Page:Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (IA lifeofhermajesty01fawc).pdf/124

 sincerity which gave his advice its weight and value. His early letters to the Prince are characterized by sharp criticism, such as few young men in any position would take in good part; and it is very much to the credit of the Prince that he was able to do so; for instance, on leaving England in 1841, Stockmar wrote a long letter to the Prince, in the course of which he dwells on the tendency he had observed in him to be carried away "by impulses and predilections for men and things which spring from mistaken or perverted feeling. This tendency, which on a close self-scrutiny you will find to be the result either of weakness or vanity, should because of its very origin be most strenuously subdued. The same defect too often leads your Royal Highness, even in matters of moment, to rest satisfied with mere talk, where action is alone appropriate. It is, therefore, not merely unworthy of you, but extremely mischievous."

Later, in 1847, although his affection for the Prince had grown greatly, and his confidence in his character still more, he calls him sharply to task for regarding the movement in German politics from a too exclusively dynastic standpoint, and also, with imperfect information, for expressing an opinion at all; he tells the Prince that he fails, from lack of knowledge and dynastic prejudice, rightly to grasp and appreciate the actual present condition and wants of the German people; that the current of opinion among thinking people in all classes in Germany was running strongly towards the conviction that the chief impediments to German national life were the dynastic sentiments, the pride and self-seeking of the numerous German princes; he declares that no men are so ignorant as the German princes of what was going on around them, and that their ignorance, arising from class prejudice, blinds them to their own true interests,