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boring countries; it was in itself peculiarly execrable. The Poles had fallen in great part under the influences of the Jesuits, and were fanatically intolerant of every form of faith except their own intensely superstitious Catholicism. The country, with its furious priests and weeping images of the Virgin, was fast retrograding to barbarism, and was, in fact, a scandal to Europe. In their frantic wilfulness and hatred of all restraint, the Poles had made government an impossibility among them, unless it came from without. Had Frederick exerted his influence with the Austrian and Russian Courts to have his brother Henry, a man of great ability and an admirable commander, appointed King of Poland, as some intelligent Poles desired, the issue might have been better for all parties; but I am not prepared to prove that such a course was practicable. Mr. Carlyle translates for us, from Herr Freytag, the following account of what Poland was when Frederick got his share of it, and what that share (West Preussen) became under Frederick's management.

POLAND BEFORE PARTITION AND AFTER.

During several centuries, the much-divided Germans had habitually been pressed upon, and straitened and injured, by greedy, conquering neighbors; Friedrich was the first conqueror who once more pushed forward the German frontier toward the East; reminding the Germans again that it was their task to carry law, culture, liberty, and industry into the East of Europe. All Friedrich's lands, with the exception only of some old-Saxon territory, had, by force and colonization, been painfully gained from the Sclave. At no time since the migrations of the Middle Ages had this struggle for possession of the wide plains to the East of Oder ceased. When arms were at rest, politicians carried on the struggle.

In the very "century of enlightenment" the persecution of the Germans became fanatical in those countries; one Protestant church after the other got confiscated; pulled down; if built of wood, set on fire: its church once burned, the village had lost the privilege of having one. Ministers and school-masters were driven away, cruelly maltreated. "Wring the Lutheran, you will find money in him," became the current proverb of

the Poles in regard to Germans. A Protestant Starost of Gnesen, a Herr Von Unruh, of the House of Birnbaum, one of the largest proprietors of the country, was condemned to die, and first to have his tongue pulled out, and his hands cut off, for the crime of having copied into his note-book some strong passages against the Jesuits, extracted from German books. Patriotic Confederates of Bar, joined by all the plunderous vagabonds around, went roaming and ravaging through the country, falling upon small towns and German villages. The Polish nobleman, Roskowski, put on one red boot and one black, symbolizing fire and death; and in this guise rode about, murdering and burning, from place to place; finally, at Jastrow, he cut off the hands, feet, and, lastly, the head of the Protestant pastor, Willich by name, and threw the limbs into a swamp. This happened in 1768.

When Prussian Poland came into possession of Friedrich, the towns, with some few exceptions, lay in ruins; so also most of the hamlets of the open country. Bromberg, the city of German colonists, the Prussians found in heaps and ruins: to this hour it has not been possible to ascertain clearly how the town came into this condition. No historian, no document tells of the destruction and slaughter that had been going on, in the whole district of the Netze there, during the last ten years before the arrival of the Prussians. The town of Culm had preserved its strong old walls and stately churches; but in the streets, the necks of the cellars stood out above the rotten timber and brick heaps of the tumbled houses; whole streets consisted merely of such cellars, in which wretched people were still trying to live. Of the forty houses in the large market-place of Culm, twenty-eight had no doors, no roofs, no windows, and no owners. Other towns were in similar condition.

The country people hardly knew such a thing as bread; many had never in their life tasted such a delicacy; few villages possessed an oven. A weaving-loom was rare, the spinning-wheel unknown. The main article of furniture, in this scene of squalor, was the crucifix and vessel of holywater under it. The peasant-noble was hardly different from the common peasant; he himself guided his hook-plough and clattered with his wooden slippers upon the plankless floor of his hut. It was a desolate land, without discipline, without law, without a master.

