Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/139

 struggle against absolutism began instantly, and the people followed it with constantly increasing interest. What has happened in the history of the world more than once happened again. Every step forward brought to the consciousness of the people the necessity of further steps forward. And now, when the king endeavored to stem the growing commotion, repelled the moderate demands made by the United Diet with sharp words, and dismissed that assembly “ungraciously,” then the public mind was, by the government itself, dragged into that channel of thought in which revolutionary sentiments grow.

There had indeed long been some revolutionary agitators who, in their isolation, had passed for dreamers and could win but a slim following. But now the feeling began to spread in large circles that the real thunder-storm was coming, although hardly anybody anticipated how soon it would come. In former days people had excited themselves about what Thiers and Guizot had said in the French chambers, or Palmerston and Derby in the English parliament, or even what Hecker, Rotteck and Welker had said in the little Diet of the grand duchy of Baden. But now everybody listened with nervous eagerness to every word that in the United Diet of the most important of German states had fallen from the lips of Camphausen, Vincke, Beckerath, Hansemann and other liberal leaders. There was a feeling in the air as if this United Diet, in its position and the task to be performed by it, was not at all unlike the French assembly of the year 1789.

We university students watched these events with perhaps a less clear understanding, but with no less ardent interest, than our elders. As I have already mentioned, the “Burschenschaft” had its political traditions. Immediately after the wars of liberation—1813 to 1815—it had been among the first