which then formed part of the possessions of the King of England, and where the young student was powerfully influenced by English ideas in the domain of history and politics.

In 1777 he left the university and entered on somewhat extensive travels, during the course of which he visited various German courts, ran down into Hungary, and lingered for some time at Wetzlar, the chief seat of the Imperial judiciary; at Ratisbon, the seat of the Imperial Diet; at Mainz, the residence of the highest Imperial official; and at Vienna, the seat of the Presence itself.

Stein's intention, when he set out on his travels, was to follow the profession which came naturally to a younger son of an Imperial knightly house who did not adopt the career of arms, and to become connected with the law-courts of the Empire.__What he saw of them, however, at Wetzlar and elsewhere did not please him, and he entered the Prussian Administration instead, in the Mining Department. He seems to have been led to this partly by admiration for the Great King, and partly by a liking for the sort of work he would have to do, while the step, strange at first sight, was made less disagreeable to his family than it might have been, from the fact that the accidents of German politics had made Frederick for the moment the champion of conservatism against the innovating tendencies of Joseph II.

The youth was fortunate in securing the patronage and, what was far better, the guidance, of Heinitz, a type of the very best kind of Prussian bureaucrat, and the best kind of Prussian bureaucrat was, even in those days, far from a bad thing. He rose quickly in his own branch of the service, and was employed out of it in several missions of importance; but he had no taste for diplomacy, and was on the contrary exactly the sort of man of whom we have so many specimens in India, a man who throws his whole soul into the improving and well-ordering, first of a district, then of a province, and

lastly of a whole country. The highest example of this order of statesman which is to be found in European history is Turgot, and Mr. Seeley considers that the life of that supremely great man was not without its influence on his hero.

The outbreak of the French Revolution found Stein engaged in the comparatively quiet activities of a provincial administrator, and that convulsion produced no great change in his way of life except in so far as that from time to time he had to look after the provisioning of large bodies of troops, and thus to make practical acquaintance with some of the duties of a war minister. During this period, too, he increased his knowledge of applied science, and married the Countess Wilhelmina von WalmodenGimborn, through whom he became more closely connected with the Hanoverian nobility. His marriage was as prosaic a proceeding as it well could be, and it seemed at first to him that he had not even secured a tolerably agreeable companion. Things mended, however, in this respect, and his wife showed in the end much strength of character, although but little brilliancy or charm.

The year 1796 brought to Stein promotion in the career of provincial administration, and in 1802 there was for a moment a question of his becoming a minister in Hanover. declined the offer, however, and remained in the Prussian service, occupied largely in reconciling, as best he might, to the rule of his sovereign the people of the Bishopric of Münster, which had been recently annexed to the great northern kingdom. A little later the wave of change which had overwhelmed the ecclesiastical sovereignties struck the imperial knights also, and Stein's little territories were calmly seized by his neighbour of Nassau. Το oppose force to force was out of the question, but the injured baron wrote a remarkable letter to the aggressor, a letter which not obscurely hints the hodie mihi, cras tibi—and was in fact a

prophecy whose accomplishment we have lived to witness.

Ere long, however, the more obscure era of Stein's labours was to come to an end. He was summoned to Berlin to take, much against his will, the portfolio of Finance, and although at first the kind of questions which came before him—the re-organisation of the Salt Department and such like-were not unfamiliar, he had soon to find the sinews of war for Prussia's struggle with Napoleon. That struggle ended, as all men know, in a terrible catastrophe, the causes of which are investigated and very clearly set forth by Mr. Seeley in about 100 pages. They may, putting aside accidents, be summed up under two heads. The army created by Frederick William I., and inspired by the Great Frederick, was no longer either organised with reference to the necessities of the time nor led by a man of genius, and the civil administration was deplorable. As to the second of these causes, I shall have something to say presently. With regard to the first, the following remarks, taken from a paper by Gneisenau, will put the reader upon the right track ::

