ssion 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-