The next startling symptom of the changing times was the rapid literary development of Germany. Its young men had been left free to think and talk. Frederick half contemptuously declared that his people might believe what nonsense they pleased so long as they remained orderly. The poet Lessing by his books roused the ancient spirit of liberty, long dormant in the German mind. Goethe and Schiller became the foremost of a crowd of younger men whose revolt at first took the form of an extravagant devotion to romance as opposed to the dull workaday world about them.[22] Pestalozzi, a Swiss, conceived the idea of reforming the world through its children, encouraging the little ones by constant, loving example to develop all the strength and goodness that was in them.[23] Yet the first open defiance given to despotism by the fast-growing spirit of freedom came not from Europe but from America; was a revolt not against the lazy tyranny in France or the kindly tyranny of Eastern Europe, but against the constitutional government of England. When the French minister signed the treaty surrendering to England all his country's possessions in America he justified himself with a well-turned phrase, "I give her all, on purpose to destroy her." The words seemed prophetic, England's loss came through her gain. The Indians, devoted to the French, refused to submit peacefully to the change of rule. Pontiac, often regarded as the ablest statesman of his fading race, gathered them into a widespread confederacy, and for years held the English at bay in the region of the Great Lakes.[24] The expenses involved both upon England and upon her American colonists by this strife and by the French war itself were a constant source of friction. England insisted that she had spent her substance in defence of the colonists, and should be repaid by them. They on the other hand asserted that she had fought for her own glory, and had been well repaid by her vast increases of territory both in India and America; that they had become impoverished, while she had now the richest trade in the world, and stood upon the top-most pinnacle of national grandeur with wealth pouring in to her from every quarter of the globe.