of worshipping God in their own houses, were only liberated and pardoned by the amnesty of August, 1840? Who could suppose that while the praises of the educational system of the Prussian government were resounding in our senate and our pulpits, this educating government was driving by religious persecution from her educated land upwards of 600 Christians, who went from Silesia to the wilds of America simply to enjoy the privileges of religious freedom, and of communicating at the altar according to the forms and doctrines of Luther or Calvin, rather than of his late Majesty ? Who could suppose that while literary men were extolling the high educational state of Prussia, her moral state stood so low that such a sect as the Muckers could not only exist in the most educated of her provinces but could flourish openly, and number among its members, clergy, nobility, and educated and influential people? These writers had evidently been deceiving themselves and the public; had looked no farther than to the means of education; and had hastily concluded that these means must necessarily be producing the end. If to read, write, cipher, and sing, be education, they are quite right the Prussian subject is an educated man. If to reason, judge, and act as an independent free agent, in the religious, moral, and social relations of man to his Creator, and to his fellow-men, be that exercise of the mental powers which alone deserves the name of education, then is the Prussian subject a mere drum-boy in education, in the cultivation and use of all that regards the moral and intellectual endowments of man, compared to one of the unlettered population of a free country. The dormant state of the public mind on all affairs of public interest, the acquiescence in a total want of political influence or existence, the intellectual dependence upon the government or its functionary in all the affairs of the community, the abject submission to the want of freedom or free agency in thoughts, words, or acts, the religious thraldom of the people to forms which they despise, the want of influence

of religious and social principle in society, justify the conclusion that the moral, religious, and social condition of the people was never looked at or estimated by those writers who were so enthusiastic in their praises of the national education of Prussia. The French writers took up the song from the band of Prussian pensioned literati of Berlin, and the English from the French writers; and so the song has gone round Europe without any one taking the trouble to inquire what this educational system was producing; whether it had elevated, as it should have done if genuine, the moral, religious, and social position and character of the Prussian people as members of civilised society having religious, moral, civil, and political rights and duties to enjoy and to perform.

It is to us in England, with our free institutions and individual free agency in all things, an inconsistency scarcely conceivable, that a government should give the means, nay, enforce the acquirement of the means, yet punish and suppress the use and exercise of the means it gives should enforce education, yet deny the use and exercise of education in the duties of men, as social, moral, religious, thinking, self-acting beings. But this is the consistency of arbitrary, uncontrolled rule, and of the juste milieu principle of government by which it seeks to continue its power. This is the government of functionarism and despotism united, endeavouring to perpetuate itself by turning the education of the people and the means of living of a great body of civil functionaries placed over them, into a machinery for its own support.

CHAP. IX.

DISJOINTED STATE OF PRUSSIA AS ONE NATIONAL BODY. DIFFERENT LAWS AND ADMINISTRATIONS. FUNCTIONARISM.ARISTOCRACY AND FUNCTIONARISM COMPARED.

THE military system of the Prussian government not only impoverishes and demoralises the people without creating that kind of military force which from its of fensive capability gives a state real political weight in European affairs; but it counteracts its own object, and actually weakens the moral element of the defence of the country, in proportion to the perfection to which it carries the physical element-the military organisation. As under this system each individual is necessarily confined very much to his own military locality, the free circulation of the mass of the population through the country is impeded, and family ties, ties of acquaintanceship, of petty business, of trades, of common interests and objects, and a common spirit, can scarcely spread over adjacent provinces, much less over such a widely outstretched land. This military system with its pendant, the civil system, is the only thing common to all. The people of distant provinces have no common interests or objects amalgamating them into one whole no liberties, laws, constitutional rights, common to all, to rally upon.

"What is it to me if the French are on the Rhine," would be the reasonable feeling of every man north of the Oder, when called out for actual service in the field" if they come to us we will defend ourselves, but what have we to do with those countries?" The different provinces of the Prussian kingdom are, in fact, not amalgamated by mutual trade and communications, not united by their material interests. They are connected together only in a common bureau at Berlin,

but are distinct existences in all that binds men together. The people can scarcely be called one nation. They are centralised but not nationalised.

But is loyalty, is the devoted attachment of the subject to the adored and beneficent monarch, to go for nothing in this cold-hearted estimate of the connection between a country and its government, and of the impulses which lead a gallant people to fly to arms, and defend with their lives and fortunes the rights of their beloved sovereign? Let him who asks turn up a file of old newspapers, and he will there find his answer. He will there find the same effusions of enthusiastic loyalty and devotedness from the same towns, provinces, and people-to King Jerom of Westphalia, that are now addressed to his majesty Frederick William IV. of Prussia to King Louis of Holland, that are now addressed to King William of Orange. Change names, and dates, and the one would do for the other. It is within the verge of possibility that the same pen and the same scribe copied, and the same burgomasters or other official personages presented the same, the identical addresses to both monarchs, containing the same assurances of the inviolable attachment, the devoted zeal to the royal house and the beloved sovereign, of the most loyal and faithful of subjects. The age of loyalty expired amidst the laughter of the world, when the Buonaparte brood of kings and princes exchanged their straw stools in Ajaccio for thrones, and were treated in their Baratarias with all the honour, adulation, and devoted loyalty, that the "lives and fortunes men” of the day, in Holland and Germany, could muster. There was a moment in this half century, when royalty and aristocracy might have restored themselves to their ancient social position by an act of great moral justice to society by reducing to their original nothingness the swarms of counts, princes, dukes, marshals, who had been elevated to social distinction by no social, intellectual, or moral worth or merit, but merely by

tary achievement, and by restoring to the countries, cities, communities, and individuals, the riches expressed from them by these personages in the shape of contributions, dons, taxes, and which, in reality, were unmilitary booty and illegal rapine. The allied powers overlooked or disdained, in the pride of victory, the opportunity of uniting the monarchical and aristocratical principle which they wished to re-establish, with the principle of moral justice. They themselves, by thus contaminating the conventional reverence for the monarchical and aristocratic elements of society which they wished to revive, reduced the ties between the European people and their governments to that of their material interests. The constitutional states have endeavoured to strengthen this tie by giving the people a voice in the management of their own affairs, a representation in the legislature. Prussia endeavours to manage the material interests of the people without the people, without a constitution; and as loyalty and aristocratical influence in the social body are undeniably effete as principles of national movement, her government is connected with her people only by two ties that of the military army with its officers, and that of the civil army with its functionaries. Compared with Britain or France, the kingdom of Prussia is in a very disjointed state, owing to this entire reliance upon the civil and military power, without any connection between the government and the people in the management of their material interests. The material interests of the people, even among themselves, those of the different provinces of Prussia, are not amalgamated. There are no common interests, common laws, common religion, common voice in the legislation of their common country, uniting all. In that most important perhaps of all the elements of social union in a country-the law and its administration-differences and confusion prevail. The different shreds torn from other countries, of which the kingdom is composed, retain, in some degree, each its own laws, forms of judicature, religion, and