though only a few months more than twenty years old, to undertake the
attempt at a reconciliation between an agitated couple: a matter
crowned, according to my view, with a certain ecclesiastical and moral
"nimbus," with which in my state of mind I did not feel able to cope.
I found Prätorius in the irritable mood of an old man awakened at an
untimely moment, who had besides all the aversion of an old bureaucrat
to a young man of birth. He said, with a contemptuous smile, "It is
very annoying, Herr _Referendarius_, when a man can do nothing for
himself; I will show you how to do it." I returned with him into the
judge's room. The case was one in which the husband wanted a divorce
and the wife not. The husband accused her of adultery; the wife,
tearful and declamatory, asserted her innocence; and, despite all
manner of ill-treatment from the man, wanted to remain with him.
Prätorius, with his peculiar clicking lisp, thus addressed the woman:
"But, my good woman, don't be so stupid. What good will it do you?
When you get home, your husband will give you a jacketing until you
can stand no more. Come now, simply say 'yes,' and then you will be
quit of the sot." To which the wife, crying hysterically, replied: "I
am an honest woman! I will not have that indignity put upon me! I
don't want to be divorced!" After manifold retorts and rejoinders in
this tone, Prätorius turned to me with the words: "As she will not
listen to reason, write as follows, Herr _Referendarius_," and
dictated to me some words which, owing to the deep impression they
made upon me, I remember to this day. "Inasmuch as the attempt at
reconciliation has been made, and arguments drawn from the sphere of
religion and morality have proved fruitless, further proceedings were
taken as follows." My chief then rose and said, "Now, you see how it
is done, and in future leave me in peace about such things." I
accompanied him to the door, and went on with the case. The Divorce
Court stage of my career lasted, so far as I can remember, from four
to six weeks; a reconciliation case never came before me again. There
was a certain necessity for the ordinance respecting proceedings in
divorce cases, to which Frederick William IV. was obliged to confine
himself after his attempts to introduce a _law_ for the substantial
alteration of the Marriage Law had foundered upon the opposition of
the Council of State. With regard to this matter it may be mentioned
that, as a result of this ordinance, the Attorney-General was first
introduced into those provinces in which the old Prussian common law
prevailed as _defensor matrimonii_, and to prevent collusion between
the parties.
More inviting was the subsequent stage of petty cases, where the
untrained young jurist at least acquired practice in listening to
pleadings and examining witnesses, but where more use was made of him
as a drudge than was met by the resulting benefit to his instruction.
The locality and the procedure partook somewhat of the restless bustle
of a railway manager's work. The space in which the leading _Rath_ and
the three or four _Auscultators_ sat with their backs to the public
was surrounded by a wooden screen, and round about the four-cornered
recess formed thereby surged an ever-changing and more or less noisy
mob of parties to the suits.
My impression of institutions and persons was not essentially modified
when I had been transferred to the Administration. In order to
abbreviate the détour to diplomacy, I applied to a Rhenish government,
that of Aachen, where the course could be gone through in two years,
whereas in the "old" provinces at least three years were required.[29]
I can well imagine that in making the appointments to the Rhenish
Governing Board in 1816 the same procedure was adopted as at the
organization of Elsass-Lothringen in 1871. The authorities who had to
contribute a portion of their staff would not be likely to respond to
the call of state requirements by putting their best foot foremost to
accomplish the difficult task of assimilating a newly acquired
population, but would have chosen those members of their offices whose
departure was desired by their superiors or wished by themselves; in
the board were to be found former secretaries of prefectures and other
relics of the French administration. The _personnel_ did not all
correspond to the ideal which floated unwarrantably enough before my
eyes at twenty-one, and still less was this the case with the details
of the current business. I recollect that, what with the many
differences of opinion between officials and governed, or with
internal differences of opinion among each of these two categories,
whose polemics for many years considerably swelled the bulk of the
records, my habitual impression was, "Well, yes, that is _one_ way of
doing it"; and that questions, the decision of which one way or the
other was not worth the paper wasted upon them, created a mass of
business which a single prefect could have disposed of with the fourth
part of the energy bestowed upon them. Nevertheless, except for the
subordinate officials, the day's work was slight; as regards heads of
departments especially, a mere sinecure.
