ails
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 o