olic Church was punished with
confiscation of property and banishment; under the Prussians anybody
could leave or join any church--that was his own affair. Under the
imperial rule the government had been, on the whole, negligent if it
had been forced to occupy itself with any matter; the Prussian
officials had their noses and their hands in everything. In spite of
the three Silesian wars the province grew to be far more prosperous
than it had been under the Empire. Up to this time a hundred years had
not been sufficient to wipe out the visible traces of the Thirty
Years' War. The people remembered well how in the cities the heaps of
rubbish from the time of the Swedish invasions had lain about, and
between the remaining houses there were patches of waste ground
blackened by fire. Many small cities still had log houses in the old
Slavic style, with thatched or shingled roofs, patched up shabbily
from time to time. In a few decades the Prussians removed the traces
not only of former devastations, but also of the recent Seven Years'
War. Frederick laid out several hundred new villages, had fifteen
good-sized towns rebuilt in regular streets--largely with funds from
the royal treasury--and had compelled the landed proprietors to
restore several thousand farms which they had abolished as individual
holdings, and install upon them tenants with rights of succession.
Under the Empire the taxes had been lower, but they had been unfairly
distributed and had fallen chiefly upon the poor, the nobility being
exempt from the greater part of them. The collection was imperfect,
much was embezzled or poorly applied; relatively little came into the
imperial treasury. The Prussians, on the contrary, divided the country
into small districts, appraised every acre of land, and in a few years
abolished almost all exemptions. The outlying country now paid its
land taxes and the cities their excise duties. So the province bore
the double burden with greater ease, and no one but the privileged
classes grumbled; and with all this, it could maintain forty thousand
soldiers, whereas formerly there had been in the province only about
two thousand. Before 1740 the nobility had lived _en grand seigneur_.
All who were Catholic and rich lived in Vienna. Everybody else who
could raise enough money betook himself to Breslau. Now the majority
of landholders lived on their estates, the poverty-stricken nobles
disappeared, the nobility knew that the King hono