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HISTORY OF GERMANY IN THE 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
TREITSCHKE'S HISTORY 
 OF GERMANY IN THE 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 TRANSLATED BY EDEN & CEDAR PAUL 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 WILLIAM HARBUTT DAWSON 
 
 VOLUME TWO 
 
 NEW YORK 
 Mc BRIDE, NAST & COMPANY 
 
 1916 
 
 f-6 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 In the first Volume of his History, Treitschke traces the later 
 stages in the decay of the Holy Roman Empire of the German 
 Nation down to its final dissol'iltioh in 1866 at the bidding of 
 Napdlebil, with the eclipse of Prussia which coiricided with it, 
 aiid follows the fortunes of the War of Liberation to its vic- 
 torious close in 1814, culrhinating in Napoleon's downfall, his 
 abdication, Elba, and the first Peace of I'aris. 
 
 The second voltime, after the interlude of a hundred days 
 has been left behind^ is miinly occupied with the beginnings of 
 the Germanic Federation, which rose upon the ruins of the 
 old Empirfe, and the efforts of the German peoples to find 
 thfemselves again when the period of chaos and demoralisation 
 was succeeded by one of order and reconstruction. All Europe, 
 Princes and people alike, breathed again freely after 1814, and most 
 relieved of all were those German Sovereigns who had bartered 
 themselves into Napoleon's service, had taken their orders from 
 him, marched under his banners, fought his battles against their 
 own countrymen, and had been proud to receive their crowns 
 and electors' hats at his hand. 
 
 Now the German nation hoped to see its regained indepen- 
 dence confirmed atid assured by political unity. In the darkest 
 hours of humiliation it had been cheered, and its heaviest 
 sacrifices had been sweetened; by the thouight that it Was fight- 
 ing not only to Uberate Germany from foreign Oppression, but 
 to win for it unity, by ties stronger and more intimate than 
 thosie which held together the old empire. Now that danger 
 was over, it was to learn by bitter experience that it had been 
 chierishing an illusion. Gfermany was hot yet ready to become 
 either an eihpire or a federal State, and even if it had been 
 ready the rulers were hot willing to forego any substantial part 
 of their independence. Austria, above all, was bent on main- 
 taining the old divisions under new sanctions, as the surest 
 guarantee of its continued domination. 
 
 By the Final Act of [the Congress of Vienna (June 8, 
 1815) the forty-one sovereign States were formed into a loose 
 
History of Germany 
 
 association — ^it could not properly be called a union — ^with the 
 name Deutscher Bund or Germanic Federation. With this 
 arrangement the rulers were on the whole well contented ; but 
 the nation at large received it with disappointment and disgust. 
 But what else could have been expected? The Congress of 
 Vienna was exclusively an affair of the Princes and Governments. 
 They only decreed, appointed and composed it, and only their 
 interests and wishes had voice or hearing in its deliberations. 
 It was a typical creation and expression of the old diplomacy, 
 which yet continues to be the diplomacy of Europe to-day, more 
 than a century later. In this august areopagus, in which the 
 elect of the diplomatic world of Europe was assembled, — Blucher, 
 fresh from the battle-field, where niceties of language are impos- 
 sible, called it a " council of thrice-accursed constables and 
 lazy-bones " — the German nation had no part or lot whatever, 
 though its political destinies were being determined for generations 
 to come ; it had no share in its deliberations ; its opinion was 
 not once given, because it was never sought ; nowhere was the 
 nation as such mentioned in the Act under which the new 
 Federation was constituted. 
 
 In a sense the Federation was not even the work of the 
 Princes themselves ; they accepted it, but the idea was that of 
 Mettemich, the powerful Austrian Chancellor, who presided over 
 the Congress and bent it to his will, concerned only to divide 
 the States, so that Austria might rule them, so maintaining in 
 the new Germany the same paramount influence which it had 
 held in the old. Austria was made the head of the Federation, 
 but its position was now merely presidential, and conferred upon it 
 no special powers or prerogatives. The time for a new German 
 Emperor had not yet come, much as the ardent friends of 
 national unity wished for the restoration of the ancient office 
 and title. " Poor, faithful German nation," wrote Amdt in 
 bitterness of soul, " thou art to have no Emperor ! Thy Princes 
 wish themselves to play the Emperor. Instead of one lord, 
 thou art to have two dozen (in point of fact, there were over 
 three 'dozen) who will never be able to agree upon German 
 questions." But that was just what Austria wanted. 
 
 The Federal Act of June 8, 1815, defined the purpose of 
 the Bund as " the maintenance of the external and internal 
 security of Germany and the independence and inviolabiUty of 
 the several German States." Such a purpose was all-important, 
 yet it did not require a wide range of functions, and the juris- 
 
 vi. 
 
Introduction 
 
 diction assigned to the Bund was, indeed, very restricted. Its 
 executive organ was the Federal Diet, which met and acted in 
 two capacities, first as an inner council, forming which body its 
 members exercised altogether seventeen votes, eleven States 
 having one each, and the remaining States voting in six groups, 
 one vote for each group ; and then — chiefly for the determina- 
 tion of questions relating to organic changes in the composition 
 of the Bund, its jurisdiction, the declaration of war and the 
 conclusion of peace — as a plenary body (plenum), in which 
 sixty-nine votes were disposable, one for each State as a mini- 
 mum and the rest allotted in rough proportion to population, all 
 the six kingdoms having four votes each. The Bund began its 
 career hemdicapped by distrust and odium, and it hved up to its 
 first reputation. For just fifty years it maintained a more or 
 less impotent and futile existence, its Diet chiefly useful as a 
 coward's castle from which the liberties of the people could be 
 safely assailed, and as affording an arena in which Austria and 
 Prussia were able to contend for the hegemony of Germany. 
 
 By the Federal Act the allied Sovereigns reciprocally 
 guaranteed each other's territories against attack from without 
 or within. It was, perhaps, the most important provision in 
 the Treaty, since the Congress of Vienna had introduced many 
 and momentous changes in the map of Germany ; some States 
 had lost and some had gained territory. Here Prussia was 
 specially affected. The readjustment of its frontiers did not 
 increase its area (though it increased its population) beyond that 
 of 1805, before Napoleon, by the Peace of Tilsit, robbed Prussia 
 of one-third of its territory ; for while it gained largely in the 
 west, by additions on the Rhine, by the absorption of part of 
 Saxony — Prussia wanted the whole, and would have got it but 
 for the opposition of Austria, France, and England — and the greater 
 part of Westphalia, it had to surrender a large slice of Poland. 
 On the whole, therefore, Prussia became more German, while 
 still remaining a mixed and somewhat incongruous State, made 
 up of divers races and civilisations, a basket of fragments 
 gathered from all sides, out of which a unity could be made 
 only after long time and effort. 
 
 Prussia had suffered more than any other part ] of Germany 
 in the long-drawn-out struggle from 1805 to 1815. Hence its 
 pressing need was internal reorganisation, for the purpose not 
 merely of righting the evils done by the war, but, as far as 
 practicable, of assimilating the life and institutions of the diverse 
 
 vii. 
 
History of Germany 
 
 territories and populations whicii made up the rehabilitated 
 kiiigdom. Here great results wete achieved in a marveHousiy 
 short time. During the second decade of the century, something 
 was done to develop and extend local government and to unify 
 law and justice ; national taxation was systematised ; a custoitis 
 system was introduced which gave a frank recognition, unique 
 in those days, to the principle of free trade, — in 1818 KTuskisson 
 in the English House of Corartions spoke of the Prussian customs 
 tariff as the most enlightened in Europe — and which, by means 
 of successive treaties, was gradually to be extended to all 
 Germany. A free course was given to the intellectual influences 
 set loose by the searching ordeal throug^h which the nation had 
 passed ; new universities were established and existing ones 
 reorganised — the University of Berlin dates from 1810, that of 
 Bonn from 1811, and that of Breslau in its present form from 
 the same year, all three being founded when Prussia was still in 
 the worst throes of the war — and with the more string^t 
 application of the principle of compulsory education the founda- 
 tions were laid of the modern system of primary and secondary 
 schools. Simultaneously the military system was placed Upon a 
 basis which, in its main features, was to continue for a century, 
 and to serve as the model for the rest Of Germany. 
 
