importance. The tendency in our government has been strongly in the direction of bureaucracy, each department, to use one of Mr. Lincoln's sayings concerning them, “running its own machine," with little or no attempt at harmony or cooperation. Indeed, what difference does it make whether the Secretary of State or Postmaster-General agrees with or dissents from the financial policy of the Treasury Department? The agreement or disagreement can scarcely be felt, except in casual conversations those gentlemen may have with members of Congress in their leisure hours. There is no legitimate and regular method provided by which the Cabinet shall exert its influence as a whole, unless it be supposed that the annual message of the President furnishes such a channel of influence. But no one familiar with our public affairs for the past dozen years will pretend that the message has any such significance, or that if it had, its weight with Congress has borne any definite proportion to the power of enforcing a policy by wielding the patronage. Let the Cabinet, however, be placed in the eyes of the public, where they must express their agreements or their differences upon matters of public importance, and, from the very necessity of the case, they will become at once a compact and thoroughly organized body, who can only be selected with a view to their known agreement on general policy and their special fitness to be its representatives in their several departments. No doubt this would result in their being more uniformly chosen from among men of experience upon the floor of either house; but, with the elevating influence of a thorough reform of the civil service, and the devotion of our rulers' time to statesmanship instead of office-jobbing, we may expect to find a congressional career growing more attractive to a large class of our best men who have proverbially avoided it; and there would be much less objection to making Congress the common route to high administrative employment.

With great hesitation, another and final advantage of such a change is submitted, which we may not be permitted wholly to overlook. As the Cabinet would be before the country, where their acts, opinions, and views could not be concealed, Cabinet changes, like ministerial crises in other constitutional governments, would carry with them their own explanation, and be

freed from the degrading gossip concerning personal motives and character, and the compromising and contradictory stories of newspaper "interviewers," which are now the bane and the shame of American politics.

From whatever point we view it, therefore, in its collateral as well as in its direct consequences, a reform of the civil service promises nothing but good, and we may reasonably hope to see the day when the present opponents of the reform will be anxious to hide from public notice the fact that they tried to prevent those who (to use again the language of the English statesman) would withdraw patronage from the dominion of party and give it to the people.

JACOB D. Cox.

ART. V.
II.

Histoire de la Prusse depuis la Mort de Frédéric Par EUG. VÉRON. Paris: Baillière. 1867.

La Prusse contemporaine et ses Institutions. Par M. K. HILLEBRAND. Paris Baillière. 1867.

THERE is probably no nation of Europe whose early successes were less popular than those of Prussia. From the first her position has had a good deal of the parvenu about it; and it was only under the pressure of necessity that the great powers sullenly recognized her as one of themselves. The sympathies of the European peoples, again, were unanimously against her. The conservative among them were too closely drawn towards Austria not to catch some prejudice against her rival; and liberals turned with repugnance from a power which, to their eyes, personified absolutism in its hardest and least attractive form, military absolutism.

Why Prussia should have had, at any one epoch of her history, the particular frontiers then pertaining to her, rather than other frontiers, depended upon the political contingencies of the times, and upon nothing else. She annexed Silesia and Glatz in 1742, because, thanks to the military genius of the Great Frederick, she was strong enough to annex them. In 1744 she seized hold of Eastern Friesland for the same VOL. CXII. NO. 230.

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good old reason; and her share in the sundry infamous partitions of Poland did not certainly rest on any better title. When the Great Frederick ascended the throne in 1740, he found Prussia with an area of eight thousand seven hundred and forty-four square geographical miles, and a population of barely two millions and a quarter. At his death, in 1786, he bequeathed to his successor more than double the number of subjects, and a territory more than half as large again.

At the Congress of Vienna Prussia was enabled, by the prominent part she had taken in the overthrow of Napoleon, to vindicate a claim to further acquisitions. Her population was thus raised to ten millions, and her position among the firstclass powers was firmly established. In the concessions made to her, however, the jealousy of her copartners in the European pentarchy was strikingly evident. With no natural frontiers, she found herself separated by the intrusion of jealous Hanover, and of Hesse, into two distinct masses, and was brought, by her sprawling configuration, into direct contact with all her most dangerous competitors, Russia and Aus

tria on one side, and France on the other. By the surrender of East Friesland she lost her position on the North Sea. Saxony, by Prussia's appropriation of half its territory, was thrown into the arms of Austria, and the cession to Bavaria of the Franconian principalities deprived the Hohenzollerns of the best affected of their subjects, while the Gallicized, Roman Catholic provinces of the Rhine, taken in exchange, presented every obstacle to amalgamation.

