of my own knowledge; it certainly is not a pleasant institution for foreigners to come across, though agreeableness to travellers is but of very second-rate importance.  But it is quite certain that the Prussian bureaucracy, though we, for a moment, half admire it at a distance, does not permanently please the most intelligent and liberal Prussians at home.  What are two among the principal aims of the Fortschritt Partei—­the party of progress—­as Mr. Grant Duff, the most accurate and philosophical of our describers, delineates them?

First, “a liberal system, conscientiously carried out in all the details of the administration, with a view to avoiding the scandals now of frequent occurrence, when an obstinate or bigoted official sets at defiance the liberal initiations of the Government, trusting to backstairs influence”.

Second, “an easy method of bringing to justice guilty officials, who are at present, as in France, in all conflicts with simple citizens, like men armed cap-a-pie fighting with defenceless”.  A system against which the most intelligent native liberals bring even with colour of reason such grave objections, is a dangerous model for foreign imitation.

The defects of bureaucracy are, indeed, well known.  It is a form of Government which has been tried often enough in the world, and it is easy to show what, human nature being what it in the long run is, the defects of a bureaucracy must in the long run be.

It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results; or, as Burke put it, “that they will think the substance of business not to be much more important than the forms of it”.  Their whole education and all the habit of their lives make them do so.  They are brought young into the particular part of the public service to which they are attached; they are occupied for years in learning its forms—­afterwards, for years too, in applying these forms to trifling matters.  They are, to use the phrase of an old writer, “but the tailors of business; they cut the clothes, but they do not find the body”.  Men so trained must come to think the routine of business not a means, but an end—­to imagine the elaborate machinery of which they form a part, and from which they derive their dignity, to be a grand and achieved result, not a working and changeable instrument.  But in a miscellaneous world, there is now one evil and now another.  The very means which best helped you yesterday, may very likely be those which most impede you to-morrow—­you may want to do a different thing to-morrow, and all your accumulation of means for yesterday’s work is but an obstacle to the new work.  The Prussian military system is the theme of popular wonder now, yet it sixty years pointed the moral against form.  We have all heard the saying that “Frederic the Great lost the battle of Jena”.  It was the system which he had established—­a good system for his wants and his times—­which,