To understand the state of affairs we must again go back to the French Revolution. Germany was at the end of the eighteenth century more rigidly mediæval than any other European country, save possibly Russia and parts of Italy. The German patriot Stein thus described the condition of Mecklenburg in a letter written in 1802: ‘I found the aspect of the country as cheerless as its misty northern sky; great estates, much of them in pastures or fallow; an extremely thin population; the entire laboring class under the yoke of serfage; stretches of land attached to solitary ill-built farm houses; in short, a monotony, a dead stillness, spreading over the whole country; an absence of life and activity that quite overcame my spirits. The home of the Mecklenburg noble, who weighs like a load on his peasants instead of improving their condition, gives me the idea of the den of some wild beast, who devastates everything about him and surrounds himself with the silence of the grave.’ If Stein was perhaps inclined to be pessimistic in his effort to arouse German spirits, it is because he has in his mind’s eye the possibility of better things, and the actual superiority of conditions in France and England. Most observers of the time viewed conditions with indifference. Goethe showed little or no patriotism; ‘Germany is not a nation,’ he said curtly. After the peace of Lunéville and the Diet of Ratisbon the greater part of Germany fell under Napoleon’s influence. The German people showed no concern at thus passing under the control of the French. The German states were nothing but the petty German courts. Fyffe[78] humorously describes the process of political reorganization which the territory underwent in 1801: ‘Scarcely was the Treaty of Lunéville signed when the whole company of intriguers who had touted at Rastadt posted off to the French capital with their maps and their money-bags, the keener for the work when it became known that by common consent the free cities of the empire were now to be thrown into the spoil. Talleyrand and his confidant, Mathieu, had no occasion to ask for bribes, or to maneuver for the position of arbiters in Germany. They were overwhelmed with importunities. Solemn diplomatists of the old school toiled up four flights of stairs to the lodging of the needy secretary, or danced attendance at the parties of the witty minister. They hugged Talleyrand’s poodle; they played blind-man’s buff and belabored each other with handkerchiefs to please his little niece. The shrewder of them fortified their attentions with solid bargains, and made it their principal care not to be outbidden at the auction. Thus the game was kept up as long as there was a bishopric or a city in the market.’