t something
more than that. Up to 1847 the only public career open to a Prussian
subject was the Civil Service; it was from them that not only the
subordinate officials but the Ministers of the State were selected. Now
we have seen that Bismarck had tried the Civil Service and deliberately
retired from it. The hatred of bureaucracy he never overcame, even when
he was at the head of the Prussian State. It arose partly from the
natural opposition between the nobleman and the clerk. Bismarck felt in
this like Stein, the greatest of his predecessors, who though he had
taken service under the Prussian Crown never overcame his hatred of
"_the animal with a pen_" as he called Prussian Civil Servants, and shed
tears of indignation when he was first offered a salary. Bismarck was
never a great nobleman like Stein and he did not dislike receiving a
salary; but he felt that the Civil Servants were the enemies of the
order to which he belonged. He speaks a few years later of "the biting
acid of Prussian legislation which in a single generation can reduce a
mediatised Prince to an ordinary voter." He is never tired of saying
that it was the bureaucracy which was the real introducer of the
Revolution into Prussia. In one of his speeches he defends himself and
his friends against the charge of being enemies to freedom; "that they
were not," he says;

"Absolutism with us is closely connected with the omnipotence of
the _Geheimrath_ and the conceited omniscience of the Professors
who sit behind the green table, a product, and I venture to
maintain a necessary product, of the Prussian method of
education. This product, the bureaucracy, I have never loved."

When, as he often does, he maintains that the Prussian Parliament does
not represent the people, he is thinking of the predominance among them
of officials, for we must always remember that many of the extreme
Liberal party and some of their most active leaders were men who were
actually at that time in the service of the Crown.

It was the introduction of a Representative Assembly that for the first
time in Prussian history made possible a Conservative opposition against
the Liberalism of the Prussian Government. There are two kinds of
Liberalism. In one sense of the word it means freedom of debate, freedom
of the press, the power of the individual as against the Government,
independence of character, and personal freedom. Of Liberalism in this
sense of the word there wa