A man who would not have risen in modern Political Circles; man unchoosable at hustings or in caucus; man forever invisible, and very unadmirable if seen, to the Able Editor and those that hang by him.

In fact, a kind of savage man, as we say; but highly interesting, if you can read dumb human worth; and of inexpressible profit to the Prussian Nation.
For the first ten years of his reign, he had a heavy, continual struggle, getting his finance and other branches of administration extricated from their strangling imbroglios of coiled nonsense, and put upon a rational footing.

His labor in these years, the first of little Fritz's life, must have been great; the pushing and pulling strong and continual.

The good plan itself, this comes not of its own accord; it is the fruit of "genius" (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all): given a huge stack of tumbled thrums, it is not in your sleep that you will find the vital centre of it, or get the first thrum by the end! And then the execution, the realizing, amid the contradiction, silent or expressed, of men and things?
Explosive violence was by no means Friedrich Wilhelm's method; the amount of slow stubborn broad-shouldered strength, in all kinds, expended by the man, strikes us as very great.

The amount of patience even, though patience is not reckoned his forte.
That of the RITTER-DIENST (Knights'-Service), for example, which is but one small item of his business, the commuting of the old feudal duty of his Landholders to do Service in Wartime, into a fixed money payment: nothing could be fairer, more clearly advantageous to both parties; and most of his "Knights" gladly accepted the proposal: yet a certain factious set of them, the Magdeburg set, stirred up by some seven or eight of their number, "hardly above seven or eight really against me," saw good to stand out; remonstrated, recalcitrated; complained in the Diet (Kaiser too happy to hear of it, that he might have a hook on Friedrich Wilhelm); and for long years that paltry matter was a provocation to him.