chafed nobody, because of the good understanding
between prince and people. Three-fourths
of this people are the moderately well-to-do
occupants of the plain, who had gradually been
acquiring an independence of their own, as the
nobles gave less and less attention to the
management of their estates, and lived chiefly at
court. The other fourth part consists of the
ruder inhabitants of the mountain, and the
townsfolk, whose industry had been for the
century repressed by interference of their guilds,
and who are still too much the listless followers
of custom. This state of affairs endured throughout
the French revolution, the wars of the Empire,
and the German war of liberty. Gotha
remained, therefore, a little patriarchal state
when in the year 'twenty-six the line of its own
dukes became extinct, and after much controversy
Gotha, parted from Altenburg, was joined
to Coburg under the rule of my father.—We are
not quoting Duke Ernest verbally, but are
giving his published thoughts, and in the first
person.

My father, energetic and independent, was not
received with enthusiasm by the all-powerful
bureaucracy of Gotha, which dreaded interference
with its privileges, while there was fear
also that Gotha would sink into the position of
a secondary capital, for the duke must reside
also at Coburg. My father, although active,
keen-witted, and energetic, was too personally
amiable to leave an opposition unconciliated.
He overcame great difficulties, and, without
disturbing the old course of things, put fresh
life into every branch of the government. He
was the father of his people, and of much of the
prosperity that Gotha now enjoys he was the
founder. But he had been born in days of
revolution and political catastrophe; he had spent
his youth rather in the camp than in the university;
modern theories and philosophical views of
life and history were strange to him; he was a
practical man who opposed every political
theorist. Yet for all that he had been the first
German prince who (in 'twenty-one) gave to his
land (Coburg Saalfeld) a form of liberal
constitution. The patriarchal system was destroyed
in Coburg when neither prince nor people had
in their hearts the spark of an idea of true
constitutional government. The result was in
Coburg much trouble and dissension, with the
growth of a rough democracy as the weed proper
to ill-tilled political soil. In Gotha, on the
other hand, all went in the old way pleasantly.
Gotha was, therefore, the favourite care of my
father, and the disorder on the other side of the
Thuringian forest was all laid by him at the door
of constitutional government, which had had its
trial and failed under it. There was a time, we
remember, when a son of the same father told
us that in England constitutional government
was on its trial.

So matters stood, says Duke Ernest, when,
after an absence of six years, not counting short
visits, I came home at my father's request, in
the year 'forty-two. My father and I were one
in affection, one in aspiration, sharing the same
delights in art and nature. I naturally had at
once a seat and voice in the ministry, and,
being active, trained to business, besides regarding
as an impartial stranger the men and
machinery of state, it was easy to see the strong
and the weak points of the government. From
my earliest youth, says this duke, I gave
almost instinctive allegiance to liberal
democratic principles. I was, in the right sense of
the word, a child of my time. In month-long
visits to Paris, London, and especially Brussels,
where we two brothers dwelt for the purpose of
study, our family position and our own impulses
had easily brought us into intellectual
intercourse with notable men, who were not exactly,
like Quetelet, our teachers; for example, the
two Brouckères, Gerlache, the two brothers
Bulwer, Arivabeni, Berger, Count Arconati, and
others. Interest in political questions had early
been awakened in us, and I went to the
University of Bonn with my mind made up and in
direct opposition to the reactionary aristocratic
views of the professors. It is easily to be
understood that when I went home I must often
oppose in the cabinet narrow-minded action of
an official world, liberal only in name; and
although, out of respect for my father, I did not
break with the men I opposed, I let them see
my mind so clearly that they were little
disposed to be my friends. There were few people
of real mark then in Gotha. I was obliged to
look abroad for higher intercourse, while there
were men at home not disposed to forget it if I
failed to take them at the valuation they would
set upon themselves. The two happy years
between my marriage and my father's death, in
January, 'forty-four, I spent at home or in
travel. When my father's death added to
my responsibilities, I began work on a defined
plan. Above all, peace was to be restored in
Coburg; constitutionalism preserved there, and
the jarring interests honestly reconciled. The
task was hard, but I succeeded so well that the
storms of eighteen 'forty-eight left us unhurt.
To do that I had to put aside a whole ministry,
and to break with the bureaucratic aristocracy.
Every change made in so small a state is felt as
an affair of persons rather than of inevitable
policy. To this hour there remains the coldness
against me of many members of these offended
families. In a lower rank, also, the noisy
demagogues, sent back into the quiet of their
families, deplored their lost importance, and
could not forgive the constitutional duke by
whom it was taken from them. They kept up
in a smaller way their trade of fomenting irritations,
and thus partly they still influence the
poorest. But the poorest class is prejudiced
against me by a more important accident of my
position. My father and my predecessors having
absolute command of the revenues, were the
ostensible and immediate benefactors in all cases
of public expenditure from which the poor
derived benefit. They were looked up to for the
direct support of public undertakings where
now there is interposed between the duke and
the people a constitutional ministry; every