adapted to the place he received; and the family has seldom failed to produce able men and women in every generation, some of them being of the highest intellectual force, while others have been remarkable for eccentricities that at times bore considerable resemblance to insanity. Yet there was not much in the history of the new electoral house that promised its future greatness, for more than two centuries.
It is surprising to look back over the history of Germany, and note how differently matters have turned out, in respect to families and countries, from what observers of old times would have predicted. When Charles V. fled before Maurice of Saxony, he may have thought, considering the great part Saxony had had in the Reformation, that from that country danger might come to the house of Austria in yet greater measure; but he would have smiled at the prophet who should have told him not only that no such danger would come, but that Saxony would be ruined because of its adherence to the house of Austria, when assailed by a descendant of the then insignificant Elector of Brandenburg. Yet the prophet would have been right, for Saxony suffered so much from her connection with the Austrians in Frederick the Great's time that she never recovered therefrom; and in the late contest she was lost before a shot was fired, and her troops, after fighting valiantly in Bohemia, shared the disasters of the power upon which she had relied for protection. Bavaria was another German country that seemed more likely to rise to greatness than Brandenburg; but, though her progress has been respectable, it must be pronounced insignificant if compared with that of Prussia. The house of Wittelsbach was great before that of Hohenzollern had risen to general fame; but the latter has passed it, as if Fortune had taken the Hohenzollerns under its special protection, and we should not be in the least surprised were they to take all its territory ere the twentieth century shall have fairly dawned upon the world.
The first of the great Prussian rulers was the Elector Frederick William, who reigned from 1640 to 1688, and who is known as the Great Elector,—a title of which he was every way worthy, and not the less that there was just a suspicion of the tyrant in his composition. He had not a little of that "justness of insight, toughness of character, and general strength of bridle-hand," which Mr. Carlyle attributes to Rudolph of Hapsburg. He was a man of the times, and a man for the times. He came to the throne just as the Thirty Years' War was well advanced in its last decade, and he had a ruined country for his inheritance; but he raised that country to a high place in Europe, and was connected with many of the principal events of the age of Louis XIV. He freed Prussia from her connection with Poland. He created that Prussian army which has done such wonderful things in the greatest of wars in the last two centuries. He it was who won the battle of Fehrbellin, June 18, 1675, at the expense of the Swedes, who were still living on the mighty reputation won under Gustavus Adolphus, almost half a century earlier, and maintained by the splendid soldiers trained in his school. The calm and philosophic Rankè warms into something like eloquence when summing up the work of the Great Elector. "Frederick William," he says, "cannot be placed in the same category with those few great men who have discovered new conditions for the development of the human race; but he may unhesitatingly be ranked with those famous princes who have saved their countries in the hour of danger, and have succeeded in re-establishing order,—with an Alfred, a Charles VII., a Gustavus Vasa. He followed the path trodden by the German territorial princes of old; but among them all there was not one who, finding his state reduced to such a miserable condition, so successfully raised it to independence and power. He instilled into his subjects a spirit of enterprise,—the mainspring of a state. He took measures which
