auching every German
princeling into having a showy court with a pretentious palace and a
tinseled retinue, all wrung from the poor peasantry, the King of Prussia
was running his court after the manner of a close-fisted, land-gaining
German farmer.

Cabbages that could not be sold {48} were served on the royal tables in
order to save a few thalers for the support of the army, and add to the
war chest.

The shabby appointments of the palace were the derision of Europe. The
common people of Prussia had, however, a much larger share of what their
labor produced than those of any other part of Europe. The King not
only set a good example in making the most out of everything, but he
personally caned lessons of industry and frugality into his people, high
and low.

There were occasionally black sheep in even such a sternly regulated
family, but as a general rule the sons and daughters married strong,
clean mates, {49} and strictly maintained the family traditions. A
provision against the way ward princelings was made by which their
possessions passed into the main house if they fell below the standard.
So the Hohenzollerns grew, and Prussia grew from a despised sandbarren
to be one of the Six Great Powers of Europe, and is now the head of the
mighty German Empire. We do not have as full history of the House of
Savoy, but we have enough to know that in much the same way, at the same
time, and by much the same moral discipline, it arose from the lordship
of a little stretch of mountain {50} land in the Alps to rule over
United Italy.

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THE most attractive feature of this self-pruning of the objectionable
growths in society, as said before, is that the victims destroy
themselves under the hallucination that they are drinking the richest
wine of earthly pleasure. When execution can be made a matter of keen
relish to the condemned, certainly nothing is wanting on the score of
humanity.

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{51} I ANTICIPATE the objection that slaying bad men by means of their
own vicious propensities brings much misery to those connected with
them.

But then all innocent persons connected with bad men are fated to suffer
in exact proportion to the closeness of the connection, whether the bad
men are destroyed or not. Weak, selfish, perverted, and criminal men
always inflict misery upon their relatives and associates. This is not
usually intensified by their being drunkards or debauche