I quitted Aachen with a very poor opinion of our bureaucracy, in
detail and collectively, with the exception of the gifted President,
Count Arnim-Boitzenburg. My opinion of the detail became more
favorable owing to my next subsequent experience in the government at
Potsdam, to which I got transferred in the year 1837; because there,
unlike the arrangement in other provinces, the indirect taxes were at
the disposal of the government, and it was just these that were
important to me if I wanted to make customs-policy the basis of my
future.
The members of the board made a better impression upon me than those
at Aachen; but yet, taking them as a whole, it was an impression of
pigtail and periwig, in which category my youthful presumption also
placed the paternal dignified President-in-Chief, von Bassewitz; while
the President of the Aachen Government, Count Arnim, wore the generic
wig of the state service, it is true, but no intellectual pigtail.
When therefore I quitted the service of the State for a country life,
I imported into the relations which as a landed proprietor I had with
the officials an opinion, which I now see to have been too mean, of
the value of our bureaucracy, and perhaps too great an inclination to
criticize them. I remember that as substitute provincial president I
had to give my verdict on a plan for abolishing the election of those
officials; I expressed myself to the effect that the bureaucracy, as
it ascended from the provincial president, sank in the general esteem;
it had preserved it only in the person of the provincial president,
who wore a Janus head, one face turned towards the bureaucracy, the
other towards the country.
The tendency to interference in the most various relations of life
was, under the paternal government of those days, perhaps greater than
now; but the instruments of such interference were less numerous, and,
as regards culture and breeding, stood much higher than do some of
those of today. The officials of the right worshipful royal Prussian
government were honest, well-read and well-bred officials; but their
benevolent activity did not always meet with recognition, because from
want of local experience they went to pieces on matters of detail, in
regard to which the views of the learned citizen at the green table
were not always superior to the healthy common-sense criticism of the
peasant intelligence. The members of the Governing Boards had in those
days _multa_, not _multum_, to do; and the lack of higher duties
resulted in their not finding a sufficient quantity of important
business, and led them in their zeal for duty to go beyond the needs
of the governed, into a tendency to over-regulation--in a word, into
what the Swiss calls _Befehlerle_.[30] To glance at a comparison with
present conditions, it had been hoped that the state authorities would
have been relieved of business and of officials by the introduction of
the local self-government of today; but, on the contrary, the number
of the officials and their load of business have been very
considerably increased by correspondence, and friction with the
machinery of self-government, from the provincial councillor down to
the rural parish administration. Sooner or later the flaw must be
reached, and we shall be crushed by the burden of clerkdom, especially
in the subordinate bureaucracy.
Moreover, bureaucratic pressure upon private life is intensified by the
mode in which self-government works in practice and encroaches more
sharply than before on the rural parishes. Formerly the provincial
president, who stood in as close relations with the people as with the
State, formed the lowest step in the State bureaucracy. Below him were
local authorities, who were no doubt subject to control, but not in the
same measure as nowadays to the disciplinary powers of the district, or
the ministerial, bureaucracy. The rural population enjoys today, by
virtue of the measure of self-government conceded to it, an autonomy,
not perhaps similar to that which the towns had long ago; but it has
received, in the shape of the official commissioner, a chief who is kept
in disciplinary check by superior instructions proceeding from the
provincial resident, under the threat of penalties, and compelled to
burden his fellow-citizens in his district with lists, notifications,
and inquisitions as the political hierarchy thinks good. The governed
_contribuens plebs_ no longer possess, in the court of the provincial
president, that guarantee against blundering encroachment which, at an
earlier period was to be found in the circumstance that people resident
in the district who became provincial presidents as a rule resolved to
remain so in their own districts all their life long, and sympathized
with the joys and sorrows of the district. Today the post of provincial
president is the lowest step in the ladder of the higher administration,
sought after by young "assessors" who have a justifiable ambition to
make a career. To obtain it they have more need of ministerial favor
than of the goodwill of the local population, and they attempt to win
this favor by conspicuous zeal, and by "taking it out of" the official
commissioners of the so-called local administration, or by carrying out
valueless bureaucratic experiments. Therein lies for the most part the
inducement to overburden their subordinates in the local self-government
system. Thus self-government means the aggravation of bureaucracy,
increase in the number of officials, and of their powers and interference
in private life.
