resentations were disregarded; now after fifty years his son came
to put an end to this barbarous disorder, and to unite again with
Prussia this land which before the Polish sovereignty had belonged to
the Teutonic order.

[Illustration: FREDERICK THE GREAT ON A PLEASURE TRIP
_From the Painting by Adolph von Menzel_]

Danzig, to be sure, indispensable to the Poles, maintained itself
through these decades of disorder in aristocratic seclusion. It
remained a free city under Slavic protection, for a long time
suspicious of the great King and not well disposed toward him. Thorn
also had to wait twenty years longer in oppression, separated from the
other German colonies, as a Polish border city. But the energetic
assistance of the King saved the country and most of the German towns
from destruction. The Prussian officials who were sent into the
country were astonished at the desolation of the unheard-of situation
which existed but a few days' journey from their capital. Only certain
larger towns, in which the German life had been protected by strong
walls and the old market traffic, and some sheltered country
districts, inhabited exclusively by Germans (such as the lowlands near
Danzig, the villages under the mild rule of the Cistercians of Oliva,
and the prosperous German places of the Catholic Ermeland), were left
in tolerable condition. Other towns lay in ruins, as did most of the
farmsteads of the open country. The Prussians found Bromberg, a German
colonial city, in ruins; and it is even yet impossible to determine
exactly how the city came into that condition. In fact, the
vicissitudes which the whole Netze district had undergone in the last
nine years before the Prussian occupation are completely unknown. No
historian, no document, no chronicle, gives reports of the destruction
and the slaughter which must have raged there. Evidently the Polish
factions fought between themselves, and crop failures and pestilence
may have done the rest. Kulm had preserved from an earlier time its
well-built walls and stately churches, but in the streets the
foundation walls of the cellars stood out of the decaying wood and
broken tiles of the crumbled buildings. There were whole streets of
nothing but such cellar rooms in which wretched people lived. Of the
forty houses of the main market-place twenty-eight had no doors, no
roofs, no windows, and no owners. Other cities were in a similar
condition.

The majority of the country peop