Excerpt from A Short History of Germany, Vol. 2

Rending complaints often found their way to Berlin. A formal request was once sent that Frederick William would consider, not his own necessities, but the bare, actual possibilities of the province. If the elector was inexorable to such appeals, it was not from lack of sympathy. The founder of the greatness of the Prussian state knew well from personal experience what poverty and hardship meant. The revenues of the Mark, when he had first taken it in hand, amounted to a paltry thirty thou sand thalers, while for the province of Cleves, there was a yearly deficit of ten thousand. During the later years of the Thirty Years' far the court had frequently been obliged to borrow sums as low as fifteen guldens, that there might be something to eat upon the table. There is practically nothing left to pawn, wrote Schwerin, the master of the household, after the swedish-polish lvar. That same war had cost some eight million thalers, which the elector was obliged to wring from his reluctant people. Almost daily in Berlin one saw wagons passing through the streets filled with the goods that had been seized for unpaid taxes, and followed by the unfortunate owners, weeping and wringing their hands.

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