That special providence, however, which seems to have watched over Prussia from her cradle, turned these apparent elements of weakness into aids towards a yet higher destiny. The northern and eastern portions, which she had lost, were chiefly inhabited by Slavonians, and their excision left Prussia all the more purely a German power. Her irregular outline and extended ramifications multiplied her points of contact with the German-speaking peoples around her; and her position, facing Russia on the east and France on the west, gave her, in conjunction with her military prestige, the character of the proper defender of Northern Germany, and made her the indispensable accomplice of all patriotic aspirations.

The primary identification of Prussian interests with those of Germany had commenced, however, still earlier than the Congress of Vienna. It had commenced in 1813, when Frederick William III., conscious that the rush of the patriotic tide left him no alternative between floating upon it or sinking beneath it, yielded to the arguments of Stein, and signed, with Russia, the treaty of Kalisch (February 28th), an offensive and defensive alliance, having the restoration of the Prussian Monarchy to its original status as an explicit aim, and being, therefore, tantamount to a declaration of war against France.

It is no exaggeration to assert that the germs of the characteristic military system of Prussia, of her constitutional development, and even of her present position as the representative of the idea of German unity, were sown and fostered under the pressure and by the direct incentive of the first Napoleon's cruel and contemptuous treatment of his fallen foe,

a treatment which one of the French writers before us states to have "left behind it miseries of which many were incurable, and hatreds which half a century of peace has failed to eradicate."

One of the provisions of the Treaty of Tilsitt (July, 1807), which followed the disastrous defeats of Jena and Auerstädt, prohibited Prussia from maintaining a larger standing army than forty-two thousand men. General Scharnhorst, who was at the time Minister of War, contrived to neutralize this prohibition by annually eliminating from the ranks a certain number of men whose training was completed, and replacing them by recruits. The army in this way became, as it actually remains, a military school through which all the citizens passed in turn, a sort of provisional furlough retaining them, for a fixed time after their discharge, at the disposition of the state.* Thus, and under this incentive, was created that formidable Landwehr system, which has been, probably, the most efficient instrument in inflicting upon France and the Napoleonic dynasty to-day's terrible retribution.

But Prussia needed something more than an efficient army. Her utter collapse after Jena clearly proved that the solid

*The reserve thus created contributed seventy thousand first-class soldiers to the desperate battle-fields of 1813.

foundations of a national structure were wanting. The masses were, in the country, little better than serfs; in the towns, mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, having no part whatever in the state organism, and therefore utterly indifferent to its political welfare. Fortunately, however, for Prussia in this her darkest hour, the helm of state was surrendered to a man whose surpassing ability was equal even to that surpassing emergency. This man was the Baron von Stein (born at Nassau, October, 1757), a statesman of indomitable energy, of the purest patriotism, and of rare grasp of thought and freedom from class prejudices.* Stein laid his finger at once upon the fundamental defect in Prussian policy to which we have referred, the absence of a popular basis, and set himself resolutely to its rectification. Three great reforms were immediately inaugurated, embracing the tenure of land, the municipal charters, and the internal regulations of the army. The edict of October, 1807, swept away all the feudal obligations resting on the peasantry, and made manors purchasable by commoners of any degree.† Trade at the same time was declared not to be derogatory to a noble, and intermarriages between members of the aristocracy and of the burgher class were permitted without preliminary sanction from the crown. The hateful distinctions of caste were thus undermined. The edict of November, 1808, restored to the citizens of towns their ancient privileges, authorizing all who were rated to a certain amount, without distinction of birth or creed, to take part in the election of the municipal authorities. At the same time commissions in the army were thrown open to all, as the recompense of good service and of personal merit.

There is no doubt that, had the opportunity been given him, Stein would have "crowned the edifice" with a regular representative system. But the despot of France, who had made himself the despot of Germany also, and seemed to take special pleasure in outraging and humiliating Prussia, soon per

*Pertz's Life of Stein (Leben des Minist. Freiherrn von Stein, Berlin, 1851) is one of the most valuable aids to a comprehension of the history of Continental Europe, during the first quarter of this century, to which the student can be referred.

† M. Véron (Hist. de la Prusse, p. 179) errs in extending the terms of this edict to landed property in general (bien-fonds). The German term used is distinctly Rittergüter.