show the causes which have hitherto hindered the development of their energy.

The Reformation dissolved, in Germany, one of the chief elements of national strength, the identity of religion; and left the Germans divided in two equal and hostile camps. The Thirty-years' War-the crisis through which the rest of the Middle Age disappeared, to make room for the modern monarchical world-had its battlefield in Germany, destroyed its wealth, almost its civilization. It left the people in the hands of princes who had become their absolute masters, and who made themselves independent of the central power of the empire. When, after a century of material and intellectual prostration, the Germans awoke to new activity, it was almost exclusively in the world of abstraction. They had no more a common country in which and for which they could feel and act. The men of thought devoted themselves to learning. Poetry, arts, sciences, and above all philosophy, were the aims of their life. Having no country in the real world, they created for themselves a home in the realm of the ideal; not belonging to a great and powerful nation, they made themselves citizens of the universe. The moral disease of cosmopolitism invaded Germany. Goethe, in his time, still said, "Germans, you are not destined to be a nation. Be, then, an intellectual complex of all nations." Germany was divided between two rival sovereigns, the emperor, a relic of the Middle Age; and the Prussian king, the unconscious, and therefore unpropitious, representative of the destruction of the past. But, when the time came in which the Germans showed the reviving spirit of freedom and nationality, the two hostile sovereigns united their power against the people. The soldiery, drilled to blind obedience, put its iron foot on the reviving body of the nation. Besides, modern Germany, notwithstanding the great development of the scientific spirit, is still weakened by the excess of book-learning, of abstract thinking, of enervating criticism. The faculties of the head have been developed beyond measure; the genuine vigor of a primitive nature has been sapped. The Germans want passion. And to all these elements of national rankness must be added the influence of

-

the modern industrialism. For the last twenty years, Germany has thrown herself ardently and successfully into industrial and mercantile life: she has become prosperous, and therefore averse to actions which would disturb her in her new, remunerating career.

Yet, in spite of the difficulties of their situation, notwithstanding their own shortcomings, the Germans already have made earnest efforts for the liberty and unity of their country. The regeneration of Germany has been, for years, the object of ardent devotion. It has been nobly professed in the horrors of dungeons, maintained on battlefields, and kept as a sacred palladium in the hearts of thousands of exiles scattered all over the world. To foreign nations this patriotic struggle does not appear in its totality. It does not strike the imagination and feelings with the same admiration created by the great acts of the revolutionary drama performed on other stages. A revolution in France, in Italy, in Poland, or Hungary, flashes through the world like the concentrated electricity of a mighty stroke of lightning: a revolutionary movement in Germany resembles the faint, isolated explosions of dispersed and far-distant thunder-clouds. Scattered insurrections at Frankfort, Cassel, Dresden, even at Berlin and Vienna, will not present themselves to the mind of the distant observer as a great battle for the liberty and unity of Germany. When defeated, they will not exhibit the awful majesty of a great national disaster, or increase the sympathies of the world. Yet the courage, the sacrifices of these champions of liberty, divided in small bands, are surely not less great and noble than those of the Poles, Hungarians, or Italians.

And, again, it is to be considered that these nations fight against foreign oppressors, whose rule is not only a political despotism, but too often a cruel tyranny violating all human rights, wounding men in their feelings as fathers, brothers, husbands. Is it surprising that they rush, almost like one man, to the battlefield, where they hope to free their countries, their own hearths, from the foreign oppressors? Such is not the case in Germany. Despots as they are, the

rulers of that country exercise no barbarous tyranny: some of them even yield a little to the spirit of the age; several are esteemed and beloved as men. Almost all are the scions of the old princely families, to which, by the habits of centuries, the dissevered members of the German nation had become deeply attached. That attachment has not yet entirely died away.*

Whoever will pronounce a just judgment on the abortive Revolution of 1848 must give due weight to the following historical fact: Germany was at that crisis suddenly called upon to do, in a few short months, what had required centuries in other nations. The Germans had to conquer, at the same time, the unity of their country and their own political liberty. Into the midst of this difficult complication, the ominous social problem threw its distracting and dissolving influence. There was not, on the German soil, an undivided army for the conquest of the unity of the country. Those who were fighting for it were also fighting among themselves as monarchists, republicans, and socialists. This not only paralyzed the combatants of the popular cause, but gave to the monarchs the welcome opportunity to frighten thousands from it, by pointing out to them a future of anarchy, of communism. Let us add, that the greatest fault of the moderate Liberals was, not to have profited by the universal enthusiasm of the German people for the cause of Schleswig-Holstein, in order to give to the revolution a national war-cry.

