AN AMERICAN HISTORY OF PRUSSIA.*
Is looking at the Kingdom of Prussia, it is sometimes difficult not to be dazzled into wonder and admiration by the extra- ordinary vigour in policy and war which raised the petty Princi- pality of Brandenburg, with its sandy fiats and dreary marshes, to the position of a mighty Kingdom, the head of a mightier Empire, more powerful in war, in organisation, and in learning than any other State in Europe. The morality of history seems at fault, and we feel almost inclined to say that in obtain- ing such results the means have been justified, and that the men who laid the foundations of this great structure need only be judged by their achievements. But, in truth, the result is no justification, for what has been achieved in Prussian history is as nothing compared with what has been destroyed. No round- ing-off of boundaries, no perfecting of the machine of govern- ment, no organisation of military power, can compensate for the overthrow of self-government, and with it of what is most worthy of cultivation in the citizen, —self-respeck inde- pendence, and the sense of personal freedom. Prussian history is the record of the destruction of these qualities in the nation, and in that it is so is nothing great or worthy, but rather a tale of decay and failure. Whether, when the spirit of liberty and self- government has once been rooted up, it can be restored by the clauses of a paper Constitution, remains to be seen. It may be that the painful growth of individual freedom will begin again ; but at present that vast political structure that we call Prussia seems to bear indelible traces of the means by which it was created. Since Prussian history is such, it must of necessity call up feelings of indignation in the minds of men of English race. And if the feeling is one of in- dignation when the wrong-doer is a ruler, like the Great Elector, how can it be other than of contempt and disgust when the blow is dealt by a mountebank like Frederick I. of Prussia, or a coarse and swaggering bully like his son, Frederick William I.? Yet the sense of shame and degradation in what is to he re- corded should not induce the historian to bate one jot of his interest, of his impartiality, or of his desire to draw what lessons he can from his subject. It is for this that Mr. Tuttle deserves such high praise. An American, and so out of sympathy with the Prussian ideal of military and bureaucratic despotism, he has yet preserved a true historic temper in dealing with his subject, and a steady and honest determination to judge by a fair and reasonable standard. And not only is his fairness to be praised; his manner of narration is clear and good.- The style, too, is not undignified ; and if it sometimes tends to fall into rather a pompous cadence, it is at least free from anything either slovenly or affected in phrase or idiom. Mr. Tattle has chosen to cover in his history the period from the grant of the Mark to Albert the Bear, till the accession of Frederick the Great. That he was altogether wise in this we cannot agree. A better choice would have been from the accession of the Great Elector and the Peace of Westphalia till the accession of Frederick the Great. This would have been a period short enough to be adequately handled in a single volume, and well within the scope of Mr. Tuttle's powers; for it is this portion of his subject which he has written of with most success, and evidently with The History of P,tessia to the Acc.esion of Frederick the Great, 1134-1740. By Herbert Tuttle, Professor in Cornell University. Boston, U.S. : Houghton, Miftl,n and Co. 1854.
most interest. Owing. to his present arrangement, a quarter of :the hook is devoted to what is necessarily an imperfect sketch of the earlier history. The chapter on "The Early Society and Institutions" is as clear as can be expected when the primitive Teutonic polity is to be discussed, and contains a good deal of information : but we would gladly have sacrificed it for more detail as to the state of Brandenburg at the end of the Thirty Years' War.
Prussian history from the year 1640 to the year 1740 is the history of three men,—of the Great Elector, of the first King, Frederick I., and of Frederick William L Than the Great Elector, perhaps, no man bound down and limited at every turn by the chain of adverse circum- stance, succeeded better in the aims he had set himself. At the age of twenty he succeeded to dominions which, at the best of times, were poor, barren, and scattered from any common centre, but which were now wasted by war, or even actually in the possession of the enemy. The army, though large, was a mutinous rabble, and, as dangerous to its own country as the foreign invaders, while the Ministers who held the reins of government—if the weak powers of the state will carry such a metaphor—were unfriendly, if not in open intrigue against the new Prince. The youth to whom this task was set soon began to overcome his difficulties. He reduced his army to submission, he disarmed the opposition of his Ministers, he played-off with the most successful, if the most unscrupulous, diplomacy the Swedes, the Emperor, and the Poles, until at last he had breathing-space to reorganise his country ; and not only to do this, but to paralyse every institution in his dominions which tended to resist his will. Circumstanced as be was, it is easy to look leniently upon his tortuous diplomacy at the Congress of Westphalia. and daring the war between Poland and Sweden ; and a debt of admiration may be conscientiously paid him for the successes at Fehrbellin and the Frisches Haff, which enabled him to clear his country of foreign enemies. It is when we -torn to regard his policy towards the Estates, and. examine in detail the arbitrary and illegal acts with which he enforced his schemes of absolutism, that sound opinion must grow hard. We would willingly, had we space, quote the author's regret that he caunot describe in detail the struggle for liberty in Preussen,—
• a struggle which, for its "fearless patriotism," and for all but its melancholy end, deserves well to be remembered. He truly says :—" It would be a work of respect and affection to describe the fearless patriotism of Kalkstein and Rhode —the one a patrician General, the other a plebeian burgher, yet as twin heroes in the battle of liberty, teaching their countrymen that the interests of the province were indivisible." Indeed, through- out his life the Elector was in aim nothing but a tyrant. He was not always wise or prudent, not always successful.