The very rottenness of the country became an attraction for Friedrich; and henceforth West Preussen was, what hitherto Silesia had been, his favorite child; which, with infinite care, like an anxious, loving mother, he washed, brushed, new-dressed, and forced to go to school and into orderly habits, and kept ever in his eye. The diplomatic squabbles about

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this "acquisition" were still going on, when he had already sent a body of his best official people into this waste howling scene, to set about organizing it. The Counties were divided into small Circles; in a minimum of time, the land was valued, and an equal tax put upon it; every Circle received its Landrath, Law-court, Post-office, and Sanitary Police. New parishes, each with its church and parson, were called into existence as by miracle; a company of 187 school-masters were sent into the country; multitudes of German mechanics, too, from brick-makers up to machine-builders. Everywhere there began a digging, a hammering, a building; cities were peopled anew; street after street rose out of the heaps of ruins; new villages of colonists were laid out, new modes of agriculture ordered. In the first year after taking possession, the great canal was dug, which, in a length of fifteen miles, connects, by the Netze river, the Weichsel with the Oder and the Elbe within one year after giving the order, the King saw loaded vessels from the Oder, 120 feet in length of keel, enter the Weichsel. The vast breadths of land, gained from the state of swamp by drainage into this canal, were immediately peopled by German colonists.

We saw that, immediately on his accession, Frederick proclaimed toleration to all religions, and freedom of the Press. He at once put a stop also to the use of torture in the legal system of Prussia. But his enthusiasm for Law Reform was by no means content with these memorable improvements. The sword once in the sheath, after the second Silesian war, he summoned to his help, as his manner was, the most effective men whom he could find to undertake the reform of the law. It is notable of Frederick-and one of the proofs of his consummate practical talent-that he never undertook work for which he was unfitted, seldom forced his own views upon men whose mastery in their department was clear. As his Chief Law Minister he named Samuel Von Cocceji, whom Mr. Carlyle describes as "one of the most learned of lawyers, and a very Hercules in cleansing law stables ;" and, a fortnight after the peace was signed, an express order was written by Frederick directing Cocceji to begin. The Law Minister had a Commission of Six appointed to assist him, " riddled together" out of

Prussia, the best men producible for the work. "To sweep out pettifogging attorneys, cancel improper advocates, to regulate fees; to war, in a calm but deadly manner, against pedantries, circumlocutions, and the multiplied forms of stupidity, cupidity, and human owlery in this department;" such, in Mr. Carlyle's picturesque language, was their duty. They took up the provinces successively, beginning with Pomerania and ending with Prussia proper.

Their method was bold, and involved one change which, to our friends of Westminster Hall and Lincoln's Inn, may seem appalling and incredible. They actually swept away the attor ney species. The advocate was himself to take charge of the suit, no middle-man permitted. In the next place they sifted out and dismissed incompetent advocates, retaining in each Court a fixed number of qualified men. Inefficient judges were shelved, and those who remained were better paid. The standard of fees was accurately fixed-another of those things which, with freedom granted to solicitors and clients to make personal bargains, and with taxation of costs left very much a sham from not being enforced in all cases, has been found a practical impossibility in England. They made it imperative-this seems to have been Frederick's own suggestion-that every suit, even if twice carried by appeal to higher Courts, should terminate within a year of its inception. Cocceji crowned his general Law Reform with the project of a code, which, in due time, was realized. Friedrich's fame," says Mr. Carlyle, "as a beneficent Justinian, rose high in all countries."

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CHAPTER XX.

FREDERICK THE POOR MAN'S LAWYER.-LINZENBARTH.

IN every case occurring within the Prussian dominions there

was an appeal to the King direct. Frederick proclaimed himself the advocate of the poor man and of the common soldier. The opinion of educated Prussia, both during Frederick's life and in our own time, has been that, in one instance, at least, his desire to do justice to a poor man, and his suspicion of legal pedantry, led him to a wrong decision. Miller Arnold, who claimed compensation for the water which, as he alleged, had been drawn from his mill-stream by a landed proprietor, and whose cause was so vehemently espoused by Frederick that he actually imprisoned his Berlin judges for refusing to decide in Arnold's favor, is commonly believed to have befooled His Majesty. Mr. Carlyle, indeed, thinks differently, but the evidence. on the other side appears to be overwhelming. In the wellknown case of the Sans Souci miller, a Prussian Naboth who would on no account give up to the King his bit of ground and mill, Frederick showed himself a wiser as well as a more magnanimous ruler than Ahab, and left the mill to be a picturesque ornament in his garden. Generally speaking, the right of appeal to Frederick worked well, checking the blunders of mechanical routine, and tending greatly to endear him to his subjects. One instance in which the crowned advocate of the poor man served his client well, deserves to be more fully detailed.

Linzenbarth was a "rugged poverty-stricken old licentiate of theology," tall, awkward, rawboned, a kind of German Dominie Sampson, who had failed in the pulpit, and managed to keep