Berlin, 19 October 1858

On the 21st of this month the Chambers are to meet in a joint session at which the Prince will call upon them to “recognise the necessity of the regency”, a demand that will of course be promptly and most obsequiously complied with. Although the formal existence of the constitution dates back to 31 January 1850, the general feeling is that its real existence as an effective instrument against the royal prerogative should be dated from 21 October 1858. In the meantime, to damp down any unseemly enthusiasm, newspaper confiscations are the order of the day – a real pity, considering the tame nature of the offenders. The first place among these papers is taken by the *Volks-Zeitung* and the *National-Zeitung*; the latter, by dint of a respectable mediocrity, cowardly concessions and unbridled display of Prussian local patriotism, has contrived to weather the counter-revolutionary storm and to turn the meagre remnants of a movement, whose dangerously extravagant tendencies it was in its day too clever to share, into ready cash. After the Flood the organic beings that populate the earth assumed a more decorous and modest form than their antediluvian forebears. The same law manifests itself in the process of the formation of society. And yet we are forced to the conclusion that the German revolution must have been very dwarfish indeed if its final expression, the Lilliputians of the Berlin press, are to be regarded as its legitimate representatives. However this may be – even if these editors are no heroes, indeed not even simple fighters, they are in any case sly calculators. They feel that something is stirring and that the regime which provided the necessary background for their sham liberalism and paid them the equivalent for their commodities is rapidly collapsing. In order, therefore, to convince their customers that they are faithful guardians, they venture to growl softly and whimper plaintively. They certainly do not bite; they do not even bark. At present their boldness consists in extolling the Prince to the skies. They even call upon him, as the *National-Zeitung* did recently, to dispose of the state treasury as he pleases; but, and this is the comic side of the matter, all their compliments on his still unaccomplished deeds turn into an equal number of critical observations on the past deeds of the Manteuffel cabinet. They irritate the Prince with their forward-looking credulity and offend the ministry with their backward-looking scepticism. But to judge them properly one would have to read them in the original. Their silly, vapid, endless twaddle cannot be rendered in any other language, not even in the French of the December coup d’état, which at least smells of its own specific *odeur de mauvais lieu* <odour of dubious origin>. One might suppose they spoke only in hints and played hide-and-seek with the police, but that would be a great mistake. In reality they say everything they have to say, but they combine the homeopathic and allopathic methods in a most skilful and lucrative fashion; they administer a tiny grain of poison in an ocean of neutral fluid. On the other hand, the ministers seem to be aware of the geological fact that the constant action of water wears away and crumbles into gravel even the proudest rock. What disquiets them is not so much the stammering of these cautious know-alls as the general state of public opinion on which it rests. In their short-sighted bureaucratic manner they therefore beat the donkey in order to hit the sack – I mean the sack of public opinion. The repeated newspaper confiscations with which the new regime is being inaugurated are, say the Royalists, the proper answer to the tumultuous hopes being set upon the Prince. No, say the official Liberals, the Prince’s regime has not yet begun, and his profound respect for constitutional legality obliges him, until he is recognised and sworn in by the Chambers, to allow the ministers to act on their own responsibility in accordance with the Charter. Now, “ministerial responsibility” in all our monarchical constitutions, whether cut to the English or the French pattern, is a very mysterious thing. In England, where it obviously exists in its most vivid and tangible form, it means that on certain solemn occasions irresponsibility is transferred from a Whig to a Tory or from a Tory to a Whig. Ministerial responsibility there means that place-hunting becomes the chief occupation of the parliamentary parties. Whoever is in office is, during that time, irresponsible because he is the representative of a legislative majority which, in order to help him, subordinates itself to its fraction leader. In Prussia the most zealous efforts of bourgeois ambition are aimed at transforming ministerial posts into prizes to be won in parliamentary tournaments. Hitherto, however, ministerial responsibility in Prussia has been in every respect a myth. Article 44 of the Charter reads:

“The King’s ministers are responsible. All governmental acts of the King require for their validity the countersignature of a minister, who thereby assumes responsibility.”

With regard to this responsibility, however, no law has been enacted. The article itself does not say to whom the ministers are responsible. In practice, whenever the Chambers went as far as to threaten a vote of no confidence, the ministers declared point-blank that they were perfectly at liberty to do so; the ministers were indeed responsible, but only to their royal master. The question of ministerial responsibility in Prussia, as in the France of Louis Philippe, is of extraordinary weight because in reality it means the responsibility of the bureaucracy. The ministers are the heads of this all-powerful, meddlesome parasitic body, and according to Article 106 of the constitution the subordinate administrative officials have to be guided by them alone, without presuming to examine the legality of the orders or to assume any responsibility for carrying them out. In this way the power of the bureaucracy, and through the bureaucracy the power of the executive, has been maintained, while the constitutional “rights of the Prussians” have been transformed into dead letters.

The approaching elections are the lever that all parties now intend to use, but precisely in electoral matters the present imposed constitution has succeeded in erasing all traces of its revolutionary origin. To be sure, in order to supplement small official salaries with an additional parliamentary source of income, the very plebeian law prescribing the payment of the people’s representatives has been retained. The same applies to the eligibility of every Prussian who has completed his 25th year. The franchise and the electoral procedure have, however, been so arranged that not only is the great mass of the people excluded, but the privileged remainder is subjected to the most unbridled interference by the bureaucracy. The elections are conducted in two stages. First the electors are chosen, and they then elect the deputies. Excluded from the primary election are not only all those who pay no direct taxes, but the whole primary electorate is itself divided into three groups, consisting of the high, the middle and the small taxpayers; like the tribes of King Servius Tullius, these three groups each elect the same number of representatives. And as if this complicated filtration process were not enough, the bureaucracy has, over and above, the right to divide, combine, alter, sever and reunite the electoral districts as it pleases. If, for example, any town is suspected of liberal sympathies, it can be crushed by reactionary rural votes; by a simple decree the minister merges the liberal town with the reactionary rural area into the same electoral district. These are the chains that fetter the electoral movement and that can be broken only exceptionally, in the large towns.