France; Kant attempted to
push philosophical inquiry beyond the bounds of human experience, and
Frederick left Prussia at last not ashamed to be Prussia. Napoleon was
eighteen years old when Frederick died, and he, next to Bismarck, did
more to bring about German unity than any other single force.
Unsuccessful Charlemagne though he was, he without knowing it blazed
the political path which led to the crowning of a German emperor in
the palace at Versailles, less than a hundred years after the death of
Frederick the Great. In 1797 at Montebello, Napoleon said: "If the
Germanic System did not exist, it would be necessary to create it
expressly for the convenience of France."

II FREDERICK THE GREAT TO BISMARCK

Frederick the Great died in 1786, leaving Prussia the most
formidable military power on the Continent. In financial, law, and
educational matters he had made his influence felt for good. He
distributed work-horses and seed to his impoverished nobles; he
encouraged silk, cotton, and porcelain industries; he built the Finow,
the Planesche, and Bromberger Canals; he placed a tariff on meat,
except pork, the habitual food of the poor, and spirits and tobacco
and coffee were added to the salt monopoly; he codified the laws,
which we shall mention later; he aided the common schools, and in his
day were built the opera-house, library, and university in Berlin, and
the new palace of Sans Souci at Potsdam.

Almost exactly one hundred years after the death of Frederick the
Great, there ended practically, at the death of the Emperor William I,
in 1888, the political career of the man, who with his personally
manufactured cement of blood and iron, bound Germany together into a
nation. The middle of the seventeenth, the middle of the eighteenth,
and the middle of the nineteenth centuries, with the Great Elector,
Frederick the Great, and Bismarck as the central figures, mark the
features of the historical landscape of Germany as with mile-stones.

How difficult was the task to bring at last an emperor of all Germany
to his crowning at Versailles, January 18, 1871, and how mighty the
artificer who accomplished the work, may be learned from a glance at
the political, geographical, and patriotic incoherence of the land
that is now the German Empire.

Germany had no definite national policy from the death of Frederick
the Great till the reign of Bismarck began in 1862. Hazy discussions
of a confederation of princes, of a