Chapter VII (2)

In the meantime army upon army was moving to the support of Napoleon, from France, from Spain, from Holland, and from Southern Germany. The fortresses of the Elbe and the Oder, which ought to have been his barrier, had become his base of operations; and so enormous were the forces at his command, that, after manning every stronghold in Central Europe, he was able at the beginning of June to bring 140,000 men into the field beyond the Vistula. The Russians had also received reinforcements, but Bennigsen's army was still weaker than that of the enemy. It was Bennigsen, nevertheless, who began the attack; and now, as in the winter campaign, he attempted to surprise and crush the northern corps of Ney. The same general movement of the French army followed as in January. The Russian commander, outnumbered by the French, retired to his fortified camp at Heilsberg. After sustaining a bloody repulse in an attack upon this position, Napoleon drew Bennigsen from his lair by marching straight upon Königsberg. Bennigsen supposed himself to be in time to deal with an isolated corps; he found himself face to face with the whole forces of the enemy at Friedland, accepted battle, and was unable to save his army from a severe and decisive defeat (June 14). The victory of Friedland brought the French into Königsberg. Bennigsen retired behind the Niemen; and on the 19th of June an armistice closed the operations of the hostile forces upon the frontiers of Russia. [139]

The situation of Bennigsen's army was by no means desperate. His men had not been surrounded; they had lost scarcely any prisoners; they felt no fear of the French. But the general exaggerated the seriousness of his defeat. Like most of his officers, he was weary of the war, and felt no sympathy with the motives which led the Emperor to fight for the common cause of Europe. The politicians who surrounded Alexander urged him to withdraw Russia from a conflict in which she had nothing to gain. The Emperor wavered. The tardiness of Great Britain, the continued neutrality of Austria, cast a doubt upon the wisdom of his own disinterestedness; and he determined to meet Napoleon, and ascertain the terms on which Russia might be reconciled to the master of half the Continent.

[Interview of Napoleon and Alexander at Tilsit, June 25.]

On the 25th of June the two sovereigns met one another on the raft of Tilsit, in the midstream of the river Niemen. The conversation, which is alleged to have been opened by Alexander with an expression of hatred towards England, was heard by no one but the speakers. But whatever the eagerness or the reluctance of the Russian monarch to sever himself from Great Britain, the purpose of Napoleon was effected. Alexander surrendered himself to the addresses of a conqueror who seemed to ask for nothing and to offer everything. The negotiations were prolonged; the relations of the two monarchs became more and more intimate; and the issue of the struggle for life or death was that Russia accepted the whole scheme of Napoleonic conquest, and took its place by the side of the despoiler in return for its share of the prey. It was in vain that the King of Prussia had rejected Napoleon's offers after the battle of Eylau, in fidelity to his engagements towards his ally. Promises, treaties, and pity were alike cast to the winds. The unfortunate Frederick William received no more embraces; the friend with whom he was to stand or fall bargained away the larger half of his dominions to Napoleon, and even rectified the Russian frontier at his expense. Prussia's continued existence in any shape whatever was described as a concession made by Napoleon to Alexander. By the public articles of the Treaties of Tilsit, signed by France, Russia, and Prussia in the first week of July, the King of Prussia ceded to Napoleon the whole of his dominions west of the Elbe, and the entire territory which Prussia had gained in the three partitions of Poland, with the exception of a district upon the Lower Vistula connecting Pomerania with Eastern Prussia. Out of the ceded territory on the west of the Elbe a Kingdom of Westphalia was created for Napoleon's brother Jerome; the Polish provinces of Prussia, with the exception of a strip made over to Alexander, were formed into the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw, and presented to Napoleon's vassal, the King of Saxony. Russia recognised the Napoleonic client-states in Italy, Holland, and Germany. The Czar undertook to offer his mediation in the conflict between France and Great Britain; a secret article provided that, in the event of Great Britain and France being at war on the ensuing 1st of December, Prussia should declare war against Great Britain.

[Secret Treaty of Alliance.]

[Conspiracy of the two Emperors.]

