George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 5, 13th edition.

[6]

Yet Protestantism, albeit the reform in religion

chap. I.} 1763.

was the seed-plot of democratic revolutions, had at first been attended by the triumph of absolute monarchy throughout continental Europe; where even the Catholic powers themselves grew impatient of the authority of the Pope over their temporal affairs. The Protestant king, who had just been the ally of our fathers in the Seven Years War, presented the first great example of the passage of feudal sovereignty into unlimited monarchy, resting on a standing military force. Still surrounded by danger, his inflexible and uncontrolled will stamped the impress of harshness even on his necessary policy, of tyranny on his errors of judgment, and of rapine and violence on his measures for aggrandizement. Yet Prussia, which was the favorite disciple of Luther and the child of the Reformation, while it held the sword upright, bore with every creed and set reason free. It offered a shelter to Rousseau, and called in D'Alembert and Voltaire as its guests; it set Semler to hold the Bible itself under the light of criticism; it breathed into the boldly thoughtful Lessing widest hopes for the education of the race to a universal brotherhood on earth; it gave its youth to the teachings of Immanuel Kant, who, for power of analysis and universality, was inferior to none since Aristotle. ‘An army and a treasure do not constitute a power,’ said Vergennes; but Prussia had also philosophic liberty. All freedom of mind in Germany hailed the peace of Hubertsburg as its own victory.¹ In every question of public law, Frederic, though full of respect for the rights of possession, continuing to noble birth its prescriptive posts and almost