Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/598

590 secured to his country an increase of power and prosperity. What the world most admired, and indeed what he himself most valued, was the condition of his army. It contained at the time of his death one hundred and seventy-five companies of foot, and seventy-six of cavalry; the artillery had recently been increased in proportion, and the Elector's attention had been constantly directed to its improvement. The whole strength of the army was about twenty-eight thousand men. There was nothing that he recommended so earnestly to his successor as the preservation of this instrument of power. By this it was that he had made room for himself among his neighbors, and had won for the Protestant cause of North Germany the respect that was its due."

Nor did he neglect that naval arm which has been of so great service to many countries. Prussia's desire to have a navy has raised many smiles, and caused much laughter, in this century, as if it were something new; whereas it is an ancient aspiration, and one which all Prussian sovereigns and statesmen have experienced for two hundred years, though not strongly. The Great Czar, who came upon the stage just after the Great Elector left it, did not long more for a good sea-coast than that Elector had longed for it. Frederick William could not effect so much as Peter effected, but he did something toward the creation of a navy for Prussia. His reluctance in parting with a portion of Pomerania was owing to his commercial and maritime aspirations. "Of all the princes of the house of Brandenburg," says Rankè, "he is the only one who ever showed a strong predilection for maritime life and maritime power. It was the dream of his youth that he would one day sail along shores obedient to his will, all the way from Custrin, out by the mouths of the Oder, across to the coast of Prussia. His sojourn in the Netherlands had strengthened, though it had not inspired, his love of the sea. The best proof how painful this cession was to the Elector is the fact that he shortly afterward offered to the crown of Sweden, not alone the three sees of Halberstadt, Minden, and Magdeburg, but a sum of two millions of thalers in addition, for the possession of Pomerania." The same writer says of the Great Elector elsewhere, that "his mind had a wide grasp; to us it may seem almost too wide, when we call to mind that he brought the coast of Guinea into direct communication with Brandenburg, and ventured to compete with Spain on the ocean." When he died, the population of his dominions amounted to one million five hundred thousand.

His successor was his son Frederick, who added to the territory of Prussia, and who, as before stated, became king in November, 1700, a few days after the extinction, in the person of Charles II., of the Spanish branch of the house of Austria. One royal house had gone out, and another came in. Prince Eugene of Savoy, the ablest man that ever served the house of Austria, plainly told the German Emperor that his ministers deserved the gallows for advising him to consent to the creation of the new kingdom, and all subsequent German history seems to show that he was right. But that house needed all the aid it could beg, buy, or borrow, to press its claim to the Spanish crowns; and, thanks to the exertions of the Great Elector, Brandenburg had an army, the aid of which was well worth purchasing at what Leopold may have thought to be a nominal price, after all. So well balanced were the parties to the war of the Spanish Succession, at least in its earlier years, that the mere absence of the Prussian contingent from the armies of the Grand Alliance might have thrown victory into the French scale. What would have been the effect had the army and the influence of Brandenburg been placed at the disposal of Louis XIV.? What would have been the fate of the house of Austria, had the Elector been actively employed on the French side, like