"The inability of the Duke of Brunswick to form a sound plan of a campaign, the irreso lution so natural at his age, his bad fortune in the field, the army's distrust of him, the dissensions of the chiefs of the staff, the neutral

ising of some of its ablest members, our army's want of practice in war, the want of preparation for it visible in almost all departments, the habit formed in the years of peace of occupying it with useless minutiae of elementary tactics, invented to gratify the people's love of shows; our system of recruiting, with all its exemptions, which obliged only a part of the nation to bear arms, and prolonged the term of service of this part unreasonably, so that in consequence it served with reluctance, and was only kept together by discipline; our system of encouraging population, which allowed the soldier to burden himself with a family, the support of which, when war called him from his hearth, was mostly left to public charity,

and whose lot often made the anxious father long for the end of the war; the system of furloughs, which tempted the chief of a company by his pecuniary interest to send the recruit home half-drilled; the bad condition of our regimental artillery, which could never

Once installed as a minister, Stein soon became involved in what must be called the intrigues, though proper and salutary intrigues, which the wretched state of the higher Prussian administration rendered necessary. The whole system had depended on a powerful driving wheel, and that powerful driving-wheel the king. Now, however, there sat on the throne one of the weakest princes of his line, Frederick William III. The result of his character acting on public affairs was the growth of a camarilla which stood between the ministers and the Crown, a camarilla composed of persons quite unfit to hold the helm of the state even in moderate weather, and dangerously unfit to do so in the terrible year of Jena. After much hesitation and many difficulties, Stein was offered the portfolio of foreign affairs. This, being a man of honour and good sense, he forthwith declined, for the excellent reason that he knew nothing whatever of its duties, and possessed neither acquaintance with nor special aptitude for the matters with which he would have had to deal. The letter in which he declined was written in ill-humour, and in the pedantic language which long years of bureaucratic sentencemaking had engrafted on the not originally good style of the writer but I cannot agree with Professor Seeley, who, like most biographers, is in general only too indulgent to him, when he describes Stein's conduct as the offspring of bureaucratic punctilio. When Stein refused a department for the work of which he felt himself peculiarly unfitted, he took a perfectly just view of the situation. The old Prussian bureaucracy had its faults, and plenty of them, but it was not on Prussian soil that grew up the impudent saying, "Any one has.

;

sufficient ability to perform the duties of any office which he has sufficient influence to obtain."

The intrigues to which I have alluded ended in a furious correspondence between the king and Stein, a correspondence which was to the credit of neither party. That correspondence could have had no conclusion except the one it had, the temporary disappearance of Stein from the Prussian service. He retired first to Königsberg, next to Danzig, and then to his estates at Nassau, where he occupied himself with revolving plans for reforming the administration, for introducing self-government in the towns, and with sketching out a programme of change which should bring about the abolition of serfdom and improve the condition of the peasantry.

Soon, however, Napoleon's intense dislike to Hardenberg brought about the fall of that statesman, and Stein returned to power, not as the head of a department peculiarly alien to his taste, but as a kind of ministerial dictator, a position for which his strong will and great knowledge of the internal affairs of the state peculiarly fitted him, in the opinion of the best politicians whom Prussia could boast of in that dreary time. His assuming this high office was perfectly consistent with his refusal of the portfolio of Foreign Affairs. Hardenberg was, in his view, the proper man to be Foreign Minister, while he himself was by all his previous training as well as by his cast of thought marked out for a Home Minister.

"If" (says Professor Seeley) "we compare Stein's dictatorship with Hardenberg's, we may see that it has the difference which might be expected from the fact that in the interval between them the war had come to an end. Hardenberg is a foreign minister, to whom, in order to increase the military efficiency of the government, a control over the other departments is given in addition. Stein is a home minister in a state ruined by war and misfortune, to whom a similar control over the other departments is given, that he may accomplish a work of extensive but peaceful reconstruction."

Even as Home Minister however he

was not a magician who, by arriving suddenly on the scene, brought order out of chaos. His work was facilitated by the labours of several men who had been working hard when he was living in retirement, and who in some respects inferior were in others quite equal to himself. These were Schön, Altenstein, Stägemann, Schrötter, Auerswald, and Niebuhr. Professor Seeley examines at some length the share which several of these persons had in preparing the reforms which made Stein's reputation, and no one can read what he says without seeing that he wishes to be scrupulously just. I am inclined, however, to think that he has been misled by a very honourable scruple into being a little unjust to more than one of them, especially perhaps to Schön. There seems to me in all this biography a sort of undertone of "I am a professor myself; I must avoid the natural temptation of a man of thought to lean rather to those who are like himself than to the men of action." The analogy which he draws between the kind of work done by Stein and that done by Charles Earl Grey cannot be sustained. The difficulties in the way of the English statesman were quite enormously greater. I must, however, content myself with merely a hint to the reader, and pass on.