 In one thing thie Prussian nation Was doomed to bitter 
 disappointment. It looked for political liberty, for a constitu- 
 tion and a beginning in parliamentary hfe, but in vain. The 
 nation imagined that after the war constitutional rights would 
 fa,ll into its lap like ripe fruit. Its devotion and sacrifice had 
 been fed and fanned by the promise of them. The German 
 Princes in the Manifesto of Kalisch in February, 1813, in appeal- 
 ing to their peoples to make a supreme effort to crush the 
 despot, held out the prospect of constitutions as the prize and 
 the reward. On May 22, 1815, the Prussian King, yielding to 
 pressure from his Chancellor Hardenberg, then still favourably 
 disposed towards the constitutional movement, issued an 
 ordinance in which he promised a national assembly developed 
 from the provincial estates. The following month the whole 
 of the German Princes signed their names to the Federal Act, 
 Article 13 iof which provided that " In all the federal 
 States there shall be a constitutional representation of the 
 Estates of the Realm." It was not said what sort of a represen- 
 tation this was to be, or when it was to be given, but those 
 were days of great hopes and of an inexhaustible confidente, and 
 
 viii. 
 
Introduction 
 
 it occurred to few people to suspect that a pledge so solemnly 
 made would not be honourably fulfilled. A rude awakening 
 soon came. Metternich lost no time in letting it be understood 
 that Austria had no idea of giving effect to Article 13 in 
 any form whatever, and he usicd all his influence and all his 
 wiles to prevent the rest of the States from doing so. 
 
 It was left to Karl August of Weimar to set an example to 
 the greater rulers of Germany of fidelity to plighted word, for 
 he granted a constitution before a year had passed. Treitschke, 
 in belittling this act, which was one of wisdom as much as of 
 honour, scoffs, not generously, at the petty Court of Weimar 
 and its large conceit of itself. Yet Weimar and the comer of 
 Germany to which it belonged were a centre of culture, of 
 sweetness and light, at a time when large parts of Prussia 
 intellectually were still Uttle more than a waste, howling wilderness, 
 producing only crops of soldiers, serfs, and cabbage squires. 
 Bavaria followed the example of Weimar a httle later, and then 
 after an interval came Wiirtemberg. Treitschke holds that the 
 South German constitutions proved a strength and support of 
 particularism. It is certain that the States of the South in 
 which constitutions were first given gained thereby a superiority 
 in poUtical education and capacity which they have held ever 
 since ; their peoples are to-day the freest in Germany ; and 
 nowhere else in the empire are the relationships between rulers 
 and ruled on the whole so intimate and harmonious. 
 
 Prussia, governed by a King who never knew his own mind 
 and a Minister who had not the courage to shake off Austrian 
 influence, lagged behind while the smaller States went forward. 
 By the ordinance of May 22, 1815, Frederick William III 
 promised" at once a national representation, to be chosen by the 
 provincial estates> which were to be restored where efficient. 
 Treitschke regrets that in issuing this ordinance he signed away 
 his Hberty to choose the right moment for action. But what 
 did it matter, seeing that the promise was never to be fulfilled ? 
 In the following month a commission, consisting of twenty-two 
 members of the Council of State, was appointed to make a grand 
 inquest of the nation. Instead of calling witnesses to Berlin, 
 however, the King resolved that three Ministers should act as 
 travelling commissioners, visiting the provinces, and collecting 
 evidence on the spot, just as the Elector Joachim I had him- 
 self done in 1525, when he was bent on reforming the system 
 of local govermnent. Their inquiries were confined almost 
 
 ix. 
 
History of Germany 
 
 exclusively to the landed nobility, — in other words, to the 
 representatives of existing conditions, and for the most part 
 these men wanted no change ; the existing provincial diets were 
 for them both satisfactory and sufficient. Only the Polish 
 aristocracy recognised the need of a higher form of representa- 
 tion, capable of reflecting the mind of the nation at large. 
 All the work of the commissioners was wasted. No sooner had 
 their reports been submitted than the King hardened his heart 
 and decided not to grant a constitution at all. 
 
 Later, in 1819, Hardenberg himself drew up the outlines of 
 a constitution based on the representation of the existing estates, 
 and Treitschke says that he did it with " a serious and honest 
 purpose." It is true that the document ended with the excel- 
 lent sentiment " Salus fuhlica suprema lex esto ! " yet for all 
 that. Stein's reproach, that Hardenberg offered " liberal phrases 
 and despotic reaUties," was well founded. All the scheme pro- 
 posed was that a " general " Diet should be elected by the 
 provincial assembUes out of the privileged classes of which they 
 were composed ; it was to be allowed to consider and report on 
 legislative proposals put before it by the ministry, but the King 
 reserved an unconditional veto, as well as undivided executive 
 power. With all its deficiences, however, the scheme was 
 too liberal for the King, and he refused to proceed with it. 
 
 Treitschke deals with this episode in the political history 
 of Prussia fully, but not sympathetically, and in consequence he 
 does far less than justice to the single-minded men — many of 
 them among the foremost figures of their day. Stein, Humboldt, 
 Schon, Vincke, Gneisenau, not to speak of men like Niebuhr,' 
 Amdt, and Dahlmann— who dared, at great risk to their reputa- 
 tions, to identify themselves with the political aspirations of the 
 Prussian nation. He tries to show that the nation did not 
 look for a reward, and speaks of the " wonderful story," the 
 " party legend," that came into currency at the end of the war, 
 to the effect that the federal Princes, and the King of Prussia 
 with them, had by the promise of constitutions " filled the 
 German people with illusory hopes." He scorns the idea, as 
 Bismarck did, that patriotism could be requited in any such 
 way, like a debt paid over a counter. Nevertheless, the fact 
 remains that, whether as reward or not, the promise of a 
 constitution was deliberately made and deliberately broken 
 by Frederick William HI, not once but" several times, and 
 that more than a generation had to pass before the pledge was 
 
 X. 
 
Introduction 
 
 made good, and then it was redeemed grudgingly by another 
 Sovereign. 
 
 Treitschke has not a word of reproach or disapproval for 
 this act of perfidy. On the contrary, he speaks of the' King's 
 promises as unfortunate and his disregard of them as laudable. 
 He says in his justification that the country needed " several 
 years more of pohtical dictatorship." As if Prussia had ever 
 had anything else ! In point of fact, the dictatorship was to 
 last unaltered not for several but for over thirty years more, 
 and it has not altogether disappeared even to-day. Again, he urges 
 that the medley of races, German and French, Saxon, Swedish 
 and Polish, made it dangerous to give a constitution. But it 
 was from just the opposite standpoint that the far-seeing 
 Bismarck proceeded when, in the hope of creating unity out of 
 a still greater diversity, he promised in 1866 and established in 
 1867 the North German Diet and made it eligible by a franchise 
 which is still as democratic as any in Europe. Worst of all, 
 says Treitschke, the Prussian nation was unripe and imfit for 
 political emancipation. This is the plea that has been advanced 
 by the advocates of oligarchy in that country ever since, and 
 it is the stock argument of the reactionary parties to-day. All 
 such transparent pretexts suggest that Treitschke himself was 
 conscious that he had a bad case to defend. The pity is that 
 he should have tried to defend it at all. 
 
 This, however, was the last time Frederick WilUam III gave 
 a thought to constitution-making. Reaction set in all over 
 Germany, and in repressing political movements and aspirations 
 the Princes who had broken the pledge of 1815 found a con- 
 genial occupation. Then came the forcible dissolution of the 
 Burschenschaften, an act of stupid intolerance which inspired 
 perhaps the most moving elegy in the German language — " Wir 
 hatten gebauet ein stattUches Haus " ; the persecution of the 
 demagogues, most of whom were no demagogues at all, but 
 moderate, sober-minded citizens whose only sin was that they 
 took their rulers at their word ; the strangling of free thought 
 in every form in which it dared to show itself ; the shackling 
 of the printing press ; the suppression, so far as force could do 
 it, of every popular effort and aspiration after political emanci- 
 pation. * I In telling the story of that pitiful war against the 
 spirit of a nation, the true KuUurkampf of the nineteenth 
 century, Treitschke has no indignation for the unspeakable 
 infamies which were perpetrated in the name of raison d'etat, 
 
 xi. 
 