It is only human nature to be more keenly sensitive to the thorns than
to the roses of every institution, and that the thorns should irritate
one against the existing state of things. The old government
officials, when they came into direct contact with the governed
population, showed themselves to be pedantic, and estranged from the
practical working of life by their occupation at the green table; but
they left behind them the impression of toiling honesty and
conscientiously for justice. The same thing cannot be assumed in all
their degrees of the wheels in the machine of the self-government of
today in those country districts where the parties stand in acute
opposition to each other; goodwill towards political friends, frame
of mind as regards opponents, readily become a hindrance to the
impartial maintenance of institutions. According to my experiences in
earlier and more recent times, I should, for the rest, not like to
allow impartiality, when comparing judicial and administrative
decisions, to the former alone, not at least in every instance. On the
contrary, I have preserved an impression that judges of small local
courts succumb more easily to strong party influences than do
administrative officials; nor need we invent any psychological reason
for the fact that, given equal culture, the latter should _a priori_
be considered less just and conscientious in their official decisions
than the former. But I certainly do assume that official decisions do
not gain in honesty and moderation by being arrived at collectively;
for apart from the fact that, in the case of voting by majority,
arithmetic and chance take the place of logical reasoning, that
feeling of personal responsibility, in which lies the essential
guarantee for the conscientiousness of the decision, is lost directly
it comes about by means of anonymous majorities.
The course of business in the two boards of Potsdam and Aachen was not
very encouraging for my ambition. I found the business assigned to
me petty and tedious, and my labors in the department of suits
arising from the grist tax and from the compulsory contribution to
the building of the embankment at Rotzis, near Wusterhausen, have
left behind in me no sentimental regrets for my sphere of work in
those days. Renouncing the ambition for an official career, I
readily complied with the wishes of my parents by taking up the
humdrum management of our Pomeranian estates. I had made up my
mind to live and die in the country, after attaining successes in
agriculture--perhaps in war also, if war should come. So far as my
country life left me any ambition at all, it was that of a lieutenant
in the Landwehr.
The impressions that I had received in my childhood were little
adapted to make a squire of me. In Plamann's educational
establishment, conducted on the systems of Pestalozzi and Jahn, the
"von" before my name was a disadvantage, so far as my childish comfort
was concerned, in my intercourse with my fellow-pupils and my
teachers. Even at the high school at the Grey Friars I had to suffer,
as regards individual teachers, from that hatred of nobility which had
clung to the greater part of the educated _bourgeoisie_ as a
reminiscence of the days before 1806. But even the aggressive tendency
which occasionally appeared in _bourgeois_ circles never gave me any
inducement to advance in the opposite direction. My father was free
from aristocratic prejudices, and his inward sense of equality had
been modified, if at all, by his youthful impressions as an officer,
but in no way by any over-estimate of inherited rank. My mother was
the daughter of Mencken, Privy Councillor to Frederick the Great,
Frederick William II., and Frederick William III., who sprang from a
family of Leipzig professors, and was accounted in those days a
Liberal. The later generations of the Menckens--those immediately
preceding me--had found their way to Prussia in the Foreign Office and
about the Court. Baron von Stein has quoted my grandfather Mencken as
an honest, strongly Liberal official. Under these circumstances, the
views which I imbibed with my mother's milk were Liberal rather than
reactionary; and, if my mother had lived to see my ministerial
activity, she would scarcely have been in accord with its direction,
even though she would have experienced great joy in the external
results of my official career. She had grown up in bureaucratic and
court circles; Frederick William IV. spoke of her as "Mienchen," in
memory of childish games. I can therefore declare it an unjust
estimate of my views in my younger years, when "the prejudices of my
rank" are thrown in my teeth and it is maintained that a recollection
of the privileges of the nobility has been the starting-point of my
domestic policy.
