text:  For myself I can say nothing more about public affairs than that while I have little confidence in the present leaders I have an unbounded trust in Providence; and that necessary as a CONSTITUTION _is to Prussia and beneficial as it would be if fairly worked I expect nothing from any machinery which will necessarily be opposed by the persons who have possession of the king's ear and the court influence generally_: and I see plainly that we are still as we have hitherto been to be governed by salaried persons equipped with mere book-learning without any substantial interest in the country without property by mere bureaucratists--a system which will last so long as it can last--'_Das geht so lange es geht!_' These four words contain the soul of our and suchlike spiritless (_geistlos_) government machines:--in the first place salaried--and this implies a tendency to maintain and to multiply the number of salaried officials; then _book-learned_--that is living in the world of the dead letter and not in the actual world; _without interest_--for these men stand in no connexion with any class of the citizens which are the mass of the state; they are a peculiar caste these men of the quill ("_die Schreiberkaste_;") lastly _without property_--this implies that they stand unmoved by all changes that affect property in sunshine or in rain with taxes high or low with old chartered rights maintained or destroyed with independent peasants or a rabble of mere journeymen with a dependence of the peasants on the proprietors or of all on the Jews and the bankers--'tis all one to the bureaucracy