But in fact Stein was ill fitted to represent the popular feeling in any efficient manner. His position is one that is not altogether easy to explain. He believed, to some extent, in the People, especially the _German_ People. That is to say, he believed in the power of that people to _feel_ justly and honourably; and, as long as that feeling was expressed in the form of a cry to their rulers to guide and lead justly, he was as anxious as anyone that that cry should be heard. He liked, too, the sense of the compact embodiment of this feeling in some institution representing the unity of the nation. But, with the ideas connected with popular representation in the English sense, he had little sympathy. That the People or their representatives should _reason_ or act, independently of their sovereigns, was a political conception which was utterly abhorrent to him. In short, Stein's antagonism to Metternich was as intense as that of the most advanced democrat; but it was not so much the opposition of a champion of freedom to a champion of despotism, as the opposition of an honest man to a rogue. Metternich wrote in his Memoirs, when he was taking office for the first time in 1809, "From the day when peace is signed we must confine our system to tacking and turning and flattering. Thus alone may we possibly preserve our existence till the day of general deliverance." This policy had been consistently followed. The abandonment of Andrew Hofer after the Tyrolese rising of 1809, the adulterous marriage of Maria Louisa, the alliance with Napoleon, the discouragement of all popular effort to throw off the French yoke, the timely desertion of Napoleon's cause, just soon enough to give importance to the alliance of Austria with Prussia and Russia and England, just late enough to prevent any danger of defeat and misfortune; these acts marked the character of Metternich's policy and excited the loathing of Stein. As he had been repelled from Metternich by arts like these, so Stein had been drawn to Arndt, Schleiermacher, and Steffens by a common love of honesty and by a common power of self-sacrifice; but he looked upon them none the less as, to a large extent, dreamers and theorists; and this want of sympathy with them grew, as the popular movement took a more independent form, until at last the champion of Parliamentary Government, the liberator of the Prussian peasant, the leader of the German people in the struggle against Napoleon, drifted entirely out of political life from want of sympathy with all parties.