eration in the Napoleonic Period.*--By reason of the
vacillating policies of her sovereign, Frederick William III., the
successive defeats of her armies at Jena, Auerstaedt, and elsewhere,
and the loss, by the treaty of Tilsit in 1807, of half of her
territory, Prussia realized from the first decade of the Napoleonic
period little save humiliation and disaster. Through the years
1807-1815, however, her lot was wonderfully improved. Upon the failure
of the Russian expedition of Napoleon in 1812, Frederick William (p. 247)
shook off his apprehensions and allied himself openly with the
sovereigns of Russia and Austria. The people rose _en masse_, and in
the titanic struggle which ensued Prussia played a part scarcely
second in importance to that of any other power. At the end she was
rewarded, through the agency of the Congress of Vienna, by being
assigned the northern portion of Saxony, Swedish Pomerania, her old
possessions west of the Elbe, the duchies of Berg and Julich, and a
number of other districts in Westphalia and on the Rhine. Her area in
1815 was 108,000 square miles, as compared with 122,000 at the
beginning of 1806; but her loss of territory was more than compensated
by the substitution that had been made of German lands for
Slavic.[359] The homogeneity of her population was thereby increased,
her essentially Germanic character emphasized, and her capacity for
German leadership enhanced.

[Footnote 359: L. A. Himly, Histoire de la
formation territoriale des etats de l'Europe
centrale, 2 vols. (Paris, 1876), I., 93-110.]

It was not merely in respect to territory and population that the
Prussia of 1815 was different from the Prussia of a decade earlier.
Consequent upon the humiliating disasters of 1806 there set in a moral
regeneration by which there was wrought one of the speediest and one
of the most thoroughgoing national transformations recorded in
history. In 1807 Frederick William's statesmanlike minister Stein
accomplished the abolition of serfdom and of all legal distinctions
which separated the various classes of society.[360] In 1808 he
reformed the municipalities and gave them important powers of
self-government. By a series of sweeping measures he reconstructed the
ministerial departments, the governments of the provinces, and the
local administrative machinery, with the result of creating an
executive system which has required but little