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principles in diluted form; and young Custine pronounce Struensee, the Minister of Finance, as much a partisa of the French Revolution as a Prussian Minister cou be. But they were not statesmen of the first rank, an they lacked the resolution to carry out the changes whi they knew to be necessary. The hour of reform on arrived when the logic of the stricken field had reveale the need of building from the depths, and when men ability and determination received the more or le reluctant assent of the monarch to carry out some of th most essential tasks.

Republican and Imperial France had shown how t develope and apply the latent strength and capacity o a nation; and the elemental grandeur of her achieve ment impressed even those who suffered from her ringin blows. The regenerators of Prussia shared the convictio that the supreme need of the time was to revive th courage and mobilise the resources of the nation b inviting it to share in the burdens, the privileges an the responsibilities of government. 'The military a well as the political chiefs,' writes Cavaignac with patriotic pride, 'were penetrated by the example of the Revolution, imbued with its spirit, convinced that Prussia and Germany could only find salvation by following the paths it had opened.' And this was recognised as frankly by Stein and Niebuhr, by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau who hated it, as by the eclectic Hardenberg and by Schön the radical doctrinaire.

The Revolution had been saddled and bridled before Stein was called, in middle life, to play a commanding part on the Prussian stage; but its influence on his reforming ideas and achievements is indubitable. After his appointment as Minister, shortly before the battle of Jena, he drew up a memorandum comparing the State of his adoption to a machine which only functions properly when controlled by a superman, and demanding a limited monarchy. The memorandum was seen by the Queen, but was considered too outspoken for the eyes of the King. Of greater importance was, the 'Nassau Programme,' written in his ancestral home on the eve of his appointment as First Minister. If the nation is to be uplifted,' he declared, 'the submerged part must be given liberty, independence, property and the protection

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of the laws. He agrees with the French reformers with regard to the emancipation of the peasants, the liberation of industry, the equalisation of taxes and the abolition of patrimonial jurisdiction. Here is no catalogue of the Rights of Man,' comments his admiring biographer Lehmann; 'but the emphatic demand for the right of a nation to administer itself rules out the patriarchal system of old Prussia and implicitly contains the whole charter of citizenship.' Stein's historic Ministry was cut short before he had time to carry out more than a fraction of the Nassau Programme; but the emancipation of the peasants and the grant of municipal self-government stand out as everlasting monuments of his rule.

Emancipation owed as much to Schön, who had drunk deeply at French springs, as did self-government to Frey, who had studied the decree of 1789 on municipalities. 'What was it,' asks Lehmann, that attracted these thoroughly German minds in Königsberg to the revolutionary legislation of France, which they only approved with large reservations? The answer is that they desired to attain for their country the position of power which those laws had secured for France.' Reform in the direction of equality was in the air; and Stein and his colleagues were merely the agents of a change rendered ultimately inevitable by the ferment of the Revolution. As it was the abstract ideas of 1789 which had appealed to the writers and thinkers of Germany in the decade of revolution, so it was their concrete results which converted conservative German statesmen in search of a policy in the opening years of the 19th century. The sensational returns secured by France by every approximation towards equality and by every release of individual aptitudes were writ large on the map of Europe; and every statesmanlike brain in Prussia grasped the fact that, if their nation was to live and grow, it must learn wisdom from its conquerors.

The new spirit of accommodation was passionately denounced by Marwitz, the spokesman of the impenitent Junkers who looked back to the autocracy and feudalism of the Frederician system as to the golden age.

'Stein brought the Revolution into our country. He collected a gang of ideologues, drones and chatterers about him,

and began revolutionising the Fatherland, inaugurating t war of the propertyless against property, of industry again agriculture, of crass materialism against the divine orde He inaugurated the so-called regeneration of the Prussia State with laws based on the principles of Rousseau ar Montesquieu. The ideologues, from the Garonne to the Ni men, hailed the Emancipation Edict with a hymn of praise.

His impeachment has been adopted and confirmed wit patriotic pride by a long series of French historian 'It needed half a century to establish throughou Germany the social principles born of the French Revolu tion,' writes Doniol in 'The Revolution and Property.'

'Finally they took possession even of the most recalcitran of the States. There was no longer room in people's mind for other laws than those fitted to endow both the peopl and the land with the independence which the French Rev lution had made the indispensable condition of social vitality Prussia led the way. Stein's Edict of 1807 was the Prussia Fourth of August.'