Such were the stipulations contained in the formal Treaties of Peace between the three Powers. These, however, contained but a small part of the terms agreed upon between the masters of the east and of the west. A secret Treaty of Alliance, distinct from the Treaty of Peace, was also signed by Napoleon and Alexander. In the conversations which won over the Czar to the cause of France, Napoleon had offered to Alexander the spoils of Sweden and the Ottoman Empire. Finland and the Danubian provinces were not too high a price for the support of a Power whose arms could paralyse Austria and Prussia. In return for the promise of this extension of his Empire, Alexander undertook, in the event of Great Britain refusing terms of peace dictated by himself, to unite his arms to those of Napoleon, and to force the neutral maritime Powers, Denmark and Portugal, to take part in the struggle against England. The annexation of Moldavia and Wallachia to the Russian Empire was provided for under the form of a French mediation. In the event of the Porte declining this mediation, Napoleon undertook to assist Russia to liberate all the European territory subject to the yoke of the Sultan, with the exception of Roumelia and Constantinople. A partition of the liberated territory between France and Russia, as well as the establishment of the Napoleonic house in Spain, probably formed the subject rather of a verbal understanding than of any written agreement. [140]

Such was this vast and threatening scheme, conceived by the man whose whole career had been one consistent struggle for personal domination, accepted by the man who among the rulers of the Continent had hitherto shown the greatest power of acting for a European end, and of interesting himself in a cause not directly his own. In the imagination of Napoleon, the national forces of the western continent had now ceased to exist. Austria excepted, there was no State upon the mainland whose army and navy were not prospectively in the hands of himself and his new ally. The commerce of Great Britain, already excluded from the greater part of Europe, was now to be shut out from all the rest; the armies which had hitherto fought under British subsidies for the independence of Europe, the navies which had preserved their existence by neutrality or by friendship with England, were soon to be thrown without distinction against that last foe. If even at this moment an English statesman who had learnt the secret agreement of Tilsit might have looked without fear to the future of his country, it was not from any imperfection in the structure of Continental tyranny. The fleets of Denmark and Portugal might be of little real avail against English seamen; the homes of the English people might still be as secure from foreign invasion as when Nelson guarded the seas; but it was not from any vestige of political honour surviving in the Emperor Alexander. Where Alexander's action was of decisive importance, in his mediation between France and Prussia, he threw himself without scruple on to the side of oppression. It lay within his power to gain terms of peace for Prussia as lenient as those which Austria had gained at Campo Formio and at Lunéville: he sacrificed Prussia, as he allied himself against the last upholders of national independence in Europe, in order that he might himself receive Finland and the Danubian Provinces.

[English expedition against Denmark, July, 1807.]

Two days before the signature of the Treaty of Tilsit the British troops which had once been so anxiously expected by the Czar landed in the island of Rügen. The struggle in which they were intended to take their part was over. Sweden alone remained in arms; and even the Quixotic pugnacity of King Gustavus was unable to save Stralsund from a speedy capitulation. But the troops of Great Britain were not destined to return without striking a blow. The negotiations between Napoleon and Alexander had scarcely begun, when secret intelligence of their purport was sent to the British Government. [141] It became known in London that the fleet of Denmark was to be seized by Napoleon, and forced to fight against Great Britain. Canning and his colleagues acted with the promptitude that seldom failed the British Government when it could effect its object by the fleet alone. They determined to anticipate Napoleon's violation of Danish neutrality, and to seize upon the navy which would otherwise be seized by France and Russia.

[Bombardment of Copenhagen, Sept. 2.]

On the 28th of July a fleet with 20,000 men on board set sail from the British coast. The troops landed in Denmark in the middle of August, and united with the corps which had already been despatched to Rügen. The Danish Government was summoned to place its navy in the hands of Great Britain, in order that it might remain as a deposit in some British port until the conclusion of peace. While demanding this sacrifice of Danish neutrality, England undertook to protect the Danish nation and colonies from the hostility of Napoleon, and to place at the disposal of its Government every means of naval and military defence. Failing the surrender of the fleet, the English declared that they would bombard Copenhagen. The reply given to this summons was such as might be expected from a courageous nation exasperated against Great Britain by its harsh treatment of neutral ships of commerce, and inclined to submit to the despot of the Continent rather than to the tyrants of the seas. Negotiations proved fruitless, and on the 2nd of September the English opened fire on Copenhagen. For three days and nights the city underwent a bombardment of cruel efficiency. Eighteen hundred houses were levelled, the town was set on fire in several places, and a large number of the inhabitants lost their lives. At length the commander found himself compelled to capitulate. The fleet was handed over to Great Britain, with all the stores in the arsenal of Copenhagen. It was brought to England, no longer under the terms of a friendly neutrality, but as a prize of war.

