Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/170

 there was scarcely any prospect for a Kammergerichts-Auskultator and Regierungs-Referendar, who had no relations whatever with the ministerial and higher official circles, of partaking in Prussian politics until he had traveled the monotonous road which would lead him, after decades of years through the grades of a bureaucratic career, to gain notice in the higher posts, and thereby win promotion. In the family circle in those days, men like Pommer-Esche and Delbrück were represented to me as model leaders on the official road, and work upon and within the Zollverein was recommended as the best line to strike into. So far as, at my then age, I seriously thought at all of an official career, I had diplomacy in view, even after my application to the minister Ancillon had evoked very little encouragement thereto from him. Not to me, but in exalted circles, he used to indicate Prince Felix Lichnowski as an example of what our diplomacy lacked, although it might have been surmised that this personage, as he exhibited himself at that time in Berlin, would not exactly come in the way of an appreciative estimate from a minister sprung from an Evangelical clerical stock.

The minister had the impression that the category of our "home-made" Prussian squirearchy did not furnish him with the desirable material to draw upon for our diplomacy, and was not adapted to make up for the want of address which he found in the personnel of this branch of the service. This impression was not absolutely unjustified. As minister, I have always had a fellow-provincial's kindness for native-born Prussian diplomatists, but my official sense of duty has rarely allowed me to gratify this preference; as a rule only when the personages in question were transferred to a diplomatic from a military position. In purely Prussian civil-diplomats, who have never, or only inadequately, come under the influence of military discipline, I have as a rule observed too strong a tendency to criticism, to "cocksureness," to opposition and personal touchiness, intensified by the discontent which the Old