History of Germany 
 
 and no enthusiasm for the men who were fighting for the right 
 to serve their country and generation with free minds and 
 unfettered wills. 
 
 The reaction seemed to triumph, to triumph completely, 
 yet the popular movements of that day, though checked and 
 apparently extinguished, powerfully influenced the course of 
 domestic history during the succeeding half century, as the cause 
 of pohtical liberty became identified more and more closely with 
 that of national unity. 
 
 WILLIAM HARBUTT DAWSON. 
 
 xu. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 VOL. II. BOOK TWO. 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE GERMANIC FEDERATION, 
 
 1814-1819. 
 
 CEIAPTER 
 
 I. THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA 
 
 §1. Character of the Congress. PersonaUty of its 
 
 Participants - - - - - 3 
 
 §2. The Territorial Negotiations - - - 26 
 
 §3. The Germanic Federation - - - 92 
 
 II. BELLE ALLIANCE (WATERLOO) 
 
 §1. The Belgian Campaign - - - - 137 
 
 §2. The Second Peace of Paris - - _ 206 
 
 III. MENTAL CURRENTS OF THE FIRST YEARS 
 
 OF PEACE 
 
 §1. Literary Characteristics of the Epoch - - 231 
 
 §2. Poetry and the Fine Arts - - - 247 
 
 §3. Science - - - - - - 296 
 
 IV. OPENING OF THE GERMAN BUNDESTAG 
 
 §1. The European Situation ... 369 
 
 §2. The Frankfort Negotiations - - - 384 
 
 V. RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PRUSSIAN STATE 
 
 §1. Personalities and Parties at the Court - - 445 
 
 §2. Reorganisation of the Administration - - 459 
 
 §3. The Provinces ..... 524 
 
 §4. Beginnings of the Constitutional Struggle - 567 
 
 xiii 
 
History of Germany 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 PAGE 
 
 VI. SOUTH GERMAN CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES 
 
 §1. The Good Old Law in Swabia - - - 588 
 
 §2. Bavaria ------ 623 
 
 §3. Baden - - - - - - 661 
 
 §4. Nassau and Hesse Darmstadt _ - - 687 
 
 APPENDIXES TO VOL. II. 
 
 I. E. M. Arndt and Wrede _ - - - 697 
 
 II. Blucher upon the Mutiny at Liege - - - 702 
 
 III. Treitschke's Preface to the Second Volume of the 
 
 German Edition ----- 703 
 
 IV. Schmalz and the Order of the Red Eagle - - 705 
 
 INDEX 
 
 - 713 
 
 XIV. 
 
BOOK II. 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE GERMANIC 
 FEDERATION, 
 
 1814-1819 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA. 
 
 § I. CHARACTER OF THE CONGRESS. PERSONALITY OF ITS 
 
 PARTICIPANTS. 
 
 When Frederick William set out for Vienna in the autumn, he 
 expected to make a stay of about three weeks. Fully nine months 
 were to elapse from the first conference of the plenipotentiaries of 
 the four alUed powers on September i8, 1814, to the final signing 
 of the last act of the congress on June 19, 1815. Who could 
 have found energy and satisfaction for the speedy despatch of 
 the business ? Tlie five senses claimed their rights after the con- 
 vulsive anxieties and unrests of these two wild decades. Just as 
 Paris after the fall of the Terror had plunged into a vortex of 
 enjoyment, so did the old princely and noble Europe now draw a 
 deep breath, rejoicing at its regained security. The great plebeian 
 had fallen, he who had once taught the highly born what the un- 
 tamed energy of a single man is capable of effecting in an old 
 world ; the heroes of the sword disappeared from the scene, and 
 with them disappeared the great passion, the pitUess veracity of 
 war. Like worms after rain, the petty talents of the boudoir and 
 the antechamber crawled out of their hiding-places and stretched 
 themselves luxuriously. The distinguished world was once more 
 at ease, in full possession of itself. Who could have imagined 
 that the veteran Prince de Ligne who had been the Hon of the 
 salons in France under the kings, and was now on the edge of the 
 grave, was once more to enjoy all the glory and all the splendour 
 of highly noble society, and was to construct witty and mischievous 
 epigrams about the distinguished congress, which danced indeed 
 but made no progress ? 
 
 Yet it failed to return, that ingenuous nonchalance of the 
 good old times when it was so clearly understood that humanity 
 really began with the baron, when never a word of the mockery 
 and of the free-thought of the great lords could make its way 
 
 3 
 
History of Germany 
 
 through to trouble the happy simplicity of the mob. By the 
 new generation, the fear of the revolution was still felt in every 
 
 ' limb. Amid the intoxicating pleasures of the congress there came 
 sinister news of the ItaUan secret league of the carbonari and of the 
 dull ferment in France, of the angry speeches of the disillusioned 
 Prussian patriots, of the conspiracies of the Greeks, and of the 
 heroic struggle of the Serbs against their Turkish tyrants. How- 
 ever carefully the doors were closed, however sedulously the loud 
 knocking of the new democratic epoch was ignored, people no 
 longer felt perfectly at ease. As of old mockery had been the 
 
 ^ mode, so now was behef ; even the man of the world must have 
 at his disposal a few unctuous words about Christianity and the 
 divine right of kings. Although pigtails and powder were not 
 revived, the effeminate love of adornment of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury was still manifest in the beardless faces, the snuff-boxes, the 
 shoes and the silk stockings, in the deliberate elegance of masculine 
 clothing ; and yet the tone of intercourse had already become 
 much freer and less formal. No longer was anything heard of the 
 old disputes about rank and title, or of the pedantic quarrels 
 regarding the shape and the colour of chairs ; the ministers met 
 to deliberate now here, now there, where any one of the pleni- 
 potentiaries might be housed, and signed the documents in 
 alphabetical order, or just as they happened to be sitting at table. 
 Most strikingly were the changed customs manifested upon the 
 great ceremonial days of the congress. The Middle Ages celebrated 
 ecclesiastical festivals, and the century of Louis XIV celebrated 
 courtly festivals ; the new age exhibited a distinctively militarist 
 character. Parades and inspection of troops were invariable 
 whenever the modern state wished to shine in all its glory. Even 
 Austria, at that time the least warlike among the great states 
 of the continent, dared not wholly ignore the colossal force of the 
 new great armies. Fifty years before, the military aspect of the 
 Prussian court had aroused mockery ; but now Prussian customs 
 had everywhere taken root, and even Francis, the weapon-shy, 
 had sometimes to appear in uniform. 
 
 A congress of diplomats can never work creatively ; all it 
 can do is to effect a tolerable arrangement of the results of 
 the war, and to give these a secure foundation. How could 
 this assembly at Vienna have done anything more ? An inde- 
 scribable exhaustion burdened the spirits of all, as had happened 
 long before at the congress of Utrecht, at the close of the bloody 
 age of Louis XIV. Just as the crown prince Frederick had then 
 
 4 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 deplored the general decadence of European statecraft, so now 
 the exhausted and harassed diplomatic world timorously ignored 
 all the inchoate new ideas of the time, and found itself once more 
 at home amid the comfortable poUtical views of the old century, 
 when the state was regarded as a mere agglomeration of so many 
 square miles and so many inhabitants. The atmosphere of Vienna 
 contributed its effect. Here, in the centre of the huge family 
 property which was termed Austria, in this confusion of forcibly 
 married lands and peoples, there had never been any inkhng of 
 the moral energies which hold together a national state-structure ; 
 and it was quite in keeping with the spirit of the old Hapsburg 
 pohcy that Austria and Bavaria should now dispute with one 
 another whether the subjects of the mediatised, who brought in 
 very little to thsir suzerain lord, were to be counted as half a unit 
 of population or only as a third. It was with disgust that the 
 liberated nations learned that they were again to be treated as 
 nothing more than a great herd, of value only in respect of number. 
 In the Rheinische Merkur, Gorres stormed against " the heartless 
 statistical methods " of the Viennese diplomats ; and Blucher 
 wrote fiercely to his old friend Riichel, " The worthy congress of 
 Vienna is like the annual market of a little town to which everyone 
 drives his beast to sell or to exchange." To prevent a revival of 
 the French power by an arbitrary distribution of lands and people — i 
 now, as formerly at Utrecht, this one idea monopolised the entire) 
 wisdom of the cabinets. Just as in those days Catel de St. Pierre 
 had imagined that by a new and completely arbitrary reconstitu- 
 tion of the map, an unalterable state of peace might be brought 
 into being, so now there reawakened the unmanly dream of 
 perpetual peace, this most certain characteristic of politically 
 exhausted and mentally impoverished epochs. Many excellent 
 men of every class and every nation seriously cherished the hope 
 that world-history was at length to desist from its eternal move- 
 ment, that its progress was to be arrested in obedience to the 
 decisions of the Viennese Areopagus. 
 
