There is an honest bacon-and-greens conscience in the man; almost the one conscience you can find in any royal man of that day.

Promptly, without tremulous counting of costs, he always starts up, solid as oak, on the occurrence of such a thing, and says, "That is unjust; contrary to the Treaty of Westphalia; you will have to put down that!"-- And if words avail not, his plan is always the same: Clap a similar thumbscrew, pressure equitably calculated, on the Catholics of Prussia; these can complain to their Popes and Jesuit Dignitaries: these are under thumbscrew till the Protestant pressure be removed.

Which always did rectify the matter in a little time.

One other of these instances, that of the Salzburg Protestants, the last such instance, as this of Heidelberg was the first, will by and by claim notice from us.
It is very observable, how Friedrich Wilhelm, hating quarrels, was ever ready to turn out for quarrel on such an occasion; though otherwise conspicuously a King who stayed well at home, looking after his own affairs; meddling with no neighbor that would be at peace with him.

This properly is Friedrich Wilhelm's "sphere of political activity" among his contemporaries; this small quasi-domestic sphere, of forbidding injury to Protestants.