of _"OEuvres Posthumes de Frederic II."_ (are in Tome vi.

of Preuss's Edition of OEUVRES), "Berlin, 1788;"-- above a year after Mirabeau had left.] while he sat penning those robust Essays on the Duty of LEAVE-ALONE.
"To form an idea of the general subversion," says the King, in regard to 1763, "and how great were the desolation and discouragement, you must represent to yourself Countries entirely ravaged, the very traces of the old habitations hardly discoverable; Towns, some ruined from top to bottom, others half destroyed by fire;--13,000 Houses, of which the very vestiges were gone.

No field in seed; no grain for the food of the inhabitants; 60,000 horses needed, if there was to be ploughing carried on: in the Provinces generally Half a Million Population (500,000) less than in 1756,--that is to say, upon only Four Millions and a Half, the ninth man was wanting.

Noble and Peasant had been pillaged, ransomed, foraged, eaten out by so many different Armies; nothing now left them but life and miserable rags.
"There was no credit, by trading people, even for the daily necessaries of life." And furthermore, what we were not prepared for, "No police in the Towns: to habits of equity and order had succeeded a vile greed of gain and an anarchic disorder.

The Colleges of Justice and of Finance had, by these frequent invasions of so many enemies, been reduced to inaction:" no Judge, in many places not even a Tax-gatherer: the silence of the Laws had produced in the people a taste for license; boundless appetite for gain was their main rule of action: the noble, the merchant, the farmer, the laborer, raising emulously each the price of his commodity, seemed to endeavor only for their mutual ruin.