"But," as Mr. Tuttle observes, "in the midst of vacillation, of tentative schemes, of failure and disappointment, he kept the one great object of his life,—the vindication of his own will as the supreme authority in the State,—ini movable before his eyes ; and in this he was brilliantly but deplorably successful." The son who succeeded the Great Elector was in every way a contrast to his father. Weak in body and mind, he was fond not of strengthening the resources of the
State by organising the administration or by gaining territory-through the successful conduct of diplomacy or war, but
of the mere displays of sovereignty. It was better to him -to be a king in name than in deed; to bear a sceptre and rank with the Kings of England and Poland, than to have his alliance sought for as a powerful Prince. Yet, contemptible as this may • at first seem, Frederick I.'s reign must not be condemned too hastily. It is something to find a Prussian King whose desire was that, above all things, his "should be a lovable govern- ment ;" and this quality of amiability in his rule did much to reconcile the people to the criminal folly and profusion of his Court.
Mr. Carlyle exults in the way in which, on his death, his son
• Frederick William turned off the cooks and lacqueys, and reduced in every direction the waste and extravagance of the Royal household. If this had been all the change, it had been well ; but not only was Frederick William determined to put down the pomp which had characterised his father's rule, but also its amiability. Probably the latter was even more dis- tasteful to him than the former. There is no more an- amiable character in the whole of history than Frederick William I. Well may Mr. Tuttle speak of the "moral hideousness" of a father who, when he bad struck his
own daughter in the face, and laid her senseless on the floor, could only be prevented from renewing his blows and from trampling upon her by the Queen and the Princesses ; or who, when his son was brought to him after his flight, fell upon him with a drawn sword, and was with difficulty persuaded from killing him with his own hands. It would be impossible to set out here the barbarities of his family life, the blows, starva- tion, taunts, and general persecution which he reserved for his children, or that wholesale domestic tyranny which made it as much as a son or daughter's life was worth to disturb the King as he lay asleep on his wooden bench after a hunting picnic. All these excesses at home had their parallel in his unfortunate country. The cruelties with regard to kidnapping the grenadiers are well known : but it is difficult to understand. that in the middle of the eighteenth century the punishment of death was awarded without form or trial on the mere order of the King. The code was always being enriched by fresh crimes for which death was the punishment. It was found that advo- cates employed tall grenadiers to hand petitions to the King as a device for gaining a favourable hearing. When the practice became an evident abuse, and the King was asked for a remedy, his Majesty replied by painting on the wall the picture of a lawyer hanging side by side with a dog : and this symbolical answer was duly incorporated into an edict, that persons guilty of such an offence were to share the gallows with a dog. The King passed all civil and judicial business under review, and." a hasty scrawl on the margin of a judge's deci- sion or an officer's complaint might cost a poor wretch his head." "A poor quartermaster in the Army was convicted of defalca- tion, and although his bond. covered the deficit, which he offered to make good, his Majesty wrote, I forgive the debt, but let him be hanged.'" It is impossible to quote all the instances of the King's ferocity. Perhaps the worst are those where inno- cent men were in danger of suffering, because the violence of the King made it unsafe for punishment to be delayed till his real meaning could be found out, or his hand-writing deciphered. Truly Mr. Tuttle does not depart from his duty of impartiality when he says of him,—" His manner wanted dignity and self- control, his temper was violent. His language was coarse,inso- lent, and brutal. He was incapable of doing a kind act grace- fully, and he made even just severity seem like heartless persecution. His vices were low, mean, sordid, and vulgar, and even his virtues sprang more often from a cold indifference than from a moral enthusiasm ; were calculated, selfish, and un- social; chilled rather than warmed the atmosphere in which he lived. Yet this swaggering, ignorant, savage ruffian proved to be one of the keenest politicians and greatest legislators of his age." With this quotation we must leave our consideration of Mr. Tattle's work, but before doing so we must most heartily wish his book the success it deserves with the English public on both sides of the Atlantic.
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