Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/425

 of Paris; and how different from the half military, half philistine appearance presented by Berlin, which at that time had not yet become a world city! How well justified, how natural, appeared to me the national pride of the Briton, when in Westminster Hall I beheld the statues and busts, and in the Abbey the tombs of the great Englishmen, which stood there as monuments of mighty thoughts and deeds! How firmly founded appeared to me the free institutions of the people to whom civil liberty was not a mere phrase, a passing whim, or a toy, but a life-principle, the reality of which the citizen needed for his daily work, and that lived in the thoughts and aspirations of every Englishman as something that is a matter of course! I saw enough of the country and of the people to feel all this, although we refugees in London lived separate lives as on an island of our own in a great surrounding sea of humanity.

A large number of refugees from almost all parts of the European continent had gathered in London since the year 1848, but the intercourse between the different national groups—Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Russians—was confined more or less to the prominent personages. All, however, in common nourished the confident hope of a revolutionary upturning on the continent soon to come. Among the Germans there were only a few who shared this hope in a less degree. Perhaps the ablest and most important person among these was Lothar Bucher, a quiet, retiring man of great capacity and acquirements, who occupied himself with serious political studies, and whom I was to meet again in later life as Bismarck's most confidential privy-councilor. In London, as in Switzerland, the refugees zealously discussed the question to whom should belong the leadership in the coming revolution. Of course this oversanguine conception of things gave rise to all sorts of jealousies, as will always happen among