Heinrich Friedrich Karl, Baron Von, a distinguished Prussian statesman, was born at Nassau on the 15th of October 1757. He was sprung from a very old and noble family of Germany, who were in possession of large estates and of wide influence in the Prussian empire. He studied successfully at Göttingen, at Wetzlar, and at Vienna, and in 1779 he entered the Prussian service as a director of mines. On the death of Frederick the Great in 1786, Stein visited England, and spent much of his time and attention in inquiring into the social and political condition of the country. He was much impressed, it is said, by the spectacle of popular institutions and of popular freedom which everywhere met his eye. Stein returned to Prussia a wiser man than he left it; resumed his business in connection with the mines, and married the Countess of Wallmoden-Gimborn, by whom he inherited large property. He was subsequently appointed commissioner, director, president, and supreme president successively of the Westphalian Chambers of Wesel, Hamm, and Minden, and in this capacity he originated and executed numerous improvements in agriculture, roads, and general social economy.

Stein had not yet sufficient scope for the magnificent administrative schemes which were simmering in his brain. He had been appointed, in 1804, minister of indirect taxation, commerce, and the public debt, and he had set vigorously to work to introduce various reforms, when the misunderstandings between Napoleon and Frederic William III. brought his work to a stand-still. Stein, who from the first took a thoroughly patriotic view of the question, had to yield up his office in 1807. When he reappeared, the kingdom was shorn of much of its territory. Having been solicited to his side by his desponding master, Frederic William III., he developed his plan for the restoration of Prussia to a high place in the councils of Europe. "What the state loses," says Stein, "in extensive greatness, it must make up by intensive strength." He proposed to reorganize the entire administrative system of Prussia. He would lay his hand upon the people, as upon the real strength of the nation, and by emancipating them from the burdens to which they had been so long subjected, would destroy in a great measure the antiquated system of villeinage and of class distinctions under which so many of them had groaned for centuries. He proposed, also, to adopt a new scheme of militia service throughout the kingdom of Prussia. As a man of genius, with a strong will to guide his movements, generally overmasters other minds, as if by storm, so Stein in this instance got the ear of the king, and succeeded in apparently convincing him that the new scheme which he had just laid before him would materially improve his country and set Prussia in the front rank of nations. Stein's "system" accordingly got set on foot as warily as possibly, for Napoleon had no difficulty in seeing far over his own immediate horizon, and its operation was attended with the best STEIN-AM-ANGER results. The sleepless Napoleon had heard, however, of the doings of "one Stein" on the other side of the Rhine, and in November 1808 he was obliged to resign and take refuge in Austria. The military and municipal parts of his system were left to another to execute, and he began to concoct and bring forth the *Tugend-bund* or "Moral Union," a society which had in view the ultimate liberation of the entire German people. After spending some time in Russia, he accompanied the allies to Paris in 1814, and drew up his opinions on the re-organization of Germany. His enlarged views of free institutions, of popular election, and so forth, did not meet the taste of the Congress, and on Napoleon's fall, the weak king of Prussia, who had in his extreme need given in his adherence to the system of Stein, now that the enemy was chained to a lonely island of the sea, thought fit to bid good-bye to him and his system, and took refuge in the hereditary arms of absolutism. Baron Von Stein's name, however, shall live forever among all who reverence free institutions, free representations, and free governments throughout the world. He received the Order of the Prussian Eagle in 1816; he had a place at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818; he was made a member of the Prussian Council of State in 1827; and he published the same year a critical review of Bourrienne's *Life of Napoleon*, in some portions of which his own conduct had been commented on. The Baron died on the 29th of June 1831, leaving a name for statesmanlike qualities such as many in Germany will not willingly let die.