*The historian Dahlmann related in the Frankfort Parliament the following anecdote : When, at the downfall of Napoleon, the Kingdom of Westphalia disappeared, and the old elector came back to his throne, occupied for a while by the brother of the Roman conquerer, a Hessian peasant said, 'Well now, there we have him back, that old ass; but after all-it is our own ass."" A revolution against the German rulers for the establishment of the German unity is not therefore, as in Italy, Poland, or Hungary, an enterprise to which the whole people is urged by the most powerful human feelings, by the burning passions of personal hatred and revenge. The revolutionary efforts in Germany are more the offspring of reflection, of ideal conceptions and longings. The amount of strength derived from the calculation of material gain, to be obtained by the reconstruction of Germany, is largely counterbalanced by the apprehensions and the opposition of the vast number of those who are unwilling to sacrifice their present gain to future risk.

When in August, 1848, the King of Prussia, betraying the cause of Germany, and usurping power which then belonged to the Central Government, concluded an armistice with Denmark, the whole nation uttered a cry of indignation, and demanded vigorous action from the parliament. If the parliament had called the nation to arms for the continuation of the war against Denmark, in spite of the King of Prussia, Germany would have entered upon the road of an irresistible revolution. All party differences would have disappeared; for the feelings of nationality, and the aspirations towards unity, would have overpowered all others. As the SchleswigHolstein question, the very embodiment of the national feelings of Germany, has this year kindled the hereditary and inevitable war between Prussia and Austria, so it might have been in 1848 the most powerful weapon for the realization of the German unity.

The knowledge of the inner life alone gives a right understanding of its outward manifestations. The monarchs had slain the idea of German unity, which the people had conceived, and struggled to realize; but, like Banquo's ghost, that spirit would not be laid. It re-appeared among the victors to confuse, trouble, and frighten them,- none more than the King of Prussia who ordered, and his brother and successor who committed, the fatal deed. The petty princes of Germany knew that their days were numbered, whatever might be the future destiny of the more powerful States. Austria foresaw that the national idea of unity might become a deadly weapon, in the hands of Prussia, against her power, even against her very existence in Germany. The King of Prussia, with a mind tortured by the most contradictory thoughts and feelings, did not know how to reconcile the hereditary aspirations of his house for the supremacy in Germany with the offended genius of the new era. His position was the most perplexed, the most tormented. The House of Hapsburg, true to its nature, and believing only in brute force, tried the old system of military despotism. The puny tyrants of Germany sought protection under the wings of the Austrian double-eagle; but the royal Hohenzollern was well

aware, that either he must renounce the ambitious views of his ancestors, and re-descend to the humble station of a crowned vassal of the Emperor of Austria, or throw himself into the arms of the hated and dreaded spectre of German unity, behind which, at no great distance, he perceived the sovereignty of the nation.

The old dynastic policy, with its diplomatic ruses and artifices, by which the Houses of Hapsburg and Hohenzollern had continued their family feud in the German diet and at the courts, was no longer of avail: the war had to be fought on national ground. This is the clew to all the events which have taken place in Germany since 1849 to this hour. The present war of Prussia against Austria is nothing else than the inevitable historical junction of the hereditary ambition of the Hohenzollern with the power of the national idea. Therefore, let no one be astonished or shocked, if to-day he sees the same man, who in 1849 was the executioner of the German unity, proclaim it as the highest aim of his policy; if he hears him promulgate the law of universal suffrage enacted by the dispersed parliament, or call for a new national assembly which shall invest him with the dignity of the supreme chief of a united Germany. There is a great and significant lesson, a most auspicious omen for the future of Germany, in this final submission of the proud, royal House of Hohenzollern-represented by the most stubborn, the most monarchical, of its scions-to the national idea. It is revolution; and indeed the present King of Prussia did not throw himself into the arms of the hated genius of the new era, without having been fully convinced that it was an absolute necessity. Let us rapidly glance at the intervening events.

Frederic William IV., the brother of the ruling monarch, had refused the imperial crown principally because his deeply offended romantic royalism could not brook the idea of becoming an emperor by the grace of the people. A member of the German Parliament and representative of the Austrian interest knew him well, when, speaking of the German constitution, he said, "I shall try to have it so strongly salted with democracy that he never will swallow it." But the