Moreover, the unlimited authority of the old Prussian monarchy was
not, and is not, the final word of my convictions. As to that, to be
sure, this authority of the monarch constitutionally existed in the
first United Diet, but accompanied by the wish and anticipation that
the unlimited power of the King, without being overturned, might fix
the measure of its own limitation. Absolutism primarily demands
impartiality, honesty, devotion to duty, energy, and inward humility
in the ruler. These may be present, and yet male and female favorites
(in the best case the lawful wife), the monarch's own vanity and
susceptibility to flattery, will nevertheless diminish the fruits of
his good intentions, inasmuch as the monarch is not omniscient and
cannot have an equal understanding of all branches of his office. As
early as 1847 I was in favor of an effort to secure the possibility of
public criticism of the government in parliament and in the press, in
order to shelter the monarch from the danger of having blinkers put on
him by women, courtiers, sycophants, and visionaries, hindering him
from taking a broad view of his duties as monarch, or from avoiding
and correcting his mistakes. This conviction of mine became all the
more deeply impressed upon me in proportion as I became better
acquainted with Court circles, and had to defend the interest of the
State from their influences and also from the opposition of a
departmental patriotism. The interests of the State alone have guided
me, and it has been a calumny when publicists, even well-meaning, have
accused me of having ever advocated an aristocratic system. I have
never regarded birth as a substitute for want of ability; whenever I
have come forward on behalf of landed property, it has not been in the
interests of proprietors of my own class, but because I see in the
decline of agriculture one of the greatest dangers to our permanence
as a State. The ideal that has always floated before me has been a
monarchy which should be so far controlled by an independent national
representation--according to my notion, representing classes or
callings--that monarch or parliament would not be able to alter
the existing statutory position before the law _separately_ but only
_communi consensus_ with publicity, and public criticism, by press and
Diet, of all political proceedings.
Whoever has the conviction that uncontrolled Absolutism, as it was
first brought upon the stage by Louis XIV., was the most fitting form
of government for German subjects, must lose it after making a special
study in the history of Courts, and such critical observations as I
was enabled to institute at the court of Frederick William IV. (whom
personally I loved and revered) in Manteuffel's days. The King was a
religious absolutist with a divine vocation, and the ministers after
Brandenburg were content as a rule if they were covered by the royal
signature even when they could not have personally answered for the
contents of what was signed. I remember that on one occasion a high
Court official of absolutist opinions, on hearing of the news of the
royalist rising at Neuchâtel, observed, with some confusion, in the
presence of myself and several of his colleagues: "That is a royalism
of which nowadays one has to go very far from Court to get
experience." Yet, as a rule, sarcasm was not a habit of this old
gentleman.
Observations which I made in the country as to the venality and
chicanery of the "district sergeants" and other subordinate officials,
and petty conflicts which I had with the government in Stettin as
deputy of the "Circle" and deputy for the provincial president,
increased my aversion to the rule of the bureaucracy. I may mention
one of these conflicts. While I was representing the President, then
on leave, I received an order from the government to compel the patron
of Külz, that was myself, to undertake certain burdens. I put the
order aside, meaning to give it to the president on his return, was
repeatedly worried about it, and fined a thaler, to be forwarded
through the post. I now drew up a statement, in which I figured as
having appeared, first of all as representative of the _Landrath_,
and secondly as patron of Külz. The party cited made the prescribed
representations to himself in his capacity as No. 1, and then
proceeded in his capacity of No. 2 to set forth the ground on which he
had to decline the application; after which the statement was approved
and subscribed by him in his double capacity. The government
understood a joke, and ordered the fine to be refunded. In other
cases, things resulted in less pleasant heckling. I had a critical
disposition, and was consequently liberal, in the sense in which the
word was then used among landed proprietors to imply discontent with
the bureaucracy, the majority of whom on their side were men more
liberal than myself, though in another sense.
I again slipped off the rails of my parliamentary liberal tendencies,
with regard to which I found little understanding or sympathy
in Pomerania, but which in Schönhausen met with the acquiescence
of men in my own district, like Count Wartensleben of Karow,
Schierstädt-Dahlen, and others (the same men of whom some were among
the party of Church patrons in the New Era subsequently condemned).
