ing acquaintance with the chief figures in the diplomatic world.
He enjoyed talks with Baron Jellacic, who had saved the monarchy in
1848, and with Prince Metternich, whose political career ended in that
year of revolutions and who was now only a figure in society. After the
Crimean War Morier obtained permission to make a tour through South-east
Hungary and to study for himself the mixture of Slavonic, Magyar, and
Teutonic races inhabiting that district. He followed this up by another
tour of three months, which carried him from Agram southwards into
Bosnia and Herzegovina, having prepared for it by working ten to twelve
hours a day for some weeks at the language of the southern Slavs.
Incidentally he enjoyed some hunting expeditions with Turkish pashas,
and obtained some insight into the weakness of the British consular
system. All his life he believed strongly in the value of such tours to
obtain first-hand information; and thirty years later, as Ambassador, he
encouraged his secretaries to familiarize themselves with the outlying
districts of the Russian empire.

In 1858, at the age of thirty-two, Morier passed from Vienna to Berlin.
It was the year in which the Princess Royal, the eldest daughter of
Queen Victoria, married the Crown Prince of Prussia.[43] Her father, the
Prince Consort, was very anxious that Morier should be at hand to advise
the young couple, and the appointment to Berlin was his work. Then it
was that Morier became involved in the struggle between Bismarck and the
Liberal influences in Germany, which had no stronger rallying-point than
the Coburg Court. This conflict only showed itself later, and at first
the young English attache must have seemed a sufficiently unimportant
person; but before 1862 Bismarck, coming home to Berlin from the St.
Petersburg Embassy, and discerning the nature of Morier's character, had
declared that it was desirable to remove such an influence from the path
of his party, who were determined to bring Liberal Germany under the
yoke of a Prussia which had no sympathy for democratic ideals.

[Note 43: The ill-fated Emperor Frederick III, who died of cancer in
1888.]

For the moment the ship of State was hanging in the wind; light currents
of air were perceptible; sails were filling in one parliamentary boat or
another; but the chief movement was to be seen not in parliamentary
circles but in the excellent civil service, which preserved that honesty
and efficiency which i