And it was not the least merit of that policy that it constantly, and with clear understanding, laboured towards a double end: to create a flourishing industry by state initiative and political means, and then, as quickly and as completely as possible, to set it on its own feet, and create thriving private businesses, - and so render itself superfluous. Similarly, in a place like Krefeld, where the favouring conditions afforded by the neighbourhood of the Dutch created a considerable industry without protective tariff or subsidy or regulation, the king did not think of state intervention: the most he did was to support the practical monopoly of the von der Leyen brothers, because he saw that this great house was capable of elevating and guiding the whole industry in an exemplary fashion. Moreover, his administrative wisdom, running not along the lines of rigid schemes, but in accordance with the men and circumstances before him, shewed itself precisely in this contemporary application of such divergent systems of industrial policy; in Berlin the most extreme state control and in Krefeld complete laissez-faire.
The truth is, he himself, in his innermost nature, was just as much the philosophical disciple of the individualistic enlightenment (Aufklarung) of the period as the last great representative of princely absolutism. Under him the Prussian state was based as much on legal security and on freedom of thought and individual opinion as upon discipline, obedience, and subordination. Had he not combined these rare qualities in himself, he had not been the great king, and on his death the Swabian peasant would not have asked the naive question "Then, who is to govern the world?"The yelping curs, the men astride of principles, who did not understand him when he died, understand him and his policy no better now. They will still less understand the great problem of the creation of states and national economies. It lies in this:
that as civilisation advances, the state and the national economy diverge more and more the one from the other, each a separate circle with its own organs; and yet that this separation must again constantly make way for a unifying guidance, a growing interaction, a harmonious joint-movement. And the secret of great times and great men consists in their taking account of this twofold development; in their leaving individuals to form themselves, in their allowing free play to individual life in its various shapes, and yet in their being able to bring the newly emerging as well as the old forces into the service of the whole.
As states get larger, as social relations become more complicated, it will be increasingly difficult to reach this ideal: - that economic forces, while living for themselves should yet entirely serve the state, and that the state, pursuing its own ends, should at the same time place all its might and all its members in the true service of the national economy. The Prussian state, - in its own fashion and after the manner of the eighteenth century, - more nearly arrived at this ideal than any of the other states of the time. We may well ask whether we to-day, under conditions so much more difficult, have approached it more nearly.
NOTES:
1. Something of this kind survived even in the towns. Thus, according to a rule of 1204, the men of Lubbeck are not passim et sine necessitate to sell their ships and build new ones at home, nor are they to export wood for sale -- because of their right to cut wood. Lub. Urkundenbuch, p. 17, Urk. xii.