Stein's own view of his duties was extremely sane, and worthy of his clear and downright intelligence.

"At present," he wrote, "when the state is still occupied by a foreign power, the province of the internal administration is very confined, and foreign relations also are very simple, and the arrangements under which the general conduct of civil affairs can be carried on are different from those under which it will be proper to carry it on after the re-occupation of the land.

"When the monarchy is recovered and a free independent administration is restored, other administrative institutions will be formed, and the relation of the minister towards these will become somewhat different, with a view to which a special plan may be elaborated by way of preparation.

"In other words" (Professor Seeley continues), "Stein considered that his first business was to pay the French and get rid of

lived through the period of Stein's administration give him the greatest praise. If in almost every department he owed much-very much-to able instruments, Schön, Stägemann, Vincke, and so many more, that is only the common case of all great ministers. How many people in this country, out of the West End of London, know the name of Sir Henry Thring, and yet who, that has been at all behind the scenes, is ignorant of the very considerable part he has played in British legislation during the last half generation?

The old Prussian administrative system, which had worked extremely well under the minute and restless supervision of the Great King, who inherited the Nürnberg business habits of the Hohenzollern family, broke down pitiably in the hands of weaker men, and to Stein must belong the credit of having initiated reforms which, in the words of Mr. Morier, led to the "creation of the ablest and the most patriotic bureaucracy which ever weakened the plea of self-government by the plea of good government."

Stein's attention was turned in a new direction by the Spanish insurrection, by the lectures of Fichte at Berlin, and by the feeling gradually forced upon him, thanks to the frightful exactions of the French, that even the most unfortunate war could hardly ruin Prussia more effectually than she was already ruined. He set to work strenuously to prepare for another struggle. It has been said that he worked through the Moral and Scientific Union, better known by its popular name of the Tugendbund, but Professor Seeley shows that this is

an error.

Stein was connected with some societies whose objects were akin to those of the Tugendbund, but not with that particular organisation. To the army reforms of the king and Scharnhorst he gave his fullest sympathy, and an account of them is one of the most valuable portions of these three volumes.

Amongst the many parts, however, which Stein was unfit to play was that of a successful conspirator, and a curiously maladroit letter which he had written, falling into the hands of Napoleon, led first to his retirement and then to his proscription.

The king, in taking leave of him, expressed himself thus :

"It is indeed a most painful feeling to me that I am compelled to part with a man of your sort, who had the most just claim on my confidence, and at the same time had the public confidence, in the most lively degree.

"It is a consolation that these reflexionsand with them the consciousness of having laid the first foundation, given the first impulse to a new-improved and strengthened organisation of the fabric of the state, which lay in ruinsmust afford you the deepest and at the same time the noblest satisfaction and solace."

It would be difficult to sum up more neatly Stein's ministerial career. He gathered into one the best ideas which were afloat, and bringing his great force of character to bear-a force of character which secured him confidence outside and acquiescence inside the court, gave the first impulse to a new improved and strengthened organisation of the Prussian monarchy.

He left a political testament behind. him, not an elaborate document like that which is connected with the name of Hardenberg, but a short summary of what he thought necessary for the good of the state. The hand that held the pen was Schön's, but Professor Seeley has no difficulty in showing that the views expressed were really Stein's, and that the fallen minister's powerful individuality had impressed itself most strongly on all who were brought into contact with him.

Denounced by Napoleon in a decree signed at Madrid as "Le nommé Stein," he had to fly for his life, and, aided by various friends, he escaped to Prague, where he renewed his acquaintance with the publicist Gentz, to whom Professor Seeley pays the very undue compliment of describing him as the "Burke of Germany." From Prague he went to Brünn, whera