The captors themselves were ashamed of their spoil. England received an armament which had been taken from a people who were not our enemies, and by an attack which was not war, with more misgiving than applause. In Europe the seemingly unprovoked assault upon a weak neutral State excited the utmost indignation. The British Ministry, who were prevented from making public the evidence which they had received of the intention of the two Emperors, were believed to have invented the story of the Secret Treaty. The Danish Government denied that Napoleon had demanded their co-operation; Napoleon and Alexander themselves assumed the air of indignant astonishment. But the facts alleged by Canning and his colleagues were correct. The conspiracy of the two Emperors was no fiction. The only question still remaining open--and this is indeed an essential one--relates to the engagements entered into by the Danish Government itself. Napoleon in his correspondence of this date alludes to certain promises made to him by the Court of Denmark, but he also complains that these promises had not been fulfilled; and the context of the letter renders it almost certain that, whatever may have been demanded by Napoleon, nothing more was promised by Denmark than that its ports should be closed to English vessels. [142] Had the British Cabinet possessed evidence of the determination of the Danish Government to transfer its fleet to Napoleon without resistance, the attack upon Denmark, considered as virtually an act of war, would not have been unjust. But beyond an alleged expression of Napoleon at Tilsit, no such evidence was even stated to have reached London; and the undoubted conspiracy of the Emperors against Danish neutrality was no sufficient ground for an action on the part of Great Britain which went so far beyond the mere frustration of their designs. The surrender of the Danish fleet demanded by England would have been an unqualified act of war on the part of Denmark against Napoleon; it was no mere guarantee for a continued neutrality. Nor had the British Government the last excuse of an urgent and overwhelming necessity. Nineteen Danish men-of-war would not have turned the scale against England. The memory of Trafalgar might well have given a British Ministry courage to meet its enemies by the ordinary methods of war. Had the forces of Denmark been far larger than they actually were, the peril of Great Britain was not so extreme as to excuse the wrong done to mankind by an example encouraging all future belligerents to anticipate one another in forcing each neutral state to take part with themselves.

[Napoleon's demands upon Portugal.]

The fleet which Napoleon had meant to turn against this country now lay safe within Portsmouth harbour. Denmark, in bitter resentment, declared war against Great Britain, and rendered some service to the Continental League by the attacks of its privateers upon British merchant-vessels in the Baltic. The second neutral Power whose fate had been decided by the two Emperors at Tilsit received the summons of Napoleon a few days before the attack on Copenhagen. The Regent of Portugal himself informed the British Government that he had been required by Napoleon to close his ports to British vessels, to declare war on England, and to confiscate all British property within his dominions. Placed between a Power which could strip him of his dominions on land, and one which could despoil him of everything he possessed beyond the sea, the Regent determined to maintain his ancient friendship with Great Britain, and to submit to Napoleon only in so far as the English Government would excuse him, as acting under coercion. Although a nominal state of war arose between Portugal and England, the Regent really acted in the interest of England, and followed the advice of the British Cabinet up to the end.

[Treaty of Fontainebleau between France and Spain for the partition of Portugal, Oct. 27.]

The end was soon to come. The demands of Napoleon, arbitrary and oppressive as they were, by no means expressed his full intentions towards Portugal. He had determined to seize upon this country, and to employ it as a means for extending his own dominion over the whole of the Spanish Peninsula. An army-corps, under the command of Junot, had been already placed in the Pyrenees. On the 12th of October Napoleon received the answer of the Regent of Portugal, consenting to declare war upon England, and only rejecting the dishonourable order to confiscate all English property. This single act of resistance was sufficient for Napoleon's purpose. He immediately recalled his ambassador from Lisbon, and gave orders to Junot to cross the frontier, and march upon Portugal. The King of Spain, who was to be Napoleon's next victim, was for the moment employed as his accomplice. A treaty was concluded at Fontainebleau between Napoleon and King Charles IV. for the partition of Portugal (Oct. 27). [143] In return for the cession of the kingdom of Etruria, which was still nominally governed by a member of the Spanish house, the King of Spain was promised half the Portuguese colonies, along with the title of Emperor of the Indies; the northern provinces of Portugal were reserved for the infant King of Etruria, its southern provinces for Godoy, Minister of Charles IV.; the central districts were to remain in the hands of France, and to be employed as a means of regaining the Spanish colonies from England upon the conclusion of a general peace.

[Junot invades Portugal, Nov., 1807.]

[Flight of the House of Braganza.]

