le at hustings or in caucus;
man forever invisible, and very unadmirable if seen, to the Able Editor
and those that hang by him. In fact, a kind of savage man, as we
say; but highly interesting, if you can read dumb human worth; and of
inexpressible profit to the Prussian Nation.

For the first ten years of his reign, he had a heavy, continual
struggle, getting his finance and other branches of administration
extricated from their strangling imbroglios of coiled nonsense, and put
upon a rational footing. His labor in these years, the first of little
Fritz's life, must have been great; the pushing and pulling strong and
continual. The good plan itself, this comes not of its own accord; it
is the fruit of "genius" (which means transcendent capacity of taking
trouble, first of all): given a huge stack of tumbled thrums, it is
not in your sleep that you will find the vital centre of it, or get the
first thrum by the end! And then the execution, the realizing, amid
the contradiction, silent or expressed, of men and things? Explosive
violence was by no means Friedrich Wilhelm's method; the amount of slow
stubborn broad-shouldered strength, in all kinds, expended by the man,
strikes us as very great. The amount of patience even, though patience
is not reckoned his forte.

That of the RITTER-DIENST (Knights'-Service), for example, which is but
one small item of his business, the commuting of the old feudal duty of
his Landholders to do Service in Wartime, into a fixed money payment:
nothing could be fairer, more clearly advantageous to both parties;
and most of his "Knights" gladly accepted the proposal: yet a certain
factious set of them, the Magdeburg set, stirred up by some seven or
eight of their number, "hardly above seven or eight really against me,"
saw good to stand out; remonstrated, recalcitrated; complained in the
Diet (Kaiser too happy to hear of it, that he might have a hook
on Friedrich Wilhelm); and for long years that paltry matter was
a provocation to him. [1717-1725. Forster, ii. 162-165, iv.
31-34; Stenzel, iii. 316-319; Samuel Buchholz, _Neueste
Preussisch-Brandenburgische Geschichte_ (Berlin, 1775), i. 197.] But if
your plan is just, and a bit of Nature's plan, persist in it like a law
of Nature. This secret too was known to Friedrich Wilhelm. In the space
of ten years, by actual human strength loyally spent, he had managed
many things; saw all things in a course towards management. All things,
as it were