Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/319

 consequence to attend to, always strives to magnify his little routine business into great transactions of state, and affects mysterious wisdom by the knowing wink and the smile of the augur. Most of my colleagues were serious and well-informed men—not, indeed, statesmen of the highest order—but attentive observers and good reasoners, of whom one could learn something. The minister with whom my relations became most agreeable was Count Galen, remarkable to tell—the representative of the Prussian Government which only a few years before had prosecuted me as a revolutionary offender, a state-criminal. Count Galen, a Westphalian, was a kinsman of the Count Wolf-Metternich, whose tenant my grandfather had been, and in whose castle I was born. Count Galen had, as a young man, been a visitor in the Gracht, the “Burg” of Liblar, and he remembered my grandfather, the “Burghalfen,” quite well. That I, the grandson of that “Burghalfen,” should now turn up at the Spanish Court as the diplomatic colleague of Count Wolf-Metternich's kinsman, seemed to us a fantastic, but also a propitious, whim of fortune, and our common memories of the “Burg” at Liblar and its inhabitants formed the subject of many a pleasant talk. Count Galen took a lively interest in American affairs, and from his utterances I could form an intelligent conclusion as to the true nature of the attitude of the Prussian Government with regard to our internal conflict. A considerable portion of the Prussian nobility, as well as many officers of the army, hating democracy and wishing that the Republic of the United States, as the greatest and most attractive example of democracy, should fail, and also believing that our slave-holders as a class corresponded most nearly to the aristocracy in European countries, instinctively sympathized with the insurgent Southern Confederacy. But all the rest of the Prussian people, that is, an