'France did more than conquer Europe,' echoes Sorel 'she converted her. The French won over to their ideas th

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very nations which revolted against their domination. princes most eagerly bent on penning-in the Revolution sav it, on returning from their crusade, sprouting in the soil o their own estates which had been fertilised by the blood o French soldiers.'

Cavaignac's massive volumes, 'La Formation de la Pruss Contemporaine,' are one long plea for the recognition of French influences on the transformation and modernisa tion of the Hohenzollern State. Stein's debt to France has been contested in Ernst von Meier's elaborate treatise on Prussia and the French Revolution; but Lehmann whose biography called forth the protest of the Hano verian jurist, never suggested that France was more than one source of his hero's inspiration or that he made uncritical use of foreign models.

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The political derivation of Hardenberg gives rise to no such controversy. While Stein swam against the stream of the time,' writes Meier, Hardenberg allowed himself to be borne along with it. He was an adherent of the French Revolution, and he desired to imitate it.

An enemy alike of autocracy and democracy, he greeted the Revolution and many of its early measures as making for the limited monarchy of his dreams. France travelled too far and too fast for a liberal conservative who abhorred violence; but he never for a moment doubted that a new era had dawned, and that the task of statesmanship was to apply the lessons of the cataclysm. In a memorial written in 1807 at the King's request, he declared that the dominant principle of government should be the application of the ideas of the French Revolution to Prussia; for such was their power that any State which rejected them would either collapse or be forced to accept them. There must be a revolution in the good sense, he argued—a revolution from above, in which the wisdom of the Government would foster the ennobling of humanity. The form most suited to the spirit of the age would be a combination of democratic principles with monarchical rule. A government must work in harmony with the scheme of Providence, and should not shrink from the principal demand of the age, namely the utmost possible liberty and equality. He prescribed the same medicine for the State when he assumed power in 1810. Your Majesty, we must do from above what the French have done from below.'

He was as good as his word. He completed the creation of a free peasantry begun by Stein and carried forward the reform of the central and local administration; and it was not his fault that Prussia had to wait for a constitution till 1848. Like Stein, he was denounced by Marwitz and the Junkers as a leveller; and from their narrow standpoint they were right, for he had grasped the force latent in the conception of social equality. Throughout Europe a truceless conflict was in progress between the ancien régime and the ideas of 1789; and, when a statesman decided to break with feudalism, he was compelled to study and to some extent to adopt French methods. Hardenberg's work,' declares Cavaignac, is the most indubitable testimony to the action of the French Revolution on European society.' A mind so receptive to new influences and yet so firmly anchored in historic realities was of infinite value in the critical period following the battle of Jena; and Ranke, the editor of his papers, justly declared that no

statesman had engraved his name more deeply on t brazen tablets of Prussian history.

The lessons of the French Revolution were taken heart by the reforming soldiers of Prussia no less tha by the reforming civilians. The powerful intellect Scharnhorst focussed on national strength, and he o served that the Declaration of the Rights of Man dea only with the rights of individuals, not with those the State; but in the early nineties of the 18th centur he complained that the upper classes were as a rule to selfish and too stupid to make concessions, and b declared that things could not go on as they were. 1 a pregnant dissertation on the French War, written i 1797, he argued that the evil fortune of the Allies wa due not to accidents or details but to much deeper cause The first of these was ignorance of the strength of th foe, due to the false reports of the émigrés, who led th Powers to believe that the Revolution was the work a small minority. The second reason was the lack stomach for the fight.

When the French Revolution began, a large number of th noblest minds were fired by the ideal of a more perfect an more beneficent government, especially among young men lively imagination with a generous feeling for right and fo the sufferings of the less fortunate class. France employe all her material and moral resources, while the Allies onl utilised a portion of their strength and were sadly lacking i moral.'

The main reasons for the loss of the first round of th match between revolutionary France and feudal Europ were thus to be sought on the moral and political rathe than on the material plane. Every citizen of the Republi had been prepared for any sacrifice to defend his territor and his independence; and necessity created a marvellou energy alike in the Government, the army and th nation. If the Powers were to triumph, they would have to penetrate the secret of national energy and determination which had carried France through un precedented trials and dangers.

Though Gneisenau, like Scharnhorst, cared more for order than liberty and more for obedience than self realisation, he drew the same lesson as his political and

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