 Prussian diplomacy had not attained to the same level as \ 
 Prussian military strategy ; not one Prussian statesman possessed 
 the bold, free, and secure vision of Gneisenau. But the incom- 
 plete and inefficient outcome of the Vienna negotiations was 
 determined by the very nature of things, and could not be attri- 
 buted to the mistakes of individual men. The War of Liberation 
 had failed to cure the most serious disease of the old system 
 of states, to which in the latest volume of his Geisi der Zeit 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Arndt had warningly referred, namely, the state of disintegra- 
 tion of Germany and of Italy. Since in both these countries 
 pubhc opinion was still completely immature, the main result 
 of the congress was for both peoples to bring about a restoration : 
 for the Italians, the territorial distribution of 1795 ; for the 
 Germans, the re-establishment of that loose association of minor 
 monarchies which had formerly arisen out of the princes' revolu- 
 tion of 1803. On both sides of the Alps, Austria had acquired a 
 \ mediate, cleverly veiled suzerainty, which was incomparably firmer 
 : than the Napoleonic world-empire, and which deprived Germans 
 and Italians alike of all possibility of peaceful national develop- 
 ment. A Germanic Federation including Austria and the still 
 unconverted satraps of Bonaparte, would mean nothing else than 
 eternalised anarchy ; an Italy subjected to Austria, to Pope, 
 Bourbons, and archdukes, would perforce remain in a condi- 
 tion of pitialDle weakness. A long fchooling of sorrows was still 
 requisite until the two nations whose destinies were so closely 
 akin could gain a knowledge of the ultimate causes of their 
 misfortune ; until that illusion of a peaceful duaUsm which still, 
 and not by chance, continued to dominate the leading intelligences, 
 had been recognised as completely vain ; and until the ancient 
 and proud Frederician traditions had once more been restored to 
 honour. The establishment of a well-secured North German 
 power, such as was needed by the nation, was from the first 
 impossible to secure in Vienna, since Prussia's destiny was here 
 largely dependent upon the will of her enemies and rivals. It is 
 possible that a bold and talented statesman at the head of 
 Prussia would have given a m.uch simpler course to the involved 
 interplay of the Viennese negotiations, would have brought about 
 a quicker crisis and a quicker decision ; yet so unfavourable were 
 the circumstances that it would have been difficult for anyone 
 to effect more than was actually effected. 
 
 In view of the weakness, for the time still incurable, of 
 Central Europe, the new system of the European balance' of 
 1 power which was founded in Vienna could be nothing more than a 
 \ makeshift, a weakly structure which owed its endurance not to its 
 lown sohdity but merely to the general exhaustion and the general 
 ■'desire for peace. Many of the most difficult and dangerous 
 problems of international law were left unsettled, the members 
 of the congress contenting themselves with the opportunist phrase 
 which soon became the mode, c'esi une question vide. Never- 
 theless, from the bitter lessons of these terrible years of war, at 
 
 6 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 least one great and new idea emerged and became a common 
 possession of the political world. Even the average frivolous 
 diplomat began to understand that the state is not, as the last 
 century had dreamed, merely power, that its hfe does not consist 
 wholly in keeping a watchful eye upon neighbouring states and in 
 craftily overreaching them. The prospect of the triumph which 
 the dissensions of the old powers had prepared for the revolution 
 and for its crowned hero, had at length awakened a living European 
 sense of community. The liberated world had earnestly deter- 
 mined to live as a peaceful society of states ; it felt that the 
 nations, notwithstanding all their divergent interests, had numerous 
 great civihsing tasks to fulfil, and that these could be fulfilled 
 only through friendly understanding. Even though the old 
 mechanical view of the state still predominated, the conscienceless 
 raison d'etat of the old cabinet policy was already passing into 
 discredit, and it remained a permanent historical service of the 
 congress of Vienna that it furnished new forms and new rules for 
 the neighbourly intercourse of the society of states. It was a 
 definite advance that an agreement should at length be secured 
 concerning the rules of international etiquette, concerning the pre- 
 cedence of diplomatic agents, and concerning other inconspicuous 
 but indispensable preliminaries to an orderly intercourse between 
 the nations. Upon the sea, indeed, everything remained as of 
 old. Here there was no international law, but only the power 
 of England ; the pride of the queen of the seas would not even 
 consent to an understanding about salutes to the flag. 
 
 StiU more important were the consequences of the agree- 
 ments regarding navigation upon the rivers which by convention 
 were common to several neighbouring states, a laborious pieca 
 of work, in which Humboldt's diligence and perspicuity were 
 invaluable. The commercial pohcy of the eighteenth century 
 had on principle sought the advantage of any particular state 
 in the injury it could inflict upon its neighbours ; now for the 
 first time did a European treaty appeal to the doctrine of political 
 economy, in the sense of a recognition that the facilitation of 
 intercourse was a joint interest to all the nations. In addi- 
 tion, a great common work of Christian compassion was. already 
 • contemplated : the powers agreed upon the abohtion of the slave 
 trade. At first, indeed, this agreement touched only the 
 principle of the matter, for Spain and Portugal would not give 
 binding pledges. None the less, the way was broken for a long 
 series of treaties by which there was woven ever more closely 
 
 7 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the fabric of international intercourse, and which provided an ever 
 securer basis for the legal rights of the foreigner. The newly 
 awakened national pride had by no means destroyed the healthy 
 nucleus of the old German cosmopolitan sense. Hardly had the 
 Imperator been overthrown, when Sethe, the Prussian jurist, laid 
 before Stein a memorial, in which he showed how severe and 
 hostile to foreigners were the provisions of the code Napoleon;^ 
 men of learning and men of business combined to demand 
 from German diplomacy the 'safeguarding of the rights of the 
 foreigner. With the Vienna congress there began a new epoch 
 of international law, a more humane age, which gradually made 
 the great name of the society of nations an actual reality, and 
 which, in especial, at length gave a positive content to the idea 
 of international civil law. 
 
 Unquestionably in this advance of international law the 
 increase of world-trade played a greater part than did the 
 conscious insight of the members of the congress. How would 
 it have been possible for a serious and profound pohtical sense to 
 develop in this brilliant assembly, the most distinguished and 
 most numerous which the world had seen since the great days 
 of the Council of Constance ? All the powers of Europe, with the 
 single exception of the Potte, were represented. In the Graben 
 and upon the bastions of old Vienna, in the Prater and at the 
 great bourse of the diplomatists, the Hotel of the Empress of 
 Austria, there thronged a motley concourse of princes and pre- 
 tenders, statesmen and officers, priests and professors, adven- 
 turers, sharpers and suppliants, most humbly admired and most 
 humbly plundered by the good-natured Viennese, who could 
 never see enough of the high dignitaries. The original sin of the 
 everyday work of diplomatists, the intermingling of serious 
 (business of state with trifling, the intrigues and the chatter of 
 the drawing-rooms, flourished luxuriantly. Even more hateful 
 than the unavoidable immorality of this great bacchanal of 
 princes, appeared the ludicrous mendacity which here became 
 a fine art ; anyone who wished to shine in this field, must learn 
 how in the morning to conclude a great war-aUiance against his 
 daily table companion, and in the afternoon to greet this same 
 friend with undisturbed affection. 
 
