PREFACE.
25
not dare to utter the word Constitution without blushing!
I speak of His Majesty Friedrich Wilhelm, third of the name, King of Prussia.[1]
Having always had, as I shall always have, a liking for royalty, it is repugnant to my principles and feelings to criticise too severely princes as individuals. My inclinations are rather to praise them for their good qualities. Therefore I willingly praise the personal virtues of the monarch of whose system of government, or rather of whose Cabinet, I have spoken so unreservedly. I attest with pleasure that Friedrich Wilhelm III. as a man deserves the highest honour and regard, such as the great majority of the Prussian people give him. He is good
- ↑ Instead of this sentence, the following occurs in the original:—"I speak of His Majesty Friedrich Wilhelm, third of the name, King of Prussia, ruler of the Rhine, to whom I was transferred as subject in the year of grace 1815, with several millions of other Rhinelanders. As may be well supposed, my consent to this was not asked. I was exchanged, I believe, against a poor East Frisian whom I had never seen, who had never initiated me into his former feelings of devotion to the royal Prussian government, and who perhaps was made so unhappy by the exchange that he now lies buried as a Hanoverian. I, however, have not been made happy by that Prussian press-ganging (Ein preussung, or oppression), and all that I have gained by it is the right to most humbly remind that monarch that he should, according to his promise, graciously bestow on us a representative constitution."—German Publisher.
