ut property, by mere
bureaucratists--a system which will last so long as it can
last--'_Das geht so lange es geht!_' These four words contain the
soul of our and suchlike spiritless (_geistlos_) government
machines:--in the first place salaried--and this implies a tendency
to maintain and to multiply the number of salaried officials; then
_book-learned_--that is, living in the world of the dead letter, and
not in the actual world; _without interest_--for these men stand in
no connexion with any class of the citizens, which are the mass of
the state; they are a peculiar caste, these men of the quill, ("_die
Schreiberkaste_;") lastly, _without property_--this implies that they
stand unmoved by all changes that affect property, in sunshine or in
rain, with taxes high or low, with old chartered rights maintained or
destroyed, with independent peasants or a rabble of mere journeymen,
with a dependence of the peasants on the proprietors, or of all on
the Jews and the bankers--'tis all one to the bureaucracy. They draw
their salary from the public purse, and write--write--write
on--secretly--silently--invisibly with shut
doors--unknown--unnoticed--unnamed--and bring up their children after
them, to be what their fathers were--very serviceable
writing-machines.

"Our machinery--the old military machinery--I saw fall on the 14th
October 1806; possibly the machinery of the desk and the quill and
the red tape has a 14th of October already doomed for it in Heaven."

These are serious words; and though Stein was one of those intense and
strongly accentuating minds that never could state a truth without
overstating it, (as Martin Luther also was continually doing,) they are
not wise who would treat the hard blows from the cudgel of such a man as
if they were puffs and whiffs of angry smoke from some wrathful Heine, or
other furious poetical politician in Paris. Stein was the most practical
of men; he had lived all his life amid the details of practice; and, like
all practical men, in the midst of his violence knew how to preserve
certain sobriety and moderation, without which no such thing as governing
is possible. There is nothing, in our opinion, that any King of Prussia
could do better than seriously to ponder the passage we have just quoted,
and also the few short sentences that follow:--

Nassau, Sept. 29, 18