reak their wills betimes, whatever it costs; break the
will if you would not damn the child. Let a child from a year old be
taught to fear the rod and to cry softly."

The meanness and cruelty, the parsimony and the eccentricities, of the
father left the son an army of eighty thousand troops, troops as
superior to other troops in Europe as are the Japanese infantry to-day,
to the Manchu guards that pick the weeds in the court-yards of
the palace at Mukden; and he left him, too, a kingdom with no debts
and an overflowing treasury. It is seldom that such insane vanities
leave such a fair estate and an heir with such unique abilities for
its skilful exploitation. Of Frederick's wars against Austria, against
France, Russia, Saxony, Sweden, and Poland; of his victories at
Prague, Leuthen, Rossbach, and Zorndorf; of his addition of Siberia
and Polish Prussia to his kingdom; of his comical literary love affair
with Voltaire; of his brutal comments upon the reigning ladies of
Russia and France, which brought upon him their bitter hatred; of his
restoration and improvement of his country; of his strict personal
economy and loyalty to his own people, scores of volumes have been
written. The hero-worshipper, Carlyle, and the Jove of reviewers,
Macaulay, have described him, and many minor scribes besides.

It is said of his victory of Rossbach, in 1757, that then and there
began the recreation of Germany, the revival of her political and
intellectual life, and union under Prussia and Prussian kings.
Frederick the Great deserves this particular encomium; for as Luther
freed Germany, and all Christendom indeed, from the tyranny of
tradition, as Lessing freed us from the tyranny of the letter, from
the second-hand and half-baked Hellenism of a Racine and a Corneille,
so Frederick the Great freed his countrymen at last from the puerile
slavery to French fashions and traditions, which had made them self-
conscious at home and ridiculous abroad. He first made a Prussian
proud to be a Prussian.

This last quarter of the eighteenth century in Germany saw the death
of Lessing in 1781, the publication of Kant's "Kritik der Reinen
Vernunft" in the same year, and the death of the great Frederick in
1786. These names mark the physical and intellectual coming of age of
Germany. Lessing died misunderstood and feared by the card-board
literary leaders of his day, men who still wrote and thought with the
geometrical instruments handed them from