"CLEVE, MONDAY, JUNE 13th, At 9 in the morning," records he, "I had audience of the King's Majesty. [In Spaen's Villa of Bellevue, shall we still suppose? Duke Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia and the rest, have bestowed themselves in other fit houses; D'Alembert too,--who is to make direct for Potsdam henceforth, by his own route; and will meet us on arriving.]--I handed him my Report, with the Tabular Schedule. His Majesty read it carefully through, in my presence; and examined all of it with strictness. Was pleased to signify his satisfaction with my work. Resolved to allow 250,000thalers (37,500 pounds) for this business of Rebuilding; gave out the due Orders to his Kammer, in consequence, and commanded me to arrange with the Kammer what was necessary. This done, his Majesty said:--KING. "'What you were described to me, I find you to be. You are a diligent laborious man; I must have you nearer to me;--in the Berlin Hammer you ought to be. You shall have a good, a right good Salary; your Patent I will give you gratis; also a VORSPANN-PASS[Standing Order available at all Prussian Post-Stations] for two carriages [rapid Program of the thing, though yet distant, rising in the Royal fancy!]. Now serve on as faithfully as you have hitherto done.'
RODEN. "'That is the object of all my endeavors.'" (EXIT:--I did not hear specially whitherward just now; but he comes to be supreme Kammer-President in those parts by and by.)"The Herr Kriegsrath Coper was present, and noted all the Orders to he expedited." [Preuss, ii. 442; Rodenbeck, ii. 217, 218: in regard to D'Alembert, see <italic> OEuvres de Frederic, <end italic>
xxiv. 190.]
These snatches of notice at first-hand, and what the reader's fancy may make of these, are all we can bestow on this Section of Friedrich's Labors; which is naturally more interesting to Prussian readers than to English. He has himself given lucid and eloquent account of it,--Two ample Chapters, "DES FINANCES;""DU MILITAIRE," [<italic> OEuvres de Frederic, <end italic> vii.
73-90, 91-109.]--altogether pleasant reading, should there still be curiosity upon it. There is something of flowingly eloquent in Friedrich's account of this Battle waged against the inanimate Chaos; something of exultant and triumphant, not noticeable of him in regard to his other Victories. On the Leuthens, Rossbachs, he is always cold as water, and nobody could gather that he had the least pleasure in recording them. Not so here. And indeed here he is as beautiful as anywhere; and the reader, as a general son of Adam,--proud to see human intellect and heroism slaying that kind of lions, and doing what in certain sad epochs is unanimously voted to be impossible and unattemptable,--exults along with him;and perhaps whispers to his own poor heart, nearly choked by the immeasurable imbroglio of Blue-books and Parliamentary Eloquences which for the present encumber Heaven and Earth, "MELIORA SPERO."To Mirabeau, the following details, from first-hand, but already of twenty-three years distance, were not known, [Appeared first in Tome v. of <italic> "OEuvres Posthumes de Frederic II." <end italic> (are in Tome vi. of Preuss's Edition of OEUVRES), "Berlin, 1788;"--above a year after Mirabeau had left.] while he sat penning those robust Essays on the Duty of LEAVE-ALONE.
"To form an idea of the general subversion," says the King, in regard to 1763, "and how great were the desolation and discouragement, you must represent to yourself Countries entirely ravaged, the very traces of the old habitations hardly discoverable; Towns, some ruined from top to bottom, others half destroyed by fire;--13,000 Houses, of which the very vestiges were gone. No field in seed; no grain for the food of the inhabitants;60,000 horses needed, if there was to be ploughing carried on:
in the Provinces generally Half a Million Population (500,000) less than in 1756,--that is to say, upon only Four Millions and a Half, the ninth man was wanting. Noble and Peasant had been pillaged, ransomed, foraged, eaten out by so many different Armies;nothing now left them but life and miserable rags.
"There was no credit, by trading people, even for the daily necessaries of life." And furthermore, what we were not prepared for, "No police in the Towns: to habits of equity and order had succeeded a vile greed of gain and an anarchic disorder.
The Colleges of Justice and of Finance had, by these frequent invasions of so many enemies, been reduced to inaction:" no Judge, in many places not even a Tax-gatherer: the silence of the Laws had produced in the people a taste for license; boundless appetite for gain was their main rule of action: the noble, the merchant, the farmer, the laborer, raising emulously each the price of his commodity, seemed to endeavor only for their mutual ruin.