stantial grievances to vex him nearer home; and, next to the feeble
machinery of the diet at Frankfort, that which hurt him most was the
political reaction at Berlin that commenced immediately after the peace,
and threatened to undo that great social work which he had so boldly begun
in 1808. However much a Prussian in his political sympathies, Stein was
essentially an Englishman in his principles; the tendency of all his
measures, as they were introduced by himself, or followed out by
Hardenberg, was to temper the military and bureaucratic despotism of
Frederick the Great by a wise admixture of popular influence; he wished a
"constitution" after the English model, as much as circumstances might
permit, not in form merely but in deed; he was not afraid of free
discussion among a well-educated people like the Germans, and was too
noble-minded to imitate, in Berlin or Maine, the spy-system on which
Napoleon had based his immoral monarchy of physical force at Paris. It was
not to be expected, however, that in a country hitherto governed solely by
the Court and by the Bureau, these English views of Stein should not have
met with sturdy opposition; in fact it was mainly by help of the battle of
Jena, that he was enabled to do what he did for creating a Prussian PEOPLE
in 1808. Now that terrible shock had passed; and the host of defeated
bureaucratists and court minions, after the battle for the liberation of
the fatherland had been fought by others, now began to crown into their
old places, and to occupy the ears of a king more honest to promise what
was right than strong to do it. Accordingly, instead of "freedom of the
press" and "constitution" in Prussia, we have heard no sound, since the
year 1815, but that of prohibited books, imaginary conspiracies of
beer-inspired Burschen, deposed professors, and banished old Luther; and
every thing, in short, except what the pious old Frederick William III.
promised, or was made to appear to promise, with such gracious, popular,
and constitutional phrases at Vienna, in the year 1815. Whether the
military and bureaucratic despotism of Germany may not, after all, be a
better system of government on the whole than our strange system of local
and corporate influence of all sorts, of fermenting acids and alkalis,
here is a question which some persons of a speculative disposition may
consider open enough; but that the supreme power having once pledged
itself to give a people a free constitut