r, Europe hears but
little in proportion to their worth; their reputation suffers partly by
the virtue, partly by the vice, of the people to whom they belong; for the
people in general are not a noise-making people--this is the virtue--and
the German government--this is the vice--are timid and eschew publicity.
The Baron von Stein was one of these hot, glowing, impetuous, volcanic
Germans--a political Luther, as he has most justly been called; but he had
the misfortune to belong to a people who never dreamed of conquering any
thing except transcendental ideas in the region of the moon, and beyond
it; and he served a good, pious, "decent" master, the late Frederick
William III., who, when he was merry, (like a good Christian,) was more
inclined to sing psalms than to crack cannons, and prayed heaven every
morning that he might die a good man, rather than live a great king. Then,
in addition to this, comes the great and authoritative extinguisher of all
German political reputation, the CENSORSHIP--a "_monstrum horrendum
ingens_," and "_cui lumen ademptum_" truly; for it will neither see
itself, nor allow others having eyes to see for it. An honest and thorough
life of Baron Stein is, in fact, in the present slavish state of the
Prussian political press, an impossibility; for the sturdy old Freiherr
was a declared enemy of the whole race of red-tapists, and other officials
of the quill, who, since the peace, have maintained a practical monopoly
of public business in Prussia, and who, in fact, keep the monarch's
conscience, and tie his hands, much more effectually than chancellor or
parliament does in Great Britain. It is only therefore, in the way of
scattered notices, drawn from various sources, that a knowledge of such a
German statesman as Stein can be obtained; and these sources also, from
the same evil influence of the censorship, are necessarily very imperfect;
the men who knew Stein, and were in possession of correspondence and other
papers that might illustrate his life, are all _marked_ men; to the
government of the bureaucracy _suspected_ men--men who had, many of them,
like the Baron himself, been, immediately after the peace, subjected to
the most odious kinds of moral, and sometimes corporeal, persecution.
Their publications, of course, were watched with peculiar jealousy by the
Argus-eyed censorship; and we may always be sure that what they do tell us
is only the half of what they might have told us, had they da