Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 1.djvu/28

4 family, except in the case of his father. Indeed, a large political family migration had taken place in 1833 and 1835 to Belleville, Illinois, a town a few miles from St. Louis, embracing his great-uncle Theodor Erasmus Hilgard, who resigned a judgeship, because he “deemed it a priceless advantage to make my [his] children freemen.”

In 1848 the French Revolution upset the whole of South Germany, and incidentally had a marked influence upon the career of Henry Hilgard, although he was then but thirteen years of age. The expectation of an immediate invasion by the forces of the new French Republic threw the entire town of Zweibrücken, like the rest of Rhenish Bavaria, into a state of feverish excitement. In the gymnasium, which Henry had entered with difficulty, and prematurely, as soon turned out, studies could hardly be thought of, and politics was the sole theme of conversation. The right of public meeting was soon granted by the monarchy to the people, and the addresses of the Revolutionary orators, together with the recruiting of a militia force of five hundred men, furnished the youth of the town with endless excitement. The proceedings of the Frankfort Parliament interested Henry so greatly that he finally obtained his father's permission to visit Robert C. Hilgard, a step-uncle (but little older than himself), then entering mercantile life in Frankfort. He spent a week with this young relative, seeing the sights of the city and listening to the speakers at the sessions of the Parliament. By this time Henry's political sympathies were profoundly democratic, and, with boyish enthusiasm, he returned to his home wearing a “Hecker hat” with a red feather. The rector of the gymnasium was so incensed at this as to give him, on his return, a choice between the hat and expulsion. This incident did not improve Henry's relations with his father, who continued to be loyal to the Government and bitterly hostile to the Revolutionary movement with which his brothers sympathized most keenly. The demoralization of Henry's studies, for which