones almost at his pleasure, then moved them some miles farther again. Up to the present time the tradition remains in Ermeland, the district around Heilberg and Braunsberg, with twelve towns and a hundred villages, that two Prussian drummers with twelve men conquered all Ermeland with four drumsticks. And then the King in his magnificent manner began to build up the country. He was attracted by precisely these run-down conditions, and West Prussia henceforth became, as Silesia had been before, his favorite child, which with infinite care, like a dutiful mother, he washed and brushed, provided with new clothes, forced into school and good behavior, and never let out of his sight. The diplomatic negotiations about the conquest were still going on when he sent a troop of his best officials into the wilderness. The territory was subdivided into small districts, in the shortest possible time the whole land area was appraised and equitably taxed, each district provided with a provincial magistrate, with a court, and with post-offices and sanitary police. New parishes were called into life as if by magic, a company of 187 school teachers was brought into the country--the worthy Semler had chosen and drilled part of them--and squads of German artisans were got together, from the machinist down to the brickmaker. Everywhere was heard the bustle of digging, hammering, building. The cities were filled with colonists, street after street rose from the ruins, the estates of the starosts were changed into crown estates, new villages of colonists were laid out, new agricultural enterprises ordered. In the first year after the occupation the great canal was dug, which in a course of a dozen miles or so unites the Vistula by way of the Netze with the Oder and the Elbe. A year after the King issued the order for the canal he saw with his own eyes laden Oder barges 120 feet long enter the Vistula, bound east. Through the new waterway broad stretches of land were drained and immediately filled with German colonists. Incessantly the King urged on, praised, and censured. However great the zeal of his officials was, it was seldom able to satisfy him. In this way, in a few years, the wild Slavic weeds which had sprung up here and there even over the German fields were brought under control, and the Polish districts, too, got used to the orderliness of the new life; and West Prussia showed itself, in the wars after 1806, almost as stoutly Prussian as the old provinces.