From childhood the Emperor has worshipped the Great Elector as his favorite hero. In their policies there is a striking similarity, for the elector was the first to recognize the importance of sea power and is praised by William II for having founded the Prussian navy and for having encouraged commerce. He built the first great German canal, from the Oder to the Spree (another lead which the present Emperor was to follow), and he inaugurated the colonial policy by founding a settlement on the west African coast. This, likewise, was to be revived by the present Emperor, for it was allowed to lapse even under Frederick the Great, who considered a "village on the frontier" a much greater asset than a state oversea. The aim of the Great Elector was to make himself an absolute ruler, as he regarded this best for the internal and external welfare of the state. But he raised Brandenburg and Prussia to a high place and laid the basis of their later power. Under these lords and their followers the progress of Prussia was amazingly rapid. In 1650, when London and Paris were cities of a little more or less than half a million inhabitants and Amsterdam counted 300,000, Berlin was a village of 10,000. The population of Prussia itself, which, to be sure, had been more than doubled in size, increased from 1,500,000 in 1688 to 19,000,000 in 1865. It was in the time of Frederick the Great, however, that her power as a state was first firmly established. His military genius (he is usually said to have originated "the oblique order" of battle) and his policy of dissimulation here stood him in good stead. He sowed discord among his neighbors and awaited the favorable opportunity to attack even on very slight pretexts and in the case of Silesia without the formality of a declaration of war. Like William II, he was a patron of the arts and sciences and invited noted littérateurs and scientists, especially Frenchmen, to his court. The scientist Maupertuis and Voltaire were his protégés, and the exiled Rousseau for a time found refuge in his domains. He himself wrote in French. It is probably because of his French sympathies and the fact that he was, in this regard, not a _kerndeutscher Mann_ that William II rarely speaks of him personally and mentions usually only his services to his country.