Moreover, the unlimited authority of the old Prussian monarchy was not, and is not, the final word of my convictions.  As to that, to be sure, this authority of the monarch constitutionally existed in the first United Diet, but accompanied by the wish and anticipation that the unlimited power of the King, without being overturned, might fix the measure of its own limitation.  Absolutism primarily demands impartiality, honesty, devotion to duty, energy, and inward humility in the ruler.  These may be present, and yet male and female favorites (in the best case the lawful wife), the monarch’s own vanity and susceptibility to flattery, will nevertheless diminish the fruits of his good intentions, inasmuch as the monarch is not omniscient and cannot have an equal understanding of all branches of his office.  As early as 1847 I was in favor of an effort to secure the possibility of public criticism of the government in parliament and in the press, in order to shelter the monarch from the danger of having blinkers put on him by women, courtiers, sycophants, and visionaries, hindering him from taking a broad view of his duties as monarch, or from avoiding and correcting his mistakes.  This conviction of mine became all the more deeply impressed upon me in proportion as I became better acquainted with Court circles, and had to defend the interest of the State from their influences and also from the opposition of a departmental patriotism.  The interests of the State alone have guided me, and it has been a calumny when publicists, even well-meaning, have accused me of having ever advocated an aristocratic system.  I have never regarded birth as a substitute for want of ability; whenever I have come forward on behalf of landed property, it has not been in the interests of proprietors of my own class, but because I see in the decline of agriculture one of the greatest dangers to our permanence as a State.  The ideal that has always floated before me has been a monarchy which should be so far controlled by an independent national representation—­according to my notion, representing classes or callings—­that monarch or parliament would not be able to alter the existing statutory position before the law separately but only communi consensus with publicity, and public criticism, by press and Diet, of all political proceedings.

Whoever has the conviction that uncontrolled Absolutism, as it was first brought upon the stage by Louis XIV., was the most fitting form of government for German subjects, must lose it after making a special study in the history of Courts, and such critical observations as I was enabled to institute at the court of Frederick William IV. (whom personally I loved and revered) in Manteuffel’s days.  The King was a religious absolutist with a divine vocation, and the ministers after Brandenburg were content as a rule if they were covered by the royal signature even when they could not have personally answered for the contents of what was signed.  I remember that on one occasion a high Court official of absolutist opinions, on hearing of the news of the royalist rising at Neuchatel, observed, with some confusion, in the presence of myself and several of his colleagues:  “That is a royalism of which nowadays one has to go very far from Court to get experience.”  Yet, as a rule, sarcasm was not a habit of this old gentleman.