LAST WEEK.
The death of the King of Prussia is not an event of any political significance. For many years past this Sovereign had been morally and intellectually dead, and the Government was exercised by his successor—now King of Prussia in name, as he had long been in reality. The daughter of Queen Victoria is one step nearer to the Prussian throne. We ought to like the Prussians better than we do, inasmuch as we have so much in common with them: but the fact seems to be that this is one of the cases in which public considerations materially interfere with private feeling. The vacillating and selfish policy of the Prussians has from time to time been of serious injury to Europe. They have been almost worse than open enemies—they have been uncertain friends. There is a straightforward, honest stupidity about the Austrian Court which almost approaches to genius. The proof of the assertion is the actual existence of the Government of Francis Joseph. In his day, and in the days of his predecessors, the capital of the Austrian Empire has been upon more than one occasion in the hands of a foreign enemy and of an insurgent people. The Hapsburghs have had to fight for their lives in Hungary, and, in fact, only retain possession of that kingdom by the grace of a neighbouring Sovereign. But the other day they were beaten out of Lombardy, and the system of alliances and satrapies, by help of which they retained in their hands dominion over the Italian Peninsula, was shattered to atoms. Despite of all this, the young Hapsburgh remains true to the traditions of his House, and neither for fear nor favour will he consent to shape his course according to the necessities of the time. Soundly beaten in Lombardy, and with the thunder-cloud hanging over Venetia, he maintains the military and police system in Hungary as rigorously as though his exchequer were full, his subjects faithful, and his hands free. He is casting cannon, keeping up the matériel of war in the Quadrilateral, and violating the pledged faith of the Empire by giving a forced currency to paper money after the most solemn promises that no measure of the kind should ever be adopted. The scraps of constitutional powers which he offers occasionally to the notice of his subjects have certainly not found favour in their eyes, but, on the contrary, have rather inflamed the existing discontent. For all this—save in the matter of the Concordat—he will not budge an inch; but for aught that is known appears resolved to maintain the system of his predecessors, even at the risk of adding another and even a more significant name to the long list of banished and wandering Kings. We detest the tyranny of Austria, but we do not therefore look upon Prussia as the fitting implement for the regeneration of Germany. The Junker, or aristocratic party, is more powerful—less under the influence of public opinion at Berlin than at Vienna—and the Court at Sans Souci is more completely in the hands of these unlucky advisers than the Court at Schönbrunn.
What change may follow from the elevation of the Regent to the throne, it would be premature to predict; but certainly the actual King, during his tenure of office as Regent, did not display any very violent sympathy with the popular party, or with liberal ideas. There is just a hope that, though, whilst shining by merely borrowed light, he was unwilling to modify or interfere with the system of his predecessor, still, now that he wears the crown himself, he may adopt a wiser, because a bolder and more liberal policy; but the hope rests upon a very insecure foundation indeed. What the Regent was we know—what the King will be we must guess. It is a pity to write this—it is a greater pity that it should be true.
The late King of Prussia seems to have been, in many respects, a counterpart—though a refined one—of our own James I. He had the same exalted notions of the kingly power,—the same belief in the kingcraft as the first of our Stuart sovereigns. True, that in place of the Scotch dogmatism and pragmatic self-conceit of the first James, the chief characteristic of his mind was a kind of metaphysical dreaminess. This only amounts to saying that he was a German, in place of being a Scotch pedant. No doubt, after all due allowance has been made for the different epochs of history during which the two sovereigns lived, the German was a man of more refined and cultivated intellect than the Scotchman, and of a far purer moral life; but in the essentials of character they were the same. Had the German been Rector of the University at Bonn or Heidelberg, and the Scotchman Provost of Aberdeen, the probability is that each would have acquitted himself respectably enough of his duty in life; but, as kings, they were decided failures. Great hopes were entertained of Frederick William IV., when in the year 1840—being then a man forty-five years of age—he ascended the throne of Prussia. During the days of his Crown-Princedom he had emphatically enunciated liberal ideas, and, as it was then supposed, only wanted the power to carry them out in fact. The brilliant, fickle, dreaming, over-educated Sovereign, was not destined to be any exemption to the usual rule that the Liberal Heir Apparent invariably turns out the Conservative King. Twice this was seen amongst our own rulers since the House of Brunswick have been called to the Three Kingdoms. George IV., as Regent and King, could not have turned a colder shoulder upon Fox and Sheridan whom he had loved and fondled as Crown Prince, than did Frederick William upon the advisers and companions of his earlier days. His schemes for the liberal regeneration of Prussia, after they had remained for seven years as mere dreams, finally obtained consistency in the ridiculous constitution of 1847, so shortly destined to be swept away by ruder hands than any which have yet wielded a German sceptre. The Provincial States were convened in one assembly at Berlin, and there was to be a house of peers in whom should be lodged the small instalment of real power of which the sovereign could make up his mind to divest himself.
A freer and more independent parliament sat in London in the days of Queen Elizabeth than was convened in Berlin in the year 1847. That
