s, and punishing men and women who became monks and nuns;
lawlessness that bred roving bands of murderers, who killed, robbed,
and even ate their victims, demanded a ruler of no little vigor to
lead his people back to civic, moral, and material health. The Great
Elector wrested east Prussia from Poland, he defeated and drove off
the Swedes, whom Louis XIV had drawn into an alliance against him, he
travelled from end to end of his country, seeking out the problems of
distress and remedying them by inducing immigration from Holland,
Switzerland, and the north, by building roads, bridges, schools, and
churches, and by encouraging planting, trade, and commerce. He built
the Frederick William Canal connecting the Oder and the Spree, and
introduced the potato to his countrymen. Germany now produces in
normal years fifteen hundred million bushels of potatoes. The splendid
equestrian statue of the Great Elector on the long bridge at Berlin,
is a worthy monument to the first great Hohenzollern.

When Charles II of Spain died, Louis XIV, the Emperor Leopold I of the
Holy Roman Empire, and the Elector of Bavaria, all three claimed the
right to name his successor. In the war that followed and which lasted
a dozen years, the Emperor, Holland, England, Portugal, the Elector of
Hanover, and the Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg, the son of the
Great Elector, were allied against France. Frederick, the Elector of
Brandenburg, was permitted by the Emperor, in return for his services
at this time, to assume the title of King, and he crowned himself and
his wife Sophia Elizabeth, at Koenigsberg, King and Queen of Prussia,
taking the title of Frederick I of Prussia, January 18th, 1701.

This novus homo among sovereigns was now a fellow king with the rulers
of England, France, Denmark, and Sweden, and the only crowned head in
the empire, except the Emperor himself, and the Elector of Saxony, who
had been chosen King of Poland in 1697. By persistent sycophancy he
had pushed his way into the inner circle of the crowned. Those who
have picked social locks these latter days by similar sycophancies, by
losses at bridge in the proper quarter, by suffering sly familiarities
to their women folk, and by wearing their personal and family dignity
in sole leather, may know something of the humiliating experiences of
this new monarch. He was a feeble fellow, but his son and successor,
Frederick William I, "a shrewd but brutal boor," so Lord Rosebery