I can well imagine that in making the appointments to the Rhenish Governing Board in 1816 the same procedure was adopted as at the organization of Elsass-Lothringen in 1871.  The authorities who had to contribute a portion of their staff would not be likely to respond to the call of state requirements by putting their best foot foremost to accomplish the difficult task of assimilating a newly acquired population, but would have chosen those members of their offices whose departure was desired by their superiors or wished by themselves; in the board were to be found former secretaries of prefectures and other relics of the French administration.  The personnel did not all correspond to the ideal which floated unwarrantably enough before my eyes at twenty-one, and still less was this the case with the details of the current business.  I recollect that, what with the many differences of opinion between officials and governed, or with internal differences of opinion among each of these two categories, whose polemics for many years considerably swelled the bulk of the records, my habitual impression was, “Well, yes, that is one way of doing it”; and that questions, the decision of which one way or the other was not worth the paper wasted upon them, created a mass of business which a single prefect could have disposed of with the fourth part of the energy bestowed upon them.  Nevertheless, except for the subordinate officials, the day’s work was slight; as regards heads of departments especially, a mere sinecure.

I quitted Aachen with a very poor opinion of our bureaucracy, in detail and collectively, with the exception of the gifted President, Count Arnim-Boitzenburg.  My opinion of the detail became more favorable owing to my next subsequent experience in the government at Potsdam, to which I got transferred in the year 1837; because there, unlike the arrangement in other provinces, the indirect taxes were at the disposal of the government, and it was just these that were important to me if I wanted to make customs-policy the basis of my future.

The members of the board made a better impression upon me than those at Aachen; but yet, taking them as a whole, it was an impression of pigtail and periwig, in which category my youthful presumption also placed the paternal dignified President-in-Chief, von Bassewitz; while the President of the Aachen Government, Count Arnim, wore the generic wig of the state service, it is true, but no intellectual pigtail.  When therefore I quitted the service of the State for a country life, I imported into the relations which as a landed proprietor I had with the officials an opinion, which I now see to have been too mean, of the value of our bureaucracy, and perhaps too great an inclination to criticize them.  I remember that as substitute provincial president I had to give my verdict on a plan for abolishing the election of those officials; I expressed myself to the effect that the bureaucracy, as it ascended from the provincial president, sank in the general esteem; it had preserved it only in the person of the provincial president, who wore a Janus head, one face turned towards the bureaucracy, the other towards the country.