ower to declare a state of siege without the assent of
the Chambers; most speakers attempted to interpret the text of the
Prussian Constitution by precedents derived from the practice in France
and England; we find the Minister of Justice defending his action on the
ground of an event in the French Revolution, and Lothar Bucher, one of
the ablest of the Opposition, complained that not enough attention had
been paid to the procedure adopted in England for repealing the _Habeas
Corpus Act_, entirely ignoring the fact that there was no Habeas Corpus
Act in Prussia. We can easily understand how repulsive this was to a man
who, like Bismarck, wished nothing more than that his countrymen should
copy, not the details of the English Constitution, but the proud
self-reliance which would regard as impertinent an application of
foreign notions.

The chief cause for this peculiarity was the desire of the Liberal party
to attain that degree of independence and personal liberty which was
enjoyed in England or France; the easiest way to do this seemed to be to
copy their institutions. There was, however, another reason: the study
of Roman law in Germany in which they had been educated had accustomed
them to look for absolute principles of jurisprudence which might be
applied to the legislation of all countries; when, therefore, they
turned their minds to questions of politics, they looked for absolute
principles of constitutional government, on which, as on a law of
nature, their own institutions might be built up. To find these they
analysed the English Constitution, for England was the classical land of
representative government; they read its rules as they would the
institutions of a Roman Jurisconsult and used them to cast light on the
dark places of their own law. Bismarck did not share this type of
thought; his mind was rather of the English cast; he believed the old
Prussian Constitution was as much a natural growth as that of England,
and decided dark points by reference to older practice as an Englishman
would search for precedents in the history of his own country.

At that time the absolute excellence of a democratic constitution was a
dogma which few cared to dispute; it appeared to his hearers as a mere
paradox when Bismarck pointed out how little evidence there was that a
great country could prosper under the government of a Parliament elected
by an extended franchise. Strictly speaking, there was no evidence from
exper