For his own part he was no worshipper of idols, and he did not believe in political dogmas.

The welfare and the liberty of a country did not depend either in whole or in part upon the form of its Constitution or of its franchise.

Herr Bebel had once said that on the whole he preferred English conditions even to conditions in France.

But in England the franchise was not universal, equal, and direct.

Could it be said that Mecklenburg, which had no popular suffrage at all, was governed worse than Haiti, of which the world had lately heard such strange news, although Haiti could boast of possessing universal suffrage ?'[48] [48] _Times_, March 27, 1908.
But what Prince Buelow's speech showed, was that he was either deliberately parodying a style of scholastic reasoning with which he did not agree, or he was incapable of grasping the first conception of quantitative political thought.