I proceeded from Schönhausen by way of Stendal and Wittenberg to the third large estate of the Prince, the extensive domain of forest land known as the Sachsenwald in Lauenburg, of which the little village of Friedrichsruh forms the centre. Owing to my letter of recommendation from the Prince, I met with a good reception at the hands of the head forester Lange, who showed me through the Chancellor’s residence, the nearest parts of the forest, and some adjoining farms that had been recently purchased. Here, however, a great deal was still in a preparatory stage. The little château was being altered and extended, the park behind it was being embellished, and the small stream that flowed at one side of it was being dredged and regulated. I therefore stayed but a short time and was able to note but little of permanent interest.... So I shall draw my picture of Friedrichsruh and the life there from materials collected during a later visit to the Prince when everything which was in course of preparation in 1877 had gradually been completed. But I will first relate a characteristic anecdote as it was told to me in Berlin by Lothar Bucher, who also published it in the _New York Tribune_. When Bismarck was in the United Diet and afterwards in the Prussian and Erfurt Parliaments the opponents of the principles which he then represented denounced him as a “Junker,” and George von Vinke went so far as to declare in a debate in the Lower Chamber that he regarded Bismarck as the “incarnation of Junkerdom,” _i.e._, an extreme adherent of the party which was at that time opposing desperate resistance to the efforts made by the Prussian National Assembly and its Parliamentary successors to abolish feudal rights, aristocratic privileges and other relics of the middle ages. Our anecdote will show how little there was left even in 1865 of the fine old Junker. Under the Gastein Convention the Duchy of Lauenburg passed to the Prussian Crown. This little country was a judicial curiosity, and in comparison with the neighbouring States including even Mecklenburg, a monstrosity. It was a petrified specimen of the Germany of the seventeenth century, and well deserved to find a place in the Museum of the German antiquities. It had never occurred to any one to make a clearance of the mass of feudal lumber under which all the relations of life were smothered. From whatever point of view the institutions of the Duchy were examined, the observer saw the genuine spirit of the mediævalism holding unrestricted and unmitigated sway under the sun of the nineteenth century, and witnessed the exploitation of the majority by a small privileged minority. Lauenburg was the Pompeii of German constitutional history, or, what amounts practically to the same thing, it was the paradise of Junkerdom. The monstrous privileges of the nobility which were set forth in a certain parchment entitled “The Compact” (“Der Recess”) had been confirmed without examination by