 Over the whole ghttering and dazzling activity lay the 
 
 atmosphere of that trivial thoughtlessness which the rule of the 
 
 iHapsburgs had estabUshed upon the soil of Vienna. The time 
 
 ' Sethe to Stein, Diisseldorf, May 13, 1814. 
 8 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 had long passed since the valiant burghers of the faithful German 
 town of Vienna had constructed the magnificent churches of the 
 place. What was there of beauty which had been built during 
 these three long centuries since the town on the Danube had 
 become the centre of the great empire ? Absolutely nothing — 
 at most the cupola of the Karlskirche and the Belvedere Castle 
 might be said to display a certain individuality. Everywhere 
 else, in the hideous houses of the city, and in the palaces of 
 the wealthy nobility, was manifest the same lack of taste. There 
 were a few art-collections in the town, but nobody went to see 
 them. The treasures of the Ambras collection were forgotten ; 
 Charles Augustus of Weimar was the first to rediscover them, 
 for the talented prince took no pleasure in the insipid nulUty of 
 these social pleasures, and ranged the town on the look-out for 
 more refined enjoyments. It was still the same old Vienna which 
 had been mocked by Schiller, the town of the Phaeacians with 
 their eternal Sunday and the ever-turning spit. There was no 
 trace of scientific activity : who had ever heard anything of the 
 venerable university, except that it possessed a well-ordered 
 hospital with a few able physicians ? Over the town lay the 
 heavy hand of the secret poUce, and there prevailed in the 
 political world a general atmosphere of dullness. Not a soul 
 in this pleasure-seeking nation troubled himself about the poh- 
 tical activities of the congress ; diuring nine months Austrian 
 observers produced one single article discussing the affairs of the 
 illustrious assembly, and no one was astonished at this dearth 
 of literary activity. The theatre alone still served to show that 
 a highly talented branch of the human race lived in Vienna, and 
 that the decayed intellectual hfe might once again awaken. In 
 the circles of the Austrian magnates, culture was still entirely 
 French ; it was only with the Prussian visitors that people spoke 
 German in order to show a kindly feeling for the northern 
 Teutonism. The wit of the old Bourbon aristocracy was indeed 
 altogether lacking ; even the leading Jewish financiers, who now, 
 thanks to the financial need of the House of Austria, for the first 
 time attained to power and made their way into the distinguished 
 world, the members of the firms of Arnstein, Eskeles, and Herz, 
 were by no means richly endowed with this quaUty. 
 
 It was inevitable that the spiritual poverty of the environ- 
 ment should react upon the tone of the congress. Deliberate 
 pleasure-seeking offered here the only protection against tedium, i 
 Masks and drives in the Prater, dances and gaming parties, 
 
History of Germany 
 
 banquets and tableaux, followed one another in monotonous 
 succession, so that the work of the diplomats could hardly be 
 begun. A caustic observation of Prince de Ligne, a scandalous 
 story about Metternich, who never honoured less than two ladies 
 at once with his favour, or a witty remark about the newly 
 discovered hobby-horse of Baron Drais, whose Umping progress 
 so strongly resembled that of the congress itself, or some judg- 
 ment uttered by that high court of refined taste which at the 
 table of Talleyrand ceremoniously declared the cheese of Brie to 
 be the king of cheeses. Such were the only reliefs amid this 
 colossal insipidity. It seemed as if the re-established old princely 
 society of the nations of Europe now desired to display to the 
 world for what useless purposes it flourished. " We have learned 
 much from Napoleon," Charles Augustus said bitterly, " and 
 among other things we have learned effrontery." 
 
 Emperor Francis, the host of the assembly, played, not 
 without abihty, his part of honourable patriarch among the high 
 nobility, although he was as yet barely forty-seven years of age. 
 He did not grudge the daily expenditure of fifty thousand gulden 
 for the imperial table, and for the congress as a whole the expendi- 
 ture of sixteen milUon gulden, whilst his unpaid veterans were 
 begging in the streets ; the crafty reckoner knew well the advan- 
 tages he gained by the position of host. How touching, to the 
 serene highnesses who were his guests, seemed this unpretending 
 figure in a shabby blue coat, with his good-natured petty bour- 
 geois manners. Born in Florence, Francis had not come to the 
 Danube until he was already a young man ; but the mask of the 
 frank, true-hearted, blunt Austrian, which he had then assumed, 
 now fitted him hke a glove, because it was suited to his 
 phlegmatic disposition and to his vulgar inchnations. No one 
 could ever induce him to feel any sentiment of cordial benevo- 
 lence ; the changes of destiny of this gigantic time passed over 
 his dull egoism without leaving a trace. He never commuted a 
 death-sentence unless the offender himself begged for death ; 
 he himself supervised the maltreatment of political prisoners, 
 himself determined the weight of the chains, and the number of 
 the days of fasting, and knew no more enjoyable recreation than 
 the reading of intercepted letters ; he had already lost two 
 wives, and was soon to bury the third, in order with invincible 
 equanimity to marry the fourth : on principle he surrounded himself 
 with people of a dubious past, whom he could at any time dismiss 
 at will. Notwithstanding all this, and notwithstanding the evil 
 
 lo 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 expression in his cold, hard eyes, notwithstanding his close resem- 
 blance to Philip II of Spain to whom he was akin not in blood 
 \only but in spirit, all the world believed in the child-Uke 
 \jnnocence of the heartless and suspicious despot. His political 
 system was the simplest possible. After all the troubles and 
 distresses of these desolate years, he wished at length to secure 
 his own peace, wished at length to function as a diligent privy 
 councillor, covering the margins of official documents with un- 
 meaning observations, to play the fiddle in his leisure hours, cut out 
 paper images, varnish bird-cages, and engage in other imperial 
 dissipations. Stupid and dull-witted like the majority of his 
 forefathers, completely incapable of even beginning to understand 
 a new political thought, he regarded all the revolutionary and 
 national ideas which were animating the new century as nothing 
 more than wickedness and stupidity, as merely a punishable 
 rebellion against the pious archducal house. With this poverty 
 lof spirit there was, however, associated a thorough-going peasant 
 cunning, a certain rude instinct for the politically attainable. 
 The emperor felt very truly that his house had already gained 
 almost everything which was desirable, and that it must neces- 
 sarily regard any change in the society of states as a danger. 
 Consequently, from inclination, on principle, and by calculation, 
 he was the sworn enemy of all innovations, the suspicious oppo- 
 nent of the two ambitious neighbour powers, Russia and, above 
 all, Prussia. 
 
 Whilst to the good emperor it was a difficult matter to emerge 
 from his imostentatious daily habits and to take part in the 
 brilliant society of the congress, the adroit Metternich could swim 
 like a fish in this sparkhng whirlpool. He had never had such 
 an enjoyable time since the dissipated days of his youth, diuing 
 ihis education in the easy-going spiritual courts of his Rhenish . 
 'home. No one knew so well as he how to carry through a political 
 intrigue between dinner and a masked ball, how before going to keep 
 an assignation to send off a quickly drafted official despatch, or 
 while looking affectionately into the beautiful blue eyes of one 
 of his intimates to lie from the bottom of his soul. Nor was he 
 at all displeased when his Prussian friends regarded him as far 
 more frivolous than he actually was, and when they took for 
 forgetfulness and neglect what had been done from deUberate 
 intention. For just as in his own household, notwithstanding all 
 his display, he remained ever a careful host, frugal to the point 
 of avarice, so amid the distractions of social intercourse he held 
 
