hundred and fifty million marks! The public
revenues are the private income of the Grand Duke. The public debt is
a private charge on the people.

In degenerate Prussia even the Imperator-Rex has to divide some of his
authority with a meddlesome assembly, and has to delegate it to an
obedient but ridiculous bureaucracy. In the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg
the ruler governs his subjects in the good old patriarchal way. It is
true, in the troubled days of 1848 an unwise predecessor granted
something like a paper constitution, but that scrap of parchment
happily became a dead-letter twelve months after it had been granted.
It is also true that there still subsists some faint image of
representative government in the two estates of the Grand Duchy,
dating as far back as 1755, but those venerable estates of the Grand
Duchy are only composed of and only represent the _Ritterschaft_--_i.e._,
six hundred and ninety noblemen; and the _Landschaft_--_i.e._, fifty
municipalities. Neither the peasants in the country nor the artisans
in the towns are ever troubled to give their advice on matters
concerning the common weal. And as, in order that a Bill may become
the law of the Grand Duchy, the consent of the two estates is
required, nothing unpleasant is ever likely to happen, and the old
order, represented by the six hundred and ninety overlords, continues
undisturbed.

In degenerate Prussia even the Junkers have to submit to the presence
of petty landowners of lowly birth, or even to peasants of servile
origin. Do not historians remind us that even Frederick the Great had
to surrender to the claims of the Miller of Sans Souci. In
Mecklenburg-Schwerin there is no Miller of Sans Souci to worry the
Grand Duke. _For no peasant owns one single acre of land._ One-half of
the territory of the Grand Duchy is owned by a few hundred lords of
the manor, and the other half realizes the Socialist ideal of the
suppression of private property and of the transfer of all private
ownership to the State. Six thousand square miles are the absolute
property of the State--that is to say, of the Grand Duke. For never
was absolute ruler more truly entitled than the Grand Duke to
appropriate the words of Louis XIV.: "L'etat c'est moi."

In this paradise of Prussian Junkerthum one might reasonably have
expected the monarch and the lords of the manor to enjoy as complete
happiness as is ever allotted to mortal man. And the peasants and
artisans could equal