The attitude of Delbrueck was certainly heresy as vile as though your own child’s nurse should bring your boy up to fear and despise his own father. Surely, you would not like that?
¶ Delbrueck was quickly given the sack; and it was well that he got off without a broken head!
He was succeeded by a preacher, Ancillon, of renown in church affairs. This Ancillon started young William off on another track; antiques, church history, Bible study, architecture, the brotherhood of man, and the fatherhood of God.
¶ Then William studied art under Rausen, and under Schinkel; and also the future king became absorbed in landscape gardening and in architecture.
¶ William was presumed to be “liberal” in his views, that is to say, he was, in a sense, supposed to be a “democrat.”
¶ Of course, the Radicals at this hour knew nothing of Bismarck, who was to be the power behind the throne. They saw instead only a weak king; and history tells over and over again, down through time, what becomes of weak kings when the people are throwing up barricades in the streets and are tossing up their caps and crying “Liberty!”
¶ Under his royal nose the Liberals kept sticking his father’s pledge of the glorious year, 1813. How about that long-promised Constitution, your Majesty? Thousands of deluded Prussians now believed that they could accurately define the peculiar word “Liberty!” It looked as though the people were bent on casting out a king. As yet there were in Prussia no organized party lines; the general situation was summed up in the growing hopes that the common people placed in French constitutionalism—wherever that might lead.
¶ At any rate, the old régime must go.