Society was in its foundations not removed from the mediæval. The soldiers with whom Frederick won Zorndorf and Leuthen, like the Russians and Austrians whom he defeated on those bloody days, were not more nor less than serfs. Instead of philosophers like Newton and Locke, he had to find the pride and safety of his country in swift rushing troopers like Winterfield and Ziethen. A daring cavalry-charge in season was for the moment more to Prussia than any theory why it is that an apple falls, and a new method of drill much more urgent than a new origin for ideas. She was concerned not with the speculative problem of the causes why the earth keeps its place in the planetary system, but with the practical problem how Prussia was to make her place in the system of Europe. Prussia was then far more behind France in all thought and all arts, save the soldier’s, than England was in front of France. Voltaire had nothing to learn at Berlin, and may we not add, as the king was a rooted Voltairean long before this, he had nothing to teach there? The sternest barrack in Europe was not a field in which the apostle of free and refined intelligence could sow seed with good hope of harvest. Voltaire at this time, we have to recollect, was in the public mind only a poet, and perhaps was regarded, if not altogether by Frederick, certainly by those who surrounded him, as much in the same order of being with Frederick’s flute, fitted by miracle with a greater number of stops. ‘I don’t give you any news of literature,’ D’Alembert wrote from Potsdam in 1763, ‘for I don’t know any, and you know how barren literature is in this country, where no one except the king concerns himself with it.’[136] There is no particular disgrace to Berlin or its king in this. Their task was very definite, and it was only a pleasant error of Frederick’s rather fantastic youth to suppose that this task lay in the direction of polite letters. The singer of the Henriade was naturally of different quality and turn of mind from a hero who had at least as hard an enterprise in his hand as that of Henry IV. Voltaire and Frederick were the two leaders of the two chief movements then going on, in the great work of the transformation of the old Europe into the new. But the movements were in different matter, demanded vastly different methods, and, as is so often the case, the scope of each was hardly visible to the pursuer of the other. Voltaire’s work was to quicken the activity and proclaim the freedom of human intelligence, and to destroy the supremacy of an old spiritual order. Frederick’s work was to shake down the old political order. The sum of their efforts was the definite commencement of that revolution in the thought and the political conformation of the West, of which the momentous local revolution in France must, if we take a sufficiently wide survey before and after, be counted a secondary phase. The conditions of the order