Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/37

Rh signal more than enough to throw all the bureaucratists of Berlin into a series of fits of conservative activity, which issued in throwing some of the finest spirits of Germany into the fortress of Spandau, in banishing others to Paris and New York, and in putting a violent extinguisher on all liberal and constitutional movements for an indefinite period. Of freedom of the press, of course, no more was heard; and as for the unity of Germany, it was soon discovered that the Diet was not a machinery in any way calculated to usher any such new political entity into existence. Practically, the board did not, and, as political nature is constituted could not, represent Germany at all, but either Prussia or Austria; and during this period of old wives, informers, policemen, and red tape, it practically represented Austria. For fifteen years, till 1830, the whole of that cumbrous and dilatory machine was twirled round the little finger of that arch-obscurantist Metternich, with a dexterity and a persistency that must command the admiration even of those who have the utmost abhorrence of the cause in which it was exercised; for the children of this world, we read, are wiser in their generation than the children of light.

French Revolution of 1830 sent, as French revolutions generally do, an electric shock through the whole of Europe, and not least through Germany, where much combustible matter had been accumulated, and curses, not loud but deep, against princedom and policedom, were eager for a vent.

The first explosion of this popular discontent took place in the trim little metropolis of Brunswick, where Duke Charles, hastening home from the French capital, planted himself before his angry burghers with the air of a man who was born to do something. But his calibre was by no means equal to his conceit. He no doubt doubled his body-guard, and planted sixteen pieces of cannon in front of his palace, with an attitude that looked heroic enough. But it was all in vain. The people rose in revolt; and the palace rose in flames; and the mighty duke was carried off in the smoke like a scroll of paper, and wafted where the wind might carry him. He was a mere braggadocio with a crown — or whatever dukes wear — on his head; a declared incapable pilot in such tempestuous times; so that even Metternich, in whose school he had been trained, pulling the wires of the Diet at Frankfort, could not save him. A new duke was elected, and a constitution proclaimed in Brunswick on the 12th October, 1832.

In Hesse-Cassel, Saxony, and Hanover liberal triumphs of a similar nature were achieved; but a foolish popular outbreak at Frankfort, in the spring of 1831, served no purpose but to give the wily Metternich a just text for preaching his favorite gospel, that all liberalism means mob government, and mob government, of course, means anarchy and ruin and chaos. In Prussia affairs remained quiet. Personally the king was much respected, and there were no abuses in the routine of government so glaring as to vex the eyes of the common spectators into open revolt. Only people felt a strong desire to move their own legs, and their own arms, and their own tongues freely, which under a "paternal government" had hitherto been denied them. It was also a sad humiliation to intellectual and Protestant Prussia to be kept playing second fiddle to the great and proverbially stupid obscurantist people of the south. It was not and it could not be right, that the independence and political unity of the German people, as represented in the Diet, should mean only the subordination of Prussia to Austria, and of both to the pope. Some consolation for this sore affront was afforded by the regulations for freedom of trade among the German States, which Prussia introduced under the name of Zoll-Verein. A certain social and economical preponderance was thus given to Prussia which, under favorable circumstances, might lead to a thorough undermining of the political weight of Austria in the Diet.

In the year 1840 Frederick William III., the royal bearer of the great memories of 1813, died; and with his successor, Frederick William IV., a new era was expected to be inaugurated. The long-promised constitution, with freedom of the press, and other freedoms comprehended under the familiar term liberalism, would now surely at last make its epiphany in Berlin. But the new king, though a man of uncommon accomplishments, and fitted to adorn either a throne or an armchair in quiet times, was not a man to put a commanding bit into the mouth of the stout democracy of the nineteenth century. His ideas of governmental power were borrowed rather from the Middle Ages than from any existing government, whether in England or France. "No power on earth," he declared, "shall ever succeed in persuading me to change the natural 