In one of his speeches he defends himself and his friends against the charge of being enemies to freedom; "that they were not," he says; "Absolutism with us is closely connected with the omnipotence of the _Geheimrath_ and the conceited omniscience of the Professors who sit behind the green table, a product, and I venture to maintain a necessary product, of the Prussian method of education.

This product, the bureaucracy, I have never loved." When, as he often does, he maintains that the Prussian Parliament does not represent the people, he is thinking of the predominance among them of officials, for we must always remember that many of the extreme Liberal party and some of their most active leaders were men who were actually at that time in the service of the Crown.
It was the introduction of a Representative Assembly that for the first time in Prussian history made possible a Conservative opposition against the Liberalism of the Prussian Government.

There are two kinds of Liberalism.

In one sense of the word it means freedom of debate, freedom of the press, the power of the individual as against the Government, independence of character, and personal freedom.

Of Liberalism in this sense of the word there was indeed little in the Prussian Government.
But Liberalism also meant the overthrow of the old established institutions inherited from the Middle Ages, especially the destruction of all privileges held by the nobility; it meant on the Continent opposition to all form of dogmatic religious teaching; it meant the complete subjection of the Church to the State; it meant the abolition of all local distinctions and the introduction of a uniform system of government chiefly imitated from French institutions.