 II 
 
History of Germany 
 
 tenaciously to his political plans. In this great conference upon 
 Austrian soil, he saw a brilliant triumph of the Hapsburg-Lorraine 
 statecraft, regarded the decisions of the illustrious assembly as 
 his own work, and imagined that by these means bounds would 
 be set once for all to the movements of national Ufa. Like the 
 emperor, he saw that his Austria could follow no policy but one 
 of conservatism, and like the emperor he 'wished to control the 
 revolutionary ideas of the nations by a strict police supervision, 
 and to bridle the ambition of the two aspiring young eastern 
 powers whilst displaying towards them in appearance the most 
 tender friendship. It was owing to these considerations that 
 he formed a firm alliance with the English-Hanoverian tories, 
 whose sentiments resembled his own, and it was for these reasons 
 that he remained on excellent terms with the Bourbon 
 court. Prussia's national policy had already imposed a barrier 
 in the way of the treaties with the Rhenish Confederate states ; 
 the first thing to do now was, by rescuing Saxony, to bind the 
 petty thrones more firmly to the House of Austria, and thus to 
 'safeguard Turkey against Russian attack. It was in a fight with 
 the Turks that Austria had first come to the front, and through 
 this in reality that she had first become a state ; to the thought- 
 less love of power of this new political wisdom it now seemed, 
 on the other hand, a sacred duty to preserve the last fragments 
 of the Turkish dominion. The sorrows of the Serbian and Greek 
 rayahs, sorrows which cried to heaven, aroused in the Ho f burg 
 no more than a frivolous smile. A sentiment of inner kinship 
 >bound to the Sublime Porte this new Austria, who in her Italian 
 provinces could maintain herself only by the power of the sword. 
 Since the beginning of 1813, Gentz had been engaged in regular 
 confidential correspondence with Janko Karadja, the Wallachian 
 hospodar, who in the Divan was to keep " our most faithful allies " 
 precisely informed concerning the situation of the world and the 
 intentions of the court of Vienna. In vain, since the autumn, 
 had Metternich been working for the same end, endeavouring 
 to persuade the czar that the sultan must be accepted into the 
 European family of princes, and that his possessions must be 
 solemnly guaranteed by all the powers in common. 
 
 The gap in the great system of the policy of stability was 
 now to be filled in. Could this be effected, and could Alexander's 
 Polish plans be also frustrated, in Metternich's view the work 
 of the congress would be safeguarded for an indefinite period. 
 Such was his view of the world. Pleasure and repose were to him 
 
 12 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 the highest aims of political life, and nothing but the dread of a 
 disturbance of the peace could spur him to a valiant resolution. 
 A persistent state of disintegration in Germany, so that the 
 sovereign petty kings should voluntarily turn to Austria for pro- 
 tection against Prussia and against "the dangerous idea of Ger- 
 man unity " ; the eternal powerlessness of Italy, which, as Lord 
 Castlereagh dryly answered to complaints of the Redmontese, 
 must ever remain partitioned for the peace of Europe, and which 
 in the eyes of the Hofburg was no more than a geographical 
 expression ; France watched by a number of peaceful states of 
 secondary importance surrounding their dangerous neighbour 
 from the Texel to the Ligurian Sea, and cutting her off from all 
 contact with the great powers ; Russia held in check by a tmited 
 Europe which was to take Turkey under her protection ; the 
 revolution crushed by the united resistance of the coiurts wherever 
 and whenever it might show itself — such were the forms of the 
 new Europe, led by Austria, as they presented themselves to the 
 mind of Metternich. It was a system of pusillanimity, the off- 
 spring of a mind devoid of ideas ; one which had no inkUng of 
 the motive forces of history : but this poHcy corresponded to the 
 momentary needs of the Austrian monarchy ; it harmonised with 
 the general desire for repose felt by the exhausted world ; it 
 set to work with calculated cunning, with profound knowledge 
 of all the mean impulses of human nature and it was based, 
 in masterly fashion, upon those petty arts of good-natured and 
 smiling mendacity wherein from ancient days had lain the 
 strength of the Hapsburg statecraft. 
 
 Among the foreign guests it was the EngUsh who attracted 
 most attention. It was long since the pohshed continentals had 
 seen such a toilette as that of the gigantic Lady Castlereagh, one 
 so old-fashioned, hideous, and tasteless. The islanders, who for 
 years had been shut off from the Continent, seemed Uke figures 
 from another world ; everywhere they aroused mockery by the 
 extraordinary crotchetiness of their disposition, and everywhere 
 hostility by their preposterous arrogance. The whole of the 
 poUte world laughed with mahcious delight when the Viennese 
 cab-drivers once actually inscribed upon the back of General Sir 
 Charles Stewart the universal opinion regarding British humiUty. 
 It was not until towards the end of the coi^gress that Wellington 
 put in an appearance, this time at length a worthy representative 
 of the great naval power ; but he also understood no more of 
 German affairs than did his poor-spirited colleagues Castlereagh 
 
 13 
 
History of Germany 
 
 and Cathcart, and like both of these the duke was guided by the 
 counsels of the Austrians and the Hanoverians. How differently 
 did the czar know how to make his influence felt. He still was 
 glad to play the part of the handsome young man, and was some- 
 times to be seen walking arm-in-arm with the illustrious young 
 cavaliers of the Bohemian or the Hungarian nobles' guard. At 
 the same time he continued to maintain the sacred character of 
 saviour and liberator of the world ; never before had he spoken 
 so eloquently and softly regarding the promotion of the happi- 
 ness of the human race. In a memorandum despatched from 
 Vienna to all of his ambassadors he assumed a tone which reminds 
 us of the language of the Rheinische Merkur. The fall of 
 Napoleon, he said in so many words, had been effected through 
 the victory of public opinion over the views of most of the 
 cabinets ; in future every nation must be empowered to defend its 
 own independence ; consequently there must be no further parti- 
 tion of countries, and a representative system must everywhere 
 i be introduced ! Now, too, Alexander was in the fortunate situa- 
 tion of finding that his ideas of world-liberation coincided pre- 
 Icisely with his personal interests. On the way to Vienna, he had 
 stayed for a few days at Pulawy, Czartoryski's beautiful castle, 
 enjoying here the intoxicating homage of the charming PoUsh 
 ladies ; now he had brought his Sarmatian friend with him to 
 j Vienna, and displayed himself openly as the constitutional king 
 \ of the new Polish realm. 
 
 Nesselrode, Metternich's friend, almost fell into disfavour; 
 his word counted for Uttle as compared with the views of Czar- 
 toryski and Capodistrias. This talented Corfiote hardly cared 
 to conceal that he regarded the Russian service as no more than 
 a step by which he hoped to become the hero and Uberator of his 
 Greek fatherland ; all enslaved peoples were to him objects for 
 help and, above all, unhappy Italy, which was dear to him as 
 sister in destiny to his own Hellas. The newly founded Hetairia 
 (Society of Friends) of Odessa, and the Philomuse League of 
 Athens, found in him a protector. Soon some Russian lords were 
 to be seen wearing the golden and iron rings of the two Hellenic 
 leagues, and the young prince Ypsilanti was active on behalf of 
 the Greek cause. German princes, statesmen, and men of 
 learning, also became numbered among the Philhellenes ; Haxt- 
 hausen's fine collection of modern Greek ballads was' passed 
 from hand to hand, simultaneously awakening ancient classical 
 memories and ] Christo-Romantic enthusiasm. However conser- 
 
 14 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 vative the times might be, the German idealists could not agree 
 to regard as a legitimate prince this Grand Turk, who at the very 
 time was flaying, impaling, and roasting the Serbs in masses. 
 Metternich saw with regret that the desired freedom of the 
 European city for his Turkish prot^6 was still remote, and he 
 observed with increasing mistrust the revolutionary sentiments 
 of the czar, who had now resumed friendly relations with Stein, 
 and who desired for the Germans a really viable federal constitu- 
 tion. It was unfortunate that Stein held no office, so that whilst 
 he could express his opinions freely to all, at the critical moment 
 of the negotiations he could not utter a decisive voice. 
 
