The practical King, anticipating this, had been enforcing the cultivation of the much despised potato; and this useful tuber saved Prussia and Silesia from famine, and some of their neighbors as well. For as many as twenty thousand famishing people came from the trampled and burnt corn-fields of Bohemia to feed upon the Prussian potato and live.
Again the people set about the oft-repeated task of repairing the devastation of war. Indeed for 150 years they had always been either enduring the horrors of a great conflict, or healing its wounds and building up the waste places it had made. Can we wonder that they were strong and serious? The weaklings were winnowed out by these great storms, and the chastened souls of those who survived knew little of pleasure. Religion, which had once been their solace and refuge, had lost much of its power on account of the bitterness of sectarian strife.
A few men groping for a solution of the problems of sin and suffering, and for the meaning of this troubled existence, thought they had found it in the new philosophy. France, under the teachings of Voltaire and Rousseau, had cast off the restraints of religious faith without providing any substitute, but Germany, more provident, was building a spacious house for the soul's refuge when the old was demolished; untrammeled freedom of thought was inscribed upon its doors, and PHILOSOPHY was enshrined within!
All this tumultuous inner life was growth: the growth and unfolding of a great and earnest soul; and the awakening of new capacities for being and doing. There was a rapturous surprise in discovering these capacities, and speculative thought and literature became an absorbing passion.
CHAPTER XIV.
At the close of the Seven Years' War, Maria Theresa had spent the twenty-three years of her reign in a fruitless struggle with Frederick. Instead of dismembering his kingdom and reducing him to a plain Margrave of Brandenburg, she had lost Silesia and was compelled to listen to the praises of her enemy resounding through Europe and to hear him called "the Great."
It was a bitter pill for her nine years later, when she had to confer with the Prussian King as an equal, over the partition of Poland, and to see him further enriched by a goodly slice of that unhappy country.
But before that event, and just two years after the conclusion of the war, Francis I. died (1755). He had worn the title, but she had wielded the power and guided the events ever since that day when, with her infant son in her arms, she had captured the Hungarian Diet at Presburg.
And now that son was Joseph II. But the scepter was still in reality to remain with her while she lived, and in fact her name was to be the last ray of splendor which should illumine the throne of Austria. But these were sunset glories after a long and troubled day, while in Prussia was the brightness of the dawn.