who ran away from one army, went in
speculation to another, like the mercenaries in the Thirty Years' War;
indeed this changing and deserting had rough jovial attraction for
adventurers. An imprisoned deserter was, in the opinion of multitudes,
anything but an evil-doer,--we have many popular songs which express
the full sympathy of the village singer for the unfortunate, but the
happy deserter passed even for a hero, and in some popular tales, the
valiant fellow who has been compelled to help the fictitious King out
of danger, and at last marries the Princess, is a runaway soldier.

This royal soldiery was considered, in accordance with the ideas of
that period, even after the popular arming of the militia, as the
private possession of the Prince. The German Sovereigns, after the
Thirty Years' War, had, as once did the Italian condottieri, trafficked
with their military force; they had leased it to foreign powers, in
order to make money and increase their influence. Sometimes the
smallest territorial princes furnished in this way many regiments for
the service of the Emperor, of the Dutch, and of the King of France.
After the troops became more numerous, and were for the most part
supplied from the children of the soil, this abuse of the Prince's
power began gradually to strike the people with surprise. But it was
not until after the wars of Frederic II. had inspired the people with
patriotic warmth, that such appropriation became a subject of lively
discussion. And when, after 1777, Brunswick, Anspach, Waldeck, Zerbst,
and more than all Hesse-Cassel and Hanau, let out to England a number
of regiments for service against the Americans, the indignation of the
people was loudly expressed. Still it was only a lyrical complaint, but
it sounded from the Rhine to the Vistula; the remembrance of it still
lives; still does this misdeed hang like a curse upon one of the ruling
families who then, to the most criminal extent, bartered away the lives
of their subjects.

Among the German states Prussia was the one in which the tyranny of
this military system was most severe, but at the same time it was in
some respects developed with a rigid grandeur and originality which
made the Prussian army for half a century the first military power in
the world, and a model after which all the other armies of Europe were
formed.

Any one who had entered Prussia shortly before 1740, when under the
government of Frederic William I., would ha