 To the unpretentious mind of Frederick William the eternal 
 pomp soon became unendurable ; he yearned to be at home once 
 more, engaged in orderly work in his quiet castle, and was utterly 
 bored by all the festivals, although to some small extent he was 
 shyly paying court to the beautiful countess Julie Zichy. He 
 remained firmly convinced that the Russian aUiance was indis- 
 pensable, yet he did not venture at present to oppose a decisive 
 negative to the different views of Hardenberg and Hiimboldt, 
 and even took pleasure in daily intercourse with Knesebeck, the 
 declared enemy of Russia, who, always a zealous adherent of 
 Austria, was now, hke Metternich, an enthusiast for the sultan. 
 The easy-going chancellor was quite at home amid these 
 multifarious activities ; it pleased him when the palm for grace 
 and amiabihty was allotted to himself among the older men of 
 the congress, as it was to Metternich among the younger ; but it 
 was manifest that his declining energies suffered from the unending 
 distractions. Humboldt was better able to endure the fatigues 
 of a life of enjoyment, and amid the hurly-burly of social pleasures 
 to maintain his tenacious industry. In intelUgence and culture, 
 in alertness and uprightness of feeUng, the Prussian statesmen 
 were not lacking. Next to Gentz, Humboldt and the privy coun- 
 cillors of Hardenberg's chancellery, Staegemann, Jordan, and 
 Hofimann, were the best workers at the congress ; it was they 
 almost alone who carried out the difficult statistical calculations 
 which served as the basis for the reconstitution of the map of 
 Europe, and their pitiless enumeration of figures was often weari- 
 some to those of other nations, and especially to the French, to 
 whom geography had always seemed a tedious subject. Of the 
 learned statistician Hoffmann, Talleyrand said once, in a rage : 
 " Who on earth is that little man who counts all the heads and 
 loses his own ? " But the buoyant resolution which might have 
 
 IS 
 
History of Germany 
 
 found a secure way out of the labyrinth of diplomatic intrigues 
 was lacking to these loyal workers. On the whole, the king's small 
 following, not excepting the men of pleasure. Prince Augustus 
 and Hardenberg, proved straightforward and honourable ; the 
 pretty, pleasure-loving women of Vienna simply could not under- 
 stand why the king's brother, the handsome and much-courted 
 Prince William, who had displayed his hon-like courage in the 
 face of the enemy, should be so shy and girlish in women's society, 
 and why he could never forget his much-loved wife. 
 
 The most numerous and variegated portion of the distin- 
 guished assembly was naturally constituted by the German petty 
 princes. There was not one of them, from the Bavarian Max 
 Joseph down to Henry LXIV of Reuss, who did not diligently 
 court the favour of the foreign rulers ; the Russians related with 
 unconcealed contempt what piles of begging letters from German 
 serene highnesses had accumulated in the czar's cabinet. There 
 was not one who did not regard his arrogated sovereignty as 
 an unapproachable holy of holies ; since the agreements of the 
 previous autumn, they felt once more so secure in the possession 
 of this Napoleonic gift, that one of the smallest said openly to 
 Stein : "I know very well that my sovereignty is an abuse, but 
 it suits me very well." With the sovereigns were associated the 
 crowd of the mediatised, who still continued to hope for the 
 recognition of their formally incontestable rights, although their 
 fate had already been decided at Ried and Fulda. Their leader 
 was the dowager princess of Fiirstenberg, a brave and sagacious 
 woman ; unweariedly she advocated the interests of her partners 
 in misfortune, in association with privy councillor Gartner, the 
 much-derided surcharge d'affaires, who was maintained by the dis- 
 crowned at their own charges. 
 
 In addition there were representatives from various German 
 territories which demanded the restoration of their old dynasties : 
 Baron von Summerau and Doctor Schlaar representing the Aus- 
 trian party in Breisgau, a deputation from Diisseldorf, which 
 town desired reunion with the Bavarian Palatinate, '^and so 
 on. Not less zealously did Wamboldt, Helfferich, and Schies, 
 the three orators of the Catholic Church in Germany, demand 
 the re-establishment of the spiritual states which had been 
 destroyed by the principal decision of the Diet of Deputation, or 
 at least the surrender of the stolen ecclesiastical property. They 
 were under the protection of the papal nuncio, the able and witty 
 Cardinal Consalvi ; with them were associated Friedrich Schlegel 
 
 i6 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 the convert, Gtoethe's nephew, Councillor Schlosser, from Frank- 
 fort, and a large circle of clericals containing many men of con- 
 spicuous ability. Yet even in the ecclesiastical splaere there was 
 manifest the hopeless disintegration of German life. For beside 
 these representatives of the Roman Church, there appeared the 
 vicar-general of Constance, Baron von Wessenberg, one of the 
 gentle, enlightened, highly noble princes of the church charac- 
 teristic of the century that had passed away — famosus tile Wessen- 
 bergius, he had been named in a papal bull. His hope was for a 
 German national Church, and it was his endeavour to secure the 
 primacy of Germany for his principal Dalberg, the dethroned 
 grand-duke of Frankfort. In addition there were a number of 
 honourable repubhcan statesmen from the Hansa towns, led by 
 Smidt of Bremen, who had played a valiant part on the great 
 headquarters-staff during the winter campaign, and who had 
 won general respect by his prudence and trustworthiness ; there 
 was also Jacob Baruch of Frankfort, as representative of German 
 Jewry ; the able bookseller Cotta of Stuttgart, whose sagacity 
 already led him to recognise that the decisive voice in German 
 affairs was Austria's, and who therefore placed his Allgemeine 
 Zeitung at the disposal of the Hofburg ; and an unending series, 
 in addition, of place-hunters, eavesdroppers, and toadies. 
 
 It was the chiefs of the middle-sized states who appeared as 
 the genuine representatives of what the French termed " la 
 troisieme Allemagne." The hearts of all these creatures of Napo- 
 leon were filled with envy for victorious Prussia. It was unen- 
 diurable that the state of Frederick should have restored to the 
 Germans a fatherland, should have given them once more the 
 right to feel joyful self-satisfaction. Down with the powerful 
 eagle into the general mire of German powerlessness, quarrelsome- 
 ness, and poverty of spirit — ^here was the thought in which the 
 satraps of Bonapartism were all happily united. To weaken the 
 state which alone could defend the fatherland seemed to them all 
 to be a self-evident precondition of German freedom. Even that 
 most bourgeois of all the kings. Max Joseph, who day after day 
 wandered about the streets of Vienna, joking and chatting with 
 everyone, the good-natured lord with whom all were acquainted, 
 who with his rough and merry manner reminded people now of a 
 French colonel of the old days and now of a Bavarian brewer, 
 even he carried on the anti-Prussian campaign in deadly earnest, 
 commanding his plenipotentiary that when in presence of the 
 monarchs he should agree to nothiixg at all so long as the king of 
 
 17 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Saxony was not restored to his rights. Similar were the views of 
 his son, the eccentric crown prince Louis, although, to his father's 
 great annoyance, the prince adhered to the party of the Teuton- 
 ising enthusiasts, and was fond of using high-sounding language 
 about the Teuton spirit and the preservation of Teutonism. 
 ' Far more provocative was the attitude of the despot of Wiir- 
 temberg. As doyen among the crowned heads he had every- 
 where precedence, and consequently, with the naive arrogance 
 of the German estate of petty princes, he determined that he 
 would now really be the most distinguished of them all. He 
 always gave the largest tips, in order to display the magnificence 
 of the new Swabian crown ; he endeavoured in word and gesture 
 to imitate the fallen Imperator, as far as his colossal girth of body 
 rendered this possible ; unabashed, and in rough and angry 
 speeches, he announced his anger at the disappearance of the 
 glories of the Confederation of the Rhine. His heir, Uke the heir 
 to the Bavarian throne, was an opponent of the Bonapartist sen- 
 timents of the father. The soul of the crown prince William 
 was fired by a restless ambition ; having in the last winter cam- 
 paign shown himself a brave and able officer, he hoped to become 
 ! commander-in-chief of the army of the Germanic Federation. 
 ■His beloved Princess Catharine strengthened him in such dreams; 
 I the youthful couple understood how to diffuse around them 
 such a nimbus of spiritual grandeur that even sober-minded men 
 believed that the court of Stuttgart would inaugurate a new 
 age for Grermany. The prince was widely over-estimated, and 
 many already saw in him the future German emperor ; German 
 particularism would not hear a word about the infinitely greater 
 performances of the Prussian generals. 
 
