The course of business in the two boards of Potsdam and Aachen was not very encouraging for my ambition.  I found the business assigned to me petty and tedious, and my labors in the department of suits arising from the grist tax and from the compulsory contribution to the building of the embankment at Rotzis, near Wusterhausen, have left behind in me no sentimental regrets for my sphere of work in those days.  Renouncing the ambition for an official career, I readily complied with the wishes of my parents by taking up the humdrum management of our Pomeranian estates.  I had made up my mind to live and die in the country, after attaining successes in agriculture—­perhaps in war also, if war should come.  So far as my country life left me any ambition at all, it was that of a lieutenant in the Landwehr.

The impressions that I had received in my childhood were little adapted to make a squire of me.  In Plamann’s educational establishment, conducted on the systems of Pestalozzi and Jahn, the “von” before my name was a disadvantage, so far as my childish comfort was concerned, in my intercourse with my fellow-pupils and my teachers.  Even at the high school at the Grey Friars I had to suffer, as regards individual teachers, from that hatred of nobility which had clung to the greater part of the educated bourgeoisie as a reminiscence of the days before 1806.  But even the aggressive tendency which occasionally appeared in bourgeois circles never gave me any inducement to advance in the opposite direction.  My father was free from aristocratic prejudices, and his inward sense of equality had been modified, if at all, by his youthful impressions as an officer, but in no way by any over-estimate of inherited rank.  My mother was the daughter of Mencken, Privy Councillor to Frederick the Great, Frederick William II., and Frederick William III., who sprang from a family of Leipzig professors, and was accounted in those days a Liberal.  The later generations of the Menckens—­those immediately preceding me—­had found their way to Prussia in the Foreign Office and about the Court.  Baron von Stein has quoted my grandfather Mencken as an honest, strongly Liberal official.  Under these circumstances, the views which I imbibed with my mother’s milk were Liberal rather than reactionary; and, if my mother had lived to see my ministerial activity, she would scarcely have been in accord with its direction, even though she would have experienced great joy in the external results of my official career.  She had grown up in bureaucratic and court circles; Frederick William IV. spoke of her as “Mienchen,” in memory of childish games.  I can therefore declare it an unjust estimate of my views in my younger years, when “the prejudices of my rank” are thrown in my teeth and it is maintained that a recollection of the privileges of the nobility has been the starting-point of my domestic policy.