Excerpt from The German Empire 1867-1914 and the Unity Movement, Vol. 2 of 2 If the material prosperity of the Prussian monarchy was checked between the death of this benevolent autocrat in 1786 and the issue of the Emancipatory Edicts of Stein and Harden berg, the decline must be attributed in part to the political trou bles of the time, but in a larger degree to the untoward fate which placed the destinies of the country for eleven fateful years in the hands of perhaps the weakest member of the Hohen zollern race, Frederick William II, years which saw the aban donment by the Crown of the ardent and unwearying solicitude for the nation's economic welfare which was so important a feature of the earlier strong, if arbitrary, rule. It has been shown in earlier pages how Prussia, from the second decade of last century forward, after sweeping away the fiscal barriers which prevented the free exchange of commodities within her own territories, won the secondary and minor German States, one by one, for 8. Customs Union which was intended ultimately to comprehend the whole of Germany proper. By the middle of the century this movement towards fiscal unity had made such progress that of the States comprised in the Ger manic Federation only the Mecklenburgs and the Hanseatic Cities, with Austria, remained outside. Without becoming an integral part of the Union, however, Austria concluded a twelve years' treaty with it in February, 1853, on the principle of re ciprocal preferential treatment. Within the Union customs duties were levied on the common account, and divided amongst the treaty States according to population. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.