attribute the efficiency with which not only the Encyclopédie but a host of minor revolutionary publications were circulated all over France. Frederick the Great had seen his opportunity. If I am right in my surmise that Ramsay's speech had reached the ears of Frederick, the prospect of the Encyclopédie contained therein may well have appeared to him a magnificent method for obtaining a footing in the intellectual circles of France; hence then, doubtless, an additional reason for his hasty initiation into Masonry, his summons to Voltaire, and his subsequent overtures to Diderot and d'Alembert, who, by the time the first volume of the Encyclopédie appeared in 1751, had both been made members of the Royal Academy of Prussia. In the following year Frederick offered d'Alembert the presidency of the Academy in place of Maupertuis, an offer which was refused; but in 1755 and again in 1763 d'Alembert visited Frederick in Germany and received his pension regularly from Berlin. It is therefore not surprising that when the Encyclopédie had reached the letter P, it included, in an unsigned article on Prussia, a panegyric on the virtues and the talents of the illustrious monarch who presided over the destinies of that favoured country.
The art of Frederick the Great, as of his successors on the throne of the Hohenzollerns, was to make use of every movement that could further the design of Prussian supremacy. He used the Freemasons as he used the philosophers and as he used the Jews, to carry out his great scheme--the destruction of the French monarchy