ONE:In the ranks all of the army were equally entitled to distinction. Promotion was conferred upon merit, not upon the accident of birth. This principle, which was entirely ignored in the other European despotisms, probably contributed to the success of Frederick��s armies. A Hanoverian count wrote to him, soliciting a high position in the army for his son, in favor of his exalted birth. Frederick dictated the following reply:

ONE:��At last, about nine, somebody brought word that my brother had changed his route and gone to Culmbach, there to stay overnight. I was for setting out thither. Culmbach is twenty miles from Berneck. But the roads are frightful, and full of precipices. Every body rose in opposition. And whether I would or not they put me into the carriage for Himmelkron, which is only about ten miles off. We had like to have got drowned on the road, the waters were so swollen. The horses could not cross but by swimming.Thus ended in clouds, darkness, and woe the third campaign of the Seven Years�� War. The winter was employed by both parties in preparing for a renewal of the struggle. As the spring opened the allies had in the field such a military array as Europe had never seen before. Three hundred thousand men extended in a cordon of posts from the Giant Mountains, near the borders of Silesia, to the ocean. In the north, also, Russia had accumulated her vast armies for vigorous co-operation with the southern troops. All the leading Continental powers��France, Austria, Russia, Sweden, and the states of the German Empire��were combined against Prussia. England alone was the inefficient ally of Frederick. Small sums of money were loaned him from the British cabinet; and the court of St. James, hostile in heart to the Prussian king, co-operated with him only so far as was deemed essential for the promotion of British interests.

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Frederick did what he could to divert the attention of the court at Reinsberg by multiplying gayeties of every kind. There was feasting, and music, and dancing, and theatric exhibitions, often continuing until four o��clock in the morning. In the mean time couriers were coming and going. Troops were moving. Provisions and the materiel of war were accumulating. Anxious embassadors watched every movement of the king��s hand, weighed every word which escaped his lips, and tried every adroit measure to elicit from him his secret. The Danish minister, Pr?torius, wrote to his court from Berlin:

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The king then rattled on without waiting for replies: ��How do you like your Cüstrin life? Do you still have as much aversion to Wusterhausen, and to wearing your shroud, as you called your uniform? Likely enough my company does not suit you. I have no French manners, and can not bring out witty sayings in the coxcomb way; and I truly consider all that as a thing to be thrown to the dogs. I am a German prince, and mean to live and die in that character. But you can now say what you have got by your caprices and obstinate heart, hating every thing that I liked, and if I distinguished any one, despising him. If an officer was put in arrest, you took to lamenting about him. Your real friends, who intended your good, you hated and calumniated. Those who flattered you and encouraged your bad purpose you caressed. You see what that has come to. In Berlin, in all Prussia, for some time back, nobody asks after you, whether you are in the world or not. And were it not that one or the other coming from Cüstrin reports you as playing tennis or wearing French hair-bags, nobody would know whether you were dead, or alive.��The unhappy Crown Prince was in an agony of despair. Again and again he frantically exclaimed, ��In the name of God, I beg you to stop the execution till I write to the king! I am ready to renounce all my rights to the crown if he will pardon Katte!�� As the condemned was led by the window to ascend the scaffold, Fritz cried out to him, in anguish as intense as a generous heart can endure, ��Pardon me, my dear Katte, pardon me! Oh that this should be what I have done for you!��