This was the result of the style, to me unsympathetic, in which the
opposition was conducted in the first United Diet, to which I was
summoned, only for the last six weeks of the session, as substitute
for Deputy von Brauchitsch, who was laid up with illness. The speeches
of the East Prussians, Saucken-Tarputschen and Alfred Auerswald, the
sentimentality of Beckerath, the Gallo-Rhenish liberalism of Heydt and
Mevissen, and the boisterous violence of Vincke's speeches, disgusted
me; and even at this date when I read the proceedings they give me the
impression of imported phrases made to pattern. I felt that the King
was on the right track, and could claim to be allowed time, and not be
hurried in his development.
I came into conflict with the Opposition the first time I made a
longer speech than usual, on May 17, 1847, when I combatted the legend
that the Prussians had gone to war in 1813 to get a constitution, and
gave free expression to my natural indignation at the idea that
foreign domination was in itself no adequate reason for fighting.[31]
It appeared to me undignified that the nation, as a set-off to its
having freed itself, should hand in to the King an account payable in
the paragraphs of a constitution. My performance produced a storm. I
remained in the tribune turning over the leaves of a newspaper which
lay there, and then, when the commotion had subsided, I finished my
speech.
At the Court festivities, which took place during the session of the
United Diet, I was avoided in a marked manner both by the King and the
Princess of Prussia, though for different reasons: by the latter
because I was neither Liberal nor popular; by the former for a reason
which only became clear to me later. When, on the reception of the
deputies, he avoided speaking to me--when, in the Court circle, after
speaking to every one in turn, he broke off immediately he came to me,
turned his back, or strolled away across the room--I considered myself
justified in supposing that my attitude as a Royalist Hotspur had
exceeded the limits which the King had fixed for himself. Only some
months later, when I reached Venice on my honeymoon, did I discover
that this explanation was incorrect. The King, who had recognized me
in the theatre, commanded me on the following day to an audience and
to dinner; and so unexpected was this to me that my light travelling
luggage and the incapacity of the local tailor did not admit of my
appearing in correct costume. My reception was so kindly, and the
conversation, even on political subjects, of such a nature as to
enable me to infer that my attitude in the Diet met with his
encouraging approval. The King commanded me to call upon him in the
course of the winter, and I did so. Both on this occasion at smaller
dinners at the palace I became persuaded that I stood high in the
favor of both the King and the Queen, and that the former, in avoiding
speaking to me in public, at the time of the session of the Diet, did
not mean to criticize my political conduct, but at the time did not want
to let others see his approval of me.
* * * * *
II
VISIT TO PARIS
In the summer of 1855 Count Hatzfeldt, our ambassador in Paris,
invited me to visit the Industrial Exhibition;[32] he still shared the
belief then existent in diplomatic circles that I was very soon to be
Manteuffel's successor at the Foreign Office. Although the King had
entertained such an idea on and off, it was already then known in the
innermost Court circles that a change had taken place. Count William
Redern, whom I met in Paris, told me that the ambassadors continued to
believe I was destined to be made a minister and that he himself had
also believed this; but that the King had changed his mind--of further
details he was ignorant. Doubtless since Rügen.
August 15, Napoleon's day, was celebrated among other ways by a
procession of Russian prisoners through the streets. On the 19th the
Queen of England made her entry, and on August 25 a State ball was
given in her honor at Versailles at which I was presented to her and
to Prince Albert.
The Prince, handsome and cool in his black uniform, conversed with
me courteously, but in his manner there was a kind of malevolent
curiosity from which I concluded that my anti-occidental influence
upon the King was not unknown to him. In accordance with the mode
of thought peculiar to him, he sought for the motives of my conduct not
where they really lay, that is, in the anxiety to keep my country
independent of foreign influences--influences which found a fertile soil
in our narrow-minded reverence for England and fear of France--and in
the desire to hold ourselves aloof from a war which we should not have
carried on in our own interests but in dependence upon Austrian and
English policy.
In the eyes of the Prince--though I of course did not gather this from
the momentary impression made during my presentation, but from
ulterior acquaintance with facts and documents--I was a reactionary
party man who took up sides for Russia in order to further an
Absolutist and "Junker" policy. It was not to be wondered at that this
view of the Prince's and of the then partisans of the Duke of Coburg
had descended to the Prince's daughter, who shortly after became our
Crown Princess.