His successor, Frederick William I. (i713-4o) has long been unjustly represented as a crude tyrant. He was a sober-minded man, without any strong intellectual interests, but a first-class organizer and imbued with a stern sense of duty, based on re ligious sentiment, and he deliberately devoted his whole soul to the service of the State. He resumed the work begun by his grandfather, and is the true father of the Prussian administrative system and Prussian officialdom. He created a new central ad ministrative service in the shape of the General Directory, for which he drew up the instructions himself (1723). This organ acted as a general ministry, in which the agenda was distributed to the several members, partly by subject, partly on local lines, while all important measures were decided in general conference. The king reserved to himself the final decision. Each official received a commission stating his duties, emoluments and exact official regulations. All official bodies had to keep a record of, and send in a weekly report on their activities. In most cases officials were nominated by the king at his full discretion ; only in the selection of the Landrdte, who were in charge of the provincial districts (Kreise) the nobles still had a certain voice. Officials and magistrates were obliged to pass through a definite course of training, and could not be appointed unless they had passed the prescribed examination. The king organized a regular procedure of judicial appeal, making the Kanymergericht in Ber lin the supreme judiciary instance for the whole State. Judicial procedure was also simplified and improved in important respects. In the financial administration he introduced the strictest economy. He succeeded in increasing the revenue from the royal domains and prerogatives and from the indirect taxes to a considerable degree, and in achieving an annual surplus. This he put into a State exchequer, which contained 7,000,000 thaler at his death. He made special efforts to encourage trade and industry, following the principles of the mercantile system, which at that time were everywhere accepted. As the country was thinly populated, he encouraged the immigration of efficient labour. Just as his grandfather had admitted a large number of the Huguenots expelled from France after the repeal of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV., so Frederick allowed the Protestants expelled by the archbishop of Salzburg to enter his kingdom, settling most of them in East Prussia. First and foremost a soldier, the king devoted especial attention to the training of the standing army, the numbers of which he raised from 40,000 to 89,00o. It was still a mercenary army, recruited from volun teers at home and abroad. He took pains, however, to ensure that as high a proportion as possible should be composed of his own subjects and divided the whole Prussian territory into recruiting districts, the so-called "cantons"; each district was obliged to supply the men for one specified regiment. The re cruiting was often done in a very arbitrary fashion, which gave rise to many complaints. Definite instructions were drawn up and regular inspections carried through to ensure uniformity of train ing; the army thus created was superior to those of most other States. It was Frederick William who first gave Prussia the char acteristic stamp of a military and bureaucratic State.
For all his military inclinations, Frederick William was an unusually peaceable man by nature, and in his foreign policy always avoided military entanglements. When he came to the throne, Prussia was embroiled in the Northern War ; at the conclusion of peace he succeeded in securing Upper Pomerania up to the Pene, which had formerly been in the hands of Sweden, with the impor tant commercial town of Stettin. He failed, however, to secure support for his claims which were based on old succession treaties, to further portions of the Cleves-Jiilich heritage, and to parts of Silesia. As a loyal German, he thought it his duty to maintain as good relations as possible with the emperor; but encountered profound mistrust in Vienna, where the growing strength of the Prussian State was watched with concern, and towards the end of his life was forced into an increasingly sharp opposition to the house of Habsburg.
inclinations led him towards the new ideas of the Aufkliirung, while the old King was a strict Calvinist. The crown prince's attempted flight (173o) brought this conflict to a head. The king had his son imprisoned, and even had an idea of excluding him from the succession ; Frederick was only able to buy a recon ciliation at the price of complete submission to his father's will. He was obliged to pass through a strict training in the adminis trative service and the army, a training which did much to prepare him for his later career.
For Frederick's conflicts with Maria Theresa, which filled the first half of his reign, see GERMANY; AUSTRIA; AUSTRIAN SUC CESSION, WAR OF, etc. They ended in the acquisition of Silesia, with the exception of a few small districts south of the Riesen gebirge, which remained in the hands of Austria. Frederick's successful resistance in the Seven Years' War against Austria, France and Russia raised his prestige enormously. From this time onward his State was recognized as a European great Power. In addition to Silesia, he had also acquired East Frisia, which came to him in 1744 on the extinction of the old princely house, through a succession treaty. At the first Partition of Poland (1772) he also acquired West Prussia (except Dantzig and Thorn), a particularly important district, as it bridged the gap between East Prussia and the Brandenburg family dominions. Frederick carried on the internal development of the Prussian State on the lines laid down by his father. He instituted a general civil code for his State in the shape of the Prussian Landrec/zt—a work not completed until after his death; accelerated judicial procedure, abolished torture, and introduced the principle that the Crown should not interfere with the course of justice. In administra tive matters, he sought to pay special consideration to the local peculiarities of the different provinces, and paid frequent jour neys of inspection to satisfy himself that his orders were being carried out. The fiscal system was further developed; but an attempt to introduce the farming of taxes, on the French model (1766), proved unsuccessful and had to be abandoned. Under his rule the State revenue increased largely; on his death he left 55,000,000 thaler in the State exchequer. He had the low lying country of the Oder and the Warthe drained, settled villages of colonists in the Pomeranian forests, arranged for the plantation of hops and potatoes, and founded factories. He left several detailed exposés of his administrative and political principles, notably in his famous political testaments of 1752 and 1767, which were designed to serve as a guide to his successor. Like his father, he considered himself the first servant of the State, and expressed the thought that the duty of the prince was to govern as though he had to render account to his subjects for all his measures. The political philosophy of the day, however, was absolutist, and Frederick too was convinced that the conduct of a great State demanded a single guiding will, which could only be that of the monarch, and he called for unconditional obedience, not only from his officials, but also from each of his subjects. He rarely consulted with his ministers in person ; he called for reports from them in writing, and dictated the answers, which he sent to them in writing. His liberal views in matters of religion led him to adopt the policy of toleration, on principle, towards the different Churches : a policy which was also naturally dic tated by practical considerations in a State which included a Protestant majority and a strong Catholic minority. His lively interest in all intellectual questions led him to take measures to improve the level of public education. In the upper schools the classics were made the principal subject of instruction. The king would have wished to establish compulsory primary education for the whole population, from the fifth to the thirteenth year, but lack of means made it impossible to carry this out. Although Frederick was deeply influenced by the humanitarian ideas of the Aufklarung, and considered the furtherance of the people's welfare and of popular education to be among the monarch's essential duties, yet his guiding thought remained always to raise the forces of his comparatively small, weak State, by better organization, so as to maintain the position of power which he had won.