Not one of these provisions was intended to be carried into effect. The conquest of Portugal was but a part of the conquest of the whole peninsula. But neither the Spanish Court nor the Spanish people suspected Napoleon's design. Junot advanced without resistance through the intervening Spanish territory, and pushed forward upon Lisbon with the utmost haste. The speed at which Napoleon's orders forced him to march reduced his army to utter prostration, and the least resistance would have resulted in its ruin. But the Court of Lisbon had determined to quit a country which they could not hope to defend against the master of the Continent. Already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the House of Braganza had been familiar with the project of transferring the seat of their Government to Brazil; and now, with the approval of Great Britain, the Regent resolved to maintain the independence of his family by flight across the Atlantic. As Junot's troops approached the capital, the servants of the palace hastily stowed the royal property on ship-board. On the 29th of November, when the French were now close at hand, the squadron which bore the House of Braganza to its colonial home dropped down the Tagus, saluted by the cannon of the English fleet that lay in the same river. Junot entered the capital a few hours later, and placed himself at the head of the Government without encountering any opposition. The occupation of Portugal was described by Napoleon as a reprisal for the bombardment of Copenhagen. It excited but little attention in Europe; and even at the Spanish Court the only feeling was one of satisfaction at the approaching aggrandisement of the Bourbon monarchy. The full significance of Napoleon's intervention in the affairs of the Peninsula was not discovered until some months were passed.

[Prussia after the Peace of Tilsit.]

[Stein Minister, Oct. 5, 1807.]

Portugal and Denmark had felt the consequences of the peace made at Tilsit. Less, however, depended upon the fate of the Danish fleet and the Portuguese Royal Family than upon the fate of Prussia, the most cruelly wronged of all the victims sacrificed by Alexander's ambition. The unfortunate Prussian State, reduced to half its former extent, devastated and impoverished by war, and burdened with the support of a French army, found in the crisis of its ruin the beginning of a worthier national life. Napoleon, in his own vindictive jealousy, unwittingly brought to the head of the Prussian Government the ablest and most patriotic statesman of the Continent. Since the spring of 1807 Baron Hardenberg had again been the leading Minister of Prussia, and it was to his counsel that the King's honourable rejection of a separate peace after the battle of Eylau was due. Napoleon could not permit this Minister, whom he had already branded as a partisan of Great Britain, to remain in power; he insisted upon Hardenberg's dismissal, and recommended the King of Prussia to summon Stein, who was as yet known to Napoleon only as a skilful financier, likely to succeed in raising the money which the French intended to extort.

[Edict of Emancipation, Oct. 9, 1807.]

Stein entered upon office on the 5th of October, 1807, with almost dictatorial power. The need of the most radical changes in the public services, as well as in the social order of the Prussian State, had been brought home to all enlightened men by the disasters of the war; and a commission, which included among its members the historian Niebuhr, had already sketched large measures of reform before Hardenberg quitted office. Stein's appointment brought to the head of the State a man immeasurably superior to Hardenberg in the energy necessary for the execution of great changes, and gave to those who were the most sincerely engaged in civil or military reform a leader unrivalled in patriotic zeal, in boldness, and in purity of character. The first great legislative measure of Stein was the abolition of serfage, and of all the legal distinctions which fixed within the limits of their caste the noble, the citizen, and the peasant. In setting his name to the edict [144] which, on the 9th of October, 1807, made an end of the mediæval framework of Prussian society, Stein was indeed but consummating a change which the progress of neighbouring States must have forced upon Prussia, whoever held its government. The Decree was framed upon the report of Hardenberg's Commission, and was published by Stein within six days after his own entry upon office. Great as were the changes involved in this edict of emancipation, it contained no more than was necessary to bring Prussia up to the level of the least advanced of the western Continental States. In Austria pure serfage had been abolished by Maria Theresa thirty years before; it vanished, along with most of the legal distinctions of class, wherever the victories of France carried a new political order; even the misused peasantry of Poland had been freed from their degrading yoke within the borders of the newly-founded Duchy of Warsaw. If Prussia was not to renounce its partnership in European progress and range itself with its barbarous eastern neighbour, that order which fettered the peasant to the soil, and limited every Prussian to the hereditary occupations of his class could no longer be maintained. It is not as an achievement of individual genius, but as the most vivid expression of the differences between the old and the new Europe, that the first measure of Stein deserves a closer examination.

[The Prussian peasant before and after the Edict of Oct. 9.]

