Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/95

 natives. In the course of time they recognized that the honest, orderly methods of administration by the Prussian officers possessed great merit; but the spirit of opposition, characteristic of the Rhenish population, once aroused, could not be easily overcome. The word Prussian served for an opprobrious invective, and when one schoolboy flung it at another it was difficult to find a more stinging epithet to fling back. All this was to become entirely changed in consequence of the revolutionary movement toward national unity in 1848; but at the time when I was a student at the gymnasium the hatred of Prussia was still in fullest flower on the banks of the Rhine.

We young people were indeed free from provincial, and especially religious, narrowness of sentiment, but we shared the prevailing impression that great changes were necessary; that it was scandalous to withhold from the people the freedom of speech and press; that the old Prussian absolutism must yield to a new constitutional form of government; that the pledges made to the German nation by the German princes in 1813 had been shamefully violated, and that the disintegrated fatherland must be molded into a united empire with free political institutions. The fermenting restless spirit permeating the minds of the educated classes, and finding expression in the literature of the day, aroused in us boys the warmest enthusiasm. By what means the dreams of liberty and unity were to be accomplished—whether, as Herwegh advised in one of his poems, which we all knew by heart, we were to tear the iron crucifixes out of the ground and forge them into swords, or whether there was a peaceable way of reaching the goal—we were not at all clear in our thoughts. But we eagerly read newspapers and pamphlets to keep ourselves informed of the occurrences and tendencies of the day. Neither could we