er_--charitable foundations for such a support of poor
female members of noble families as becomes their rank. Many of these
institutions were formerly nunneries. It is further provided by the
constitution that public offices shall be open to all; that personal
freedom and the inviolability of private property and dwellings shall be
secured; that all shall enjoy the right of petition, perfect freedom of
speech, the liberty of forming organizations for the accomplishment of
any legal object; that a censorship of the press can in no case be
exercised, and that no limitation of the freedom of the press can be
introduced except by due process of law; that civil and political rights
shall not be affected by religious belief, and that the right of filling
ecclesiastical offices shall not belong to the state. Only 'in case of
war or insurrection, and of consequent imminent danger,' has the
Government a right to infringe on the above specified immunities of the
citizens and the press.

The foregoing is all that need be given in order to convey a general
idea of what the Prussian constitution is. It is in its provisions so
specific and clear, that one would hardly expect that disputes
respecting its meaning could have reached the height of bitterness which
has characterized discussions of its most fundamental principles. The
explanation of this fact is to be sought in the mode of the introduction
of the constitution itself. The English constitution has been the growth
of centuries; the Prussian, of a day. The latter, moreover, was not,
like ours, the fundamental law of a new nation, but a constitution
designed to introduce a radical change in the form of a government
which, during many centuries, had been acquiring a fixed character. It
undertook to remodel at one stroke the whole political system. Not
indeed as though there had been no sort of preparation for this change.
The general advance in national culture, the general anticipation of the
change, as well as the actual approaches toward it in the administrative
measures of Frederick the Great and Frederick William III., paved the
way for the introduction of a popular element in the Government.
Nevertheless, the actual, formal introduction itself was sudden. The
constitution was not, in the specific form which it took, the result of
experience and experiment. And, as all history shows, attempts to fix or
reconstruct social systems on merely theoretical principles are liable