The Edict of October 9, 1807, extinguished all personal servitude; it permitted the noble, the citizen, and the peasant to follow any calling; it abolished the rule which prevented land held by a member of one class from passing into the hands of another class; it empowered families to free their estates from entail. Taken together, these enactments substitute the free disposition of labour and property for the outworn doctrine which Prussia had inherited from the feudal ages, that what a man is born that he shall live and die. The extinction of serfage, though not the most prominent provision of the Edict, was the one whose effects were the soonest felt. In the greater part of Prussia the marks of serfage, as distinct from payments and services amounting to a kind of rent, were the obligation of the peasant to remain on his holding, and the right of the lord to take the peasant's children as unpaid servants into his house. A general relation of obedience and command existed, as between an hereditary subject and master, although the lord could neither exact an arbitrary amount of labour nor inflict the cruel punishments which had been common in Poland and Hungary. What the villein was in England in the thirteenth century, that the serf was in Prussia in the year 1806; and the change which in England gradually elevated the villein into the free copyholder was that change which, so many centuries later, the Prussian legislator effected by one great measure. Stein made the Prussian peasant what the English copyholder had become at the accession of Henry VII., and what the French peasant had been before 1789, a free person, but one bound to render fixed dues and service to the lord of the manor in virtue of the occupation of his land. These feudal dues and services, which the French peasant, accustomed for centuries before the Revolution to consider himself as the full proprietor of the land, treated as a mere grievance and abuse, Stein considered to be the best form in which the joint interest of the lord and the peasant could be maintained. It was reserved for Hardenberg, four years later, to free the peasant from all obligations towards his lord, and to place him in unshackled proprietorship of two-thirds of his former holding, the lord receiving the remaining one-third in compensation for the loss of feudal dues. Neither Stein nor Hardenberg interfered with the right of the lord to act as judge and police-magistrate within the limits of his manor; and the hereditary legal jurisdiction, which was abolished in Scotland in 1747, and in France in 1789, continued unchanged in Prussia down to the year 1848.

[Relative position of the peasant in Prussia and England.]

The history of Agrarian Reform upon the Continent shows how vast was the interval of time by which some of the greatest social changes in England had anticipated the corresponding changes in almost all other nations. But if the Prussian peasant at the beginning of this century remained in the servile condition which had passed out of mind in Great Britain before the Reformation, the early prosperity of the peasant in England was dearly purchased by a subsequent decline which has made his present lot far inferior to that of the children or grandchildren of the Prussian serf. However heavy the load of the Prussian serf, his holding was at least protected by law from absorption into the domain of his lord. Before sufficient capital had been amassed in Prussia to render landed property an object of competition, the forced military service of Frederick had made it a rule of State that the farmsteads of the peasant class must remain undiminished in number, at whatever violence to the laws of the market or the desires of great landlords. No process was permitted to take place corresponding to that by which in England, after the villein had become the free copyholder, the lord, with or without technical legal right, terminated the copyhold tenure of his retainer, and made the land as much his own exclusive property as the chairs and tables in his house. In Prussia, if the law kept the peasant on the land, it also kept the land for the peasant. Economic conditions, in the absence of such control in England, worked against the class of small holders. Their early enfranchisement in fact contributed to their extinction. It would perhaps have been better for the English labouring class to remain bound by a semi-servile tie to their land, than to gain a free holding which the law, siding with the landlord, treated as terminable at the expiration of particular lives, and which the increasing capital of the rich made its favourite prey. It is little profit to the landless, resourceless English labourer to know that his ancestor was a yeoman when the Prussian was a serf. Long as the bondage of the peasant on the mainland endured, prosperity came at last. The conditions which once distinguished agricultural England from the Continent are now reversed. Nowhere on the Continent is there a labouring class so stripped and despoiled of all interest in the soil, so sedulously excluded from all possibilities of proprietorship, as in England. In England alone the absence of internal revolution and foreign pressure has preserved a class whom a life spent in toil leaves as bare and dependent as when it began, and to whom the only boon which their country can offer is the education which may lead them to quit it.

[Reform of Prussian Army.]

[Short service.]

