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 up