f 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
provinc