Berlin, 4 December 1858

In an earlier article I wrote to you what a sudden turn the general elections took after Herr Flottwell had confidentially warned the bourgeoisie not to push the “rebirth” game too far. In accordance with this, a clean sweep was made of the bourgeois radicals. On the other hand, the lower classes needed no warnings, since they, of their own free will and with considerable contempt, refrained from taking part in the comedy of casting a vote that, by virtue of the electoral law, has no meaning whatever when, as in the present case, the voters of the first and second class have resolved upon joint action. If in a few localities, for example in our town, votes are found from the minority of tax-paying workers, one may be certain that these acted under coercion on a mot d’ordre <an order> from their employers. Even the “own correspondent of the London Times” (who sees everything couleur de rose <in the rosiest colours>) cannot help confessing in the columns of the British Leviathan that the passive attitude of the masses fills his valiant heart with dark forebodings. Thus, then, the elections are perfectly liberal in the ministerial sense. The party of the “Kreuz-Zeitung” has vanished as if by a wave of a magic wand. Two of its leaders have still found their way back into the Chambers, where they used to dictate; and a few owe their return solely and entirely to the magnanimity of their rivals. The scale of the devastation wrought among them is evident from the fact that of 77 Landräte <Landräte: in the “N.-Y. D. T.” German> only 27 have been re-elected.

Taken as a whole, they will reappear only in the shape of a by no means considerable minority.

But Prussian constitutionalism is of so feeble a nature that the magnitude of its own victory has thrown it into terror: Since the elections have produced Chambers representing the liberalism of the ministry, it is manifest that the ministry represents the liberalism of the elected Chambers and is, by this simple process, actually transformed into a party ministry, a parliamentary ministry—that very abomination that was not supposed to have come about. Consequently, the ministers were obliged immediately to protest in the Staats-Anzeiger against the new situation into which they had blundered. They, the appointed counsellors of the Prince, suddenly appeared to have been transformed into the elected executive authority of the country and to have received their plenitude of power from the people. In their protest—the only name that can be given to their profession of loyalty in the Staats-Anzeiger—they declare in high-flown phrases that in Prussia a parliamentary ministry or a party government is entirely out of the question; that the King by the grace of God must remain the sole source of power; that the ministers cannot serve two masters; that it is perfectly in order for the country to have carried out the elections in the spirit of the ministry, but that the country cannot now expect it to follow the initiative of the Chambers; on the contrary, the ministry expects the Chambers to step submissively into the footsteps of the government.

You see where we have got to. The ministry is a parliamentary government and is also no parliamentary government. Through the elections it has ousted the party of the Queen, and now it shows itself eagerly at work to break the ladder on which it climbed to the edifice of power. Since the King is still alive, the Queen still intriguing, and powerful organised interests still hiding behind her banner, the Prince could only consolidate his position by appointing a liberal ministry, and this ministry, in turn, could only maintain its position by taking refuge in general elections. Since the voters below repeated the tune that was played above, the ministers became a party ministry and the Prince a bourgeois dictator. But then the Prussian heir to the throne by the grace of God suddenly becomes aware of the false position into which events have landed him; in his angry weakness he imagines that he can undo facts with words and alter the real conditions of his title to power with half pedantic, half threatening phrases; he

believes that after a successful electoral manoeuvre he is in a position to display the traditional bearing of a Prussian king. While he and his followers imagine that they can deceive the country, they only betray their own unscrupulousness and present the grotesque spectacle of a malade malgré lui. In their endeavour to suppress the political reawakening, they only free it from their control. The Prince’s speech in the Council of State must be regarded as an appendix to the ministerial protest—a speech that has been published in full because the Queen’s camarilla harped on a few sentences of the address torn from their context.

The Prince, like the ministers, is now turning in a circle of the most violent inner contradictions. He has appointed a new cabinet because he regarded the dismissal of the old one as no real change. He wants something new, but the new must be a reissue of the old. He condemns the municipal ordinance forced on the country by the previous government because it extinguished the last spark of communal self-government; but neither does he want to see it changed, because a change of this kind might prove dangerous in the present ferment of public opinion. He proposes to extend Prussia’s influence only by peaceful means, and consequently insists on the necessary enlargement of the army, which is already an excrescence of devastating proportions. He admits that money is needed for this purpose and that the state treasury, although a state debt has been created since the revolution, turns a deaf ear even to the most urgent demands. He announces the introduction of new taxes and is at the same time indignant at the gigantic progress that credit has made in Prussia over the past decade. Just as his ministers want voters after their own mind, while they are not permitted to be ministers after the mind of their voters, so he, the Regent, wants money for his army, but wants to know nothing of moneyed men. The only passage in his speech in which a resolute opposition to the previous regime can be felt is his violent outburst against religious hypocrisy. That was a thrust against the Queen; but to prevent the public from taking the same liberty, he, the Protestant Prince, at the very same time had a meeting of free Catholics in Berlin broken up by the police.

You will admit that a policy so indefinable, so self-contradictory, so suicidal would prove exceedingly provocative and dangerous even under ordinary circumstances; but the circumstances are not ordinary. Revolution threatens from France, and to confront it the Prussian government must feel secure at

home. Only a European war offers a prospect of postponing the revolution in France. In such a war Russia, France and Sardinia would combine against Austria. In order not to become the universal scapegoat, Prussia would then have to be ready to wage an insurrectionary war, a war for German independence; for if it became involved in a war against its own subjects, it would, as in 1806, be struck down with one blow. The Prussian government is fully aware of the disagreeable situation in which it would be placed by a French revolution or a European war. It also knows that Europe is at this moment vacillating between the two possibilities of this dilemma. On the other hand, it knows that the same danger that would have been avoided abroad would arise from within if the popular movement were given free rein. To make apparent concessions to the people but in reality to thwart them—to play this game with the German people would probably be dangerous; yet the wretched Prussian government lacks the courage even to attempt this game. Why, for example, is the big bourgeoisie not allowed the comfort of enjoying the fact that a cabinet appointed by the Regent had afterwards been elected by it? Because even the semblance of a concession to the people wounds dynastic pride. As with home policy, so with foreign policy. No other state feels greater terror at the prospect of a European war than Prussia. But a little private war, say a scuffle with Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein or a murderous exchange of fire with Austria over German hegemony, could prove an extremely skilful diversionary manoeuvre and, by letting the rabble bleed, bring in popularity quite cheaply. But this, too, is a case in which one cannot do what one would like to do. Behind the Danish question lurks Russia, while Austria in person represents nothing less than the maintenance of the status quo in Europe. Thus, constitutional concessions would pave the way for revolution, and a little scuffle would lead to a European war. Hence one can be certain that Prussia’s loud clamour for war against Denmark will evaporate into a verbose protest published in the Staats-Anzeiger.