on 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 Neuchatel, 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