To begin with, it was not yet “Germany” at all; it was Prussia. We are well accustomed in the twentieth century to regard Germany as one of the Great Powers of Europe, with her enormous army and her expanding navy and mercantile marine, with all else for which the Fatherland stands in science, letters, and industry. It is necessary, however, to realise that the Princess Royal’s marriage was to bring her to what was then a very different country. Prussia was in fact not to be compared in power, wealth, or security with the Princess’s native land. Including Silesia, Brandenburg, and Westphalia, the country only had a population of some seventeen millions in 1858, or about that of England alone. The revenue was comparatively insignificant, but the army numbered 160,000 officers and men; the navy had 55 ships, 3500 officers and men, and 265 guns; while the mercantile marine is given as 826 ships of 268,000 tons.
The Germanic Confederation had superseded the Confederation of the Rhine formed by Napoleon. It included Austria, as well as Prussia and the various German States, and by the nature of its constitution it was weak where it should have been strong. The jealousy felt by Austria for the hegemony of Prussia among the smaller German States, and the internal jealousies of those States among themselves, almost doomed the Confederation to impotence. Indeed, the primary object of the Confederation, namely, the maintenance of the external security of the States, was in constant danger, owing partly to the complicated regulations for voting in the Diet, partly to a military system which was full of compromises and certain to produce, on the outbreak of war, a maximum of confusion and a minimum of efficiency.
The constitutional liberties of the individual States had been gravely menaced by a series of feudal decrees passed between 1830 and 1840; while in 1850 the Confederation had actually suppressed the constitution of Hesse-Cassel. In Prussia itself the Manteuffel Ministry had been working, beneath the cloak of the constitutional reforms granted in 1850, to establish a centralised police State on the model of the French préfet system combined with typical Prussian mediævalism.
It was in 1847 that King Frederick William IV uttered the famous words that he would never allow a piece of written parchment to be placed, like a second Providence, between God in heaven and his country. Now the constitution of only two years later did seem to be such a piece of written parchment, but this was only in appearance, because it did not settle by organic laws the crucial questions of political liberty, but left them in practice to the Chambers which it called into existence. The task of Baron Manteuffel’s Ministry, therefore, resolved itself into obtaining a sufficiently reactionary Parliament which could be trusted to remove the foundations of political liberty laid by the great constitutional lawgiver, Stein, and his follower, Hardenburg.
It was not till 1855, three years before the Princess Royal’s marriage, that a thoroughly servile Chamber was obtained. The two principal reforms effected by Stein, namely, the localising of the administration and the independence of officials, were abolished, and the administration was carefully centralised on the French model, and the whole official class was made dependent upon the Government. This latter object was effected by an ingenious theory—that any opposition to a constitutional Ministry which enjoyed the confidence of the sovereign became constructively an offence against the Crown, and therefore punishable.
It is significant that it took five years before a really servile Chamber was obtained, even by these methods. The Prussian mediævalists did not altogether like the police supremacy established by the Manteuffel Ministry; but, on the other hand, by their alliance with the Ministry they had the satisfaction of staving off certain reforms which they especially dreaded, notably the equalisation of the land tax, the removal of the rural police from the control of the lord of the manor, and the liberal organisation of the rural communes. Moreover, they were given practical freedom to do what they liked in ecclesiastical and educational administration.
It must be remembered that, while England has had from time to time her mediævalists, they have, on the whole, failed to make any real impression on politics, and have exerted their influence only in the province of religious belief and in that of art. It was different in Prussia, where feudalism as a practical system had a much longer life.