He copied the
ancient decrees of Colbert as to naval personnel. He would have gone as
far as assurance against non-employment. In the dominion of the King, he
said, no one should die of hunger.
The Junker made a force of Prussia; he made Prussia itself. It was due
to him that she passed after 1815 from the form of a Polizeistaat to the
form of Kulturstaat, the latter only an expansion of the former. In
place of a watchful, regulating, and vexatious State she became an
organized State, the instructor of youth, the protector of religion, the
source of inspiration for agricultural reforms, and all great commercial
and industrial enterprises. This State was not an emanation from the
national will, but the creator of a nation, the living and moving
self-incarnation of the Hegelian "idea," that is to say, the Divine
thought.
Of all the German aristocracy the noble of Pomerania or Brandenburg, the
Prussian Junker, represented this social type most definitely. In the
south the liberal tendencies--to be exact, the memories of the French
Revolution--persisted far into the nineteenth century. But it is well
known that German unity was accomplished by military force and against
liberalism.
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