402 MAEIA THERESA. character. She employed her power to encourage agri culture and reanimate trade. She removed tariffs and other barbarous restrictions from the commerce with foreign nations. She caused new and better roads to ba constructed. She decorated her capital with grand and useful edifices. Directly through her encouragement, her subjects began to manufacture woolen cloths, silk, and porcelain, which remain to this day important branches of the national industry. Not content with these merely material works, she founded a University, several colleges, schools of architecture and design, and three observato- ries. She took great pains to make her subjects acquainted with improved methods of healing the sick. For the old soldiers who had shed their blood in her cause, she erected hospitals and asylums. She pensioned the widows and dowered the daughters of officers who had fallen in war. Above all, in her own life, and in the government and education of her family, she set an example of purity, wisdom, and devotion, which every mother in the world could study with profit. She did not think that the labors of governing an empire exempted her from the ordinary responsibilities of life. She became the mother of ten children, four sons and six daughters, all of whom survived her, and all of them, I believe, did honor to the character of their mother. But she could not reconcile herself to the loss of her darling Silesia. Always looking forward to the time when she should be in a position to recover that province, she strengthened and disciplined her army continually, and founded military schools where officers could be trained capable of coping with the veterans of the Prus- sian king. At the same time she prepared the way, by able diplomacy, to combine the powers of Europe against the ambitious Prussians. She stooped even to flatter the mistress of the King of France, Madame de Pompadour,
