For this reason, as a rule, the most efficient, most objective and most impartial set of officials is found in poor states. Prussia, for example, was formerly indebted to its poverty for that incomparable body of officials who handled it through all its troubles. These employees of the state were actually, in consonance with the rule laid down above, dissociated completely from all interests in money making, directly or indirectly.
This ideal body of officials is a rare occurrence in the more wealthy states. The plutocratic development draws the individual more and more into its vortex, robbing him of his objectivity and of his impartiality. And yet the officials continue to fulfil the duty which the modern state requires of them, to preserve the interests of the state as opposed to the interests of any class. And this interest is preserved by them, even though against their will, or at least without clear consciousness of the fact, in such manner that the economic means, which called the bureaucracy into being, is in the end advanced on its tedious path of victory, as against the political means. No one doubts that the officials carry on class politics, prescribed for them by the constellation of forces operating in the state; and to that extent, they certainly do represent the master class from which they sprang. But they do ameliorate the bitterness of the struggle, by opposing the extremists in either camp, and by advocating amendments to existing law, when the social development has become ripened for their enactment, without waiting until the contest over these has become acute. Where an efficient race of princes governs, whose momentary representative adopts the policy of King Frederick, which was to regard himself only as “the first servant of the state,” what has been said above applies to him in an increased degree, all the more so as his interests, as the permanent beneficiary of the continued existence of the state, would before all else prompt him to strengthen the centripetal forces and to weaken the centrifugal powers. In the course of the preceding we have in many instances noted the natural solidarity between prince and people, as an historic force of great value. In the completed constitutional state, in which the monarch in but an infinitesimally small degree is a subject of private economic interests, he tends to be almost completely “an official.” This community of interests is emphasized here much more strongly than in either the feudal state or the despotically governed state, where the dominion, at least for one-half its extent, is based on the private economic interests of the prince.