Besides the commission which had drafted the Edict of Emancipation, Stein found a military commission engaged on a plan for the reorganisation of the Prussian army. The existing system forced the peasant to serve in the ranks for twenty years, and drew the officers from the nobility, leaving the inhabitants of towns without either the duty or the right to enter the army at all. Since the battle of Jena, no one doubted that the principle of universal liability to military service must be introduced into Prussia; on the other hand, the very disasters of the State rendered it impossible to maintain an army on anything approaching to its former scale. With half its territory torn from it, and the remainder devastated by war, Prussia could barely afford to keep 40,000 soldiers in arms. Such were the conditions laid before the men who were charged with the construction of a new Prussian military system. Their conclusions, imperfect in themselves, and but partially carried out in the succeeding years, have nevertheless been the basis of the latest military organisation of Prussia and of Europe generally. The problem was solved by the adoption of a short period of service and the rapid drafting of the trained conscript into a reserve-force. Scharnhorst, President of the Military Commission, to whom more than to any one man Prussia owed its military revival, proposed to maintain an Active Army of 40,000 men; a Reserve, into which soldiers should pass after short service in the active army; a Landwehr, to be employed only for the internal defence of the country; and a Landsturm, or general arming of the population, for a species of guerilla warfare. Scharnhorst's project was warmly supported by Stein, who held a seat and a vote on the Military Commission; and the system of short service, with a Reserve, was immediately brought into action, though on a very limited scale. The remainder of the scheme had to wait for the assistance of events. The principle of universal military obligation was first proclaimed in the war of 1813, when also the Landwehr was first enrolled.

[Stein's plans of political reform.]

[Design for a Parliament, for Municipalities, and District boards.]

The reorganisation of the Prussian military system and the emancipation of the peasant, though promoted by Stein's accession to power, did not originate in Stein himself; the distinctive work of Stein was a great scheme of political reform. Had Stein remained longer in power, he would have given to Prussia at least the beginnings of constitutional government. Events drove him from office when but a small part of his project was carried into effect; but the project itself was great and comprehensive. He designed to give Prussia a Parliament, and to establish a system of self-government in its towns and country districts. Stein had visited England in his youth. The history and the literature of England interested him beyond those of any other country; and he had learnt from England that the partnership of the nation in the work of government, so far from weakening authority, animates it with a force which no despotic system can long preserve. Almost every important State-paper written by Stein denounces the apathy of the civil population of Prussia, and attributes it to their exclusion from all exercise of public duties. He declared that the nation must be raised from its torpor by the establishment of representative government and the creation of free local institutions in town and country. Stein was no friend of democracy. Like every other Prussian statesman he took for granted the exercise of a vigorous monarchical power at the centre of the State; but around the permanent executive he desired to gather the Council of the Nation, checking at least the caprices of Cabinet-rule, and making the opinion of the people felt by the monarch. Stein's Parliament would have been a far weaker body than the English House of Commons, but it was at least not intended to be a mockery, like those legislative bodies which Napoleon and his clients erected as the disguise of despotism. The transaction of local business in the towns and country districts, which had hitherto belonged to officials of the Crown, Stein desired to transfer in part to bodies elected by the inhabitants themselves. The functions allotted to the new municipal bodies illustrated the modest and cautious nature of Stein's attempt in the direction of self-government, including no more than the care of the poor, the superintendence of schools, and the maintenance of streets and public buildings. Finance remained partly, police wholly, in the hands of the central Government. Equally limited were the powers which Stein proposed to entrust to the district councils elected by the rural population. In comparison with the self-government of England or America, the self-government which Stein would have introduced into Prussia was of the most elementary character; yet his policy stood out in striking contrast to that which in every client-state of Napoleon was now crushing out the last elements of local independence under a rigid official centralisation.

[Municipal reform alone carried out.]

Stein was indeed unable to transform Prussia as he desired. Of the legislative, the municipal, and the district reforms which he had sketched, the municipal reform was the only one which he had time to carry out before being driven from power; and for forty years the municipal institutions created by Stein were the only fragment of liberty which Prussia enjoyed. A vehement opposition to reform was excited among the landowners, and supported by a powerful party at the Court. Stein was detested by the nobles whose peasants he had emancipated, and by the Berlin aristocracy, which for the last ten years had maintained the policy of friendship with France, and now declared the only safety of the Prussian State to lie in unconditional submission to Napoleon. The fire of patriotism, of energy, of self-sacrifice, which burned in Stein made him no representative of the Prussian governing classes of his time. It was not long before the landowners, who deemed him a Jacobin, and the friends of the French, who called him a madman, had the satisfaction of seeing the Minister sent into banishment by order of Napoleon himself (Dec., 1808). Stein left the greater part of his work uncompleted, but he had not laboured in vain. The years of his ministry in 1807 and 1808 were the years that gathered together everything that was worthiest in Prussia in the dawn of a national revival, and prepared the way for that great movement in which, after an interval of the deepest gloom, Stein was himself to light the nation to its victory.