Although Frederick's tastes led him so strongly to letters and to music, these two arts had attained this rich development in Germany without any assistance from him. When he died in 1786 the monument he left was a Kingdom of Prussia; equal in rank with any of the Great Powers of Europe, enlarged in territory, rich in population, with a great army and an overflowing treasury.
As Frederick the Great had no son, this splendid inheritance passed to his nephew Frederick William II.
With the new ascendency of Prussia in the German Empire, a process which had long been going on was accelerated. That empire had become a fiction, a form from which the substance had long ago departed; almost its only remaining relic being an Imperial Diet, where thirty solemn old men supposed they were holding the venerated structure together by weaving about it, and repairing, the thin, worn threads of tradition.
The German Empire had in its best time existed by grace of God and force of circumstances, more than by reason of a sound and perfect organism. It always struggled with fatal inherent defects. Its life currents never flowed freely and had been growing more and more sluggish for centuries. And now, they had ceased to flow at all. There was no vital relation whatever between its various parts. Of national feeling there was absolutely none. Lessing, one of the greatest Germans of that time, said, "Of the love of country I have no conception!"
And what was there to inspire patriotism in this great empty shell of despotism! The shattered lifeless old structure was wrong at its very foundation. It was built upon feudal injustice; that injustice which compelled the people to bear the whole burden of taxation, from which it exempted the nobility and the clergy. England had long ago redressed this grievous wrong. France was just preparing to free herself from it by a tremendous convulsion. Germany had been offered emancipation at the hands of her enlightened and gracious Emperor Joseph, but so spiritless and benumbed had she become that she could not understand his message.
He was attempting a vain task in trying to infuse new life into the empire. There were no living channels to convey the current. The only thing to be done with it was to sweep it away—and the man and the time for doing this were close at hand. The surface calm which existed while Leopold II. was repairing the disorder left by his reforming brother Joseph, was the calm which precedes the hurricane.
[[1]] See Chart of Civilization in Six Centuries, "Who, When, and What."
CHAPTER XV.
The energies which were to transform the face of Europe had been gradually centering in France. They commenced when Voltaire and Rousseau made it the fashion to scoff at the Church. Then, as religion and morality are closely allied, virtue became also a subject of ridicule. The spirit animating this was supposed to be a reforming spirit. It was an effort to free the people from the fetters of ecclesiasticism. Naturally, this led to assaults upon other fetters, other prevailing abuses. The vices of the Court were held up to view—its extravagance and luxury; all of which people were reminded that they had to pay for.