ly, a project of
Dorothea's. Her dairy was wonderfully remunerative, and it was even
rumored that she held a controlling interest in a brewery. Thrifty
Dorothea certainly was; comfortable to live with, either as wife or
stepmother, she evidently was not. She never filled the vacant place in
Frederick William's heart. "Ah! my poor Louisa," the great elector, now
growing to be the old elector, often exclaimed; "I have not my dear
Louisa now. To whom shall I turn for help and comfort?"

Between Dorothea and her stepson, the crown prince Frederick, a constant
state of warfare existed. Political enemies even accused Dorothea,
without a shadow of truth, of attempting to poison him. At last
Frederick withdrew entirely from his father's court, leaving his
stepmother and his four stepbrothers in possession of the field. This
wearing domestic friction, combined with much political opposition,
embittered the last years of the elector's life. He died in 1688; but he
had not lived in vain. His private life was honorable; his morals were
above reproach. In his conjugal fidelity, he stands a solitary figure
upon the threshold of a new and still more debased age.

War was not the sole cause of woman's degradation in this unhappy
period. French influence, proceeding from the brilliant, evil court of
Louis XIV. (1643-1715), debased her incalculably. Like a moral miasma,
this influence permeated every stratum of German society. Upon the
innocent and the guilty woman alike its effect was deadly. This
destructive conquest over the brain and soul of Germany was not made in
a single generation, for, in the beginning, men of the stamp of the
great elector and women like his beloved Louisa fought against the
subtle, poisonous influence.

For half a century a German princess lived at the very fountain head of
corruption, the court of Louis XIV., and remained pure. Elizabeth
Charlotte of the Palatinate was a granddaughter of Elizabeth Stuart. Her
father was Carl Ludwig, Prince of the Palatinate, to whom had been
restored a part of his paternal inheritance the Rhine Palatinate. She
was educated by her father's sister, Sophia, Electress of Hanover, whom
she loved devotedly. To this aunt, through fifty years of life in a
corrupt and foreign atmosphere, which to the end she hated, the exiled
German princess poured out her heart in letters that, to the historian,
have proved of priceless value. Ranke says: "Nowhere else is the
uncleanness of French