 Among the statesmen of the minor courts three were especially 
 conspicuous, Wrede, Miinster, and Gagem, each after his own 
 manner a typical representative of the impotent megalomania 
 characteristic of the diplomatists of the petty states, a mania 
 which had already brought so much ignominy upon Germany, 
 and which for half a century yet to come was to play a leading 
 part in the councils of the fatherland. Wrede had always shown 
 himself a courageous swordsman, from those days when he led 
 the Landsturm of the peasants of Odenwald against the sans- 
 culottes down to the time of the " decisive battle " of Arcis, as 
 it was named by the servile Bavarian press. Of genuine military 
 talent he had as little as he had of noble sentiments or real cul- 
 ture ; the unhappy Tyrolese insurgents had had sufficient experi- 
 
 i8 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 ence of his brutal roughness. ^ The far-seeing Bavarian officers did 
 not themselves believe in this manufactured greatness ; they knew 
 that his comrade Deroy, the reformer of the Bavarian infantry, 
 who had remained in Russia, had been an incomparably greater 
 soldier ; they knew that the glories of Bavarian arms were to be 
 sought, not in the campaign of the previous winter, but in the 
 wars of the Confederation of the Rhine. However, the lucky man 
 had abandoned France at the right moment, and had concluded 
 the treaty of Ried which was of so much advantage to Austria. 
 Since that time he had enjoyed the special favour of the court of 
 Vienna ; the coarse blusterer was easier to get on with than was 
 Montgelas with his tenacious cunning. Moreover, the Austrian 
 army was itself so poorly provided with men of talent, that many 
 of the Austrian diplomats seriously believed Wrede to be a com- 
 mander. When he came to Vienna, he was still intoxicated by 
 the praises which the allies had showered upon him after the 
 defeat of Hanau ; he boasted that he would chastise Prussian 
 greed by force of arms, whilst he demanded for Bavaria alto- 
 gether immoderate compensation, even Mainz, Frankfort, and 
 Hanau. He was now prince and field-marshal, for Bavaria, too, 
 must have her Blucher, and he endeavoured to secure honour for 
 his title by loud abuse of the quill-drivers, exclaiming, " a marshal 
 Wrede signs only with the sword ! " 
 
 A remarkable contrast to this sabre-ratthng boaster was 
 furnished by the rigid, worthy, and dignified Munste;, one of those 
 enviable men who beheve in themselves so profoundly that the 
 uninitiated are inchned to share the delusion. To the servile natures 
 of ducal and grand-ducal diplomacy, this gigantic man with a long 
 face, reminding everyone of the well-known hereditary beauty 
 of the House of Hapsburg, seemed magnificent when with unre- 
 strained frankness he sang his own praises. The count did in 
 fact possess a many-sided, although superficial, culture. Married 
 to a princess of Biickeburg, and for so many years an associate 
 of the proudest nobiUty of the world, he was glad to play the part 
 of the great lord. Moreover, he had good reason to look down 
 upon the small fry of the Rhenish Confederate states, for he had 
 had rich experience in the service of the EngUsh crown, 
 
 1 In the first two editions of this work there followed here in the text an 
 observation regarding the act of pillage which Wrede is said to have perpetrated 
 in the year 1807 in the castle of Oels (related by Arndt, Wanderungen mit Stein, 
 p. 218). The passage has now been omitted because, as the outcome of 
 enquiries made in Oels, I have come to the conclusion that the story is inaccurate. 
 See Appendix. 
 
 19 
 
History of Germany 
 
 and had displayed great endurance in the struggle with Bona- 
 partism. Yet he was rather courtier than statesman, rather 
 junker than aristocrat. Having made himself indispensable to 
 the Guelphs by petty complacencies in the wearisome domestic 
 negotiations of the royal house — chamberlain's services, to which 
 neither the pride of Stein nor the suppleness of Hardenberg would 
 ever have stooped — ^his conception of the great struggles of the 
 century did not rise above the level of the simple prejudices of 
 caste. " The principal struggle of our time," he was accus- 
 tomed to say, " is that the ante-chamber wants to find its way 
 into the drawing-room." As a correct of&cial representative of 
 electoral Brunswick, he demanded the restoration of the imperial 
 dignity, whose abolition had indeed never been recognised by the 
 Guelphs ; but the glories of the illustrious House of Guelph 
 must not be diminished by this. His open contempt for the 
 " kinglets " of the Confederation of the Rhine did not prevent 
 him at the congress from immediately demanding (without the 
 knowledge of the prince regent) a Hanoverian kingletship for 
 his Guelphs — ^a pretentious kingly crown, whose untenable claims 
 were in days to come to press as a heavy burden upon the little 
 country. 
 
 It was the curse of this world of petty states that an 
 honourable national pride was here impossible. However 
 often Miinster might talk at large of the greatness of Germany, 
 it was his pride that his children were English. And however 
 loudly he was accustomed to speak of the free spirit of the true 
 aristocracy, he was himself utterly enmeshed in the servile ideas 
 which the professional falsifications of particularist history had 
 caused to flourish in the German minor states. This Guelph 
 house, which since the days of Henry the Lion had done almost 
 nothing for the German nation, was to him the most glorious in 
 the world. Just as uncritically as the servile Gottingen pro- 
 fessors did he describe the brilliancy of Enghsh parliamentarism 
 (which had, however, developed solely through the congenital 
 incapacity of the Guelph Georges, and to the detriment of their 
 authority), ascribing these glories to the wisdom of the House of 
 Brunswick, and rediscovering the much-loved " Guelph freedom " 
 in the petrified junker rule of the Hanoverian territories. This 
 great moment, when Germany at length once more belonged to 
 herself, was one which he hoped to utilise in order to reverse the 
 justified punishment which Henry the Lion had received for his 
 misdeeds more than six hundred years before ; on the other hand 
 
 20 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 he found it preposterous that Prussia, on her side, should desire ] 
 to secure atonement for the maltreatment suffered only seven j 
 years before. 
 
 The Guelph statesman, although he had never made any 
 attempt to acquire even a superficial understanding of Prussian 
 affairs, was inspired by an ardent hatred for the Prussian neigh- 
 bour. Among the poHtical sins which for this unhappy nation 
 barred the road to power and freedom, there was nothing so 
 disastrous as the general failure to understand the true significances 
 of the new history of the fatherland — a failure almost miraculous i 
 in a cultured nation. Of all the remarkable transformations which ^ 
 had been first rendered possible by the creation of the Prussian ' 
 national army and the consequent liberation of Germany, hardly / 
 anything was known in the petty states. Whilst the Rhenislr' 
 Confederates related extraordinary fables about the stupidity 
 of the servile Brandenburg peasants and the tyranny of the Prus- 
 sian junkers, the Hanoverians spoke disdainfully of the polyarchy 
 of the Berlin bureaucracy. Even the wisest in Hanover were 
 not free from such conceits. It was during the years in which 
 the Hanoverian state was no longer in existence that Rehberg, 
 the most notable man among those bourgeois councillors to whom 
 the work of the noble Hanoverian ministers was entrusted, wrote 
 his book upon administrative work under a monarchy, a glorifica- 
 tion of the Guelph nobles' rule in opposition to the Prussian 
 regime of slavery ; the apt rejoinder of Friedrich von Biilow, 
 based upon a thorough knowledge of both states, attracted no 
 attention. Thus Miinster also had formed his ideas of the 
 Prussian state solely out of current talk, perhaps with the aid of 
 Wilhelmina's memoirs ; with unbounded contempt he expressed 
 his feelings about the miseries of the corporal's administration of 
 Berlin. Just as in the year 1804, from petty-minded mistrust, 
 he had frustrated the Prussian occupation, which perhaps might 
 still have saved his homeland, so upon the outbreak of the War 
 of Liberation he believed that Prussia lived only as a memory ; 
 and when this fine dream had been dispersed, he wrote, greatly 
 troubled, to Gagern, that now Austria had been rounded off in 
 the east and half excluded from Germany, the aggrandisement of 
 Prussia was the greatest danger. Fear and jealousy were the 
 motive forces in the German policy of these ministeriunculi, as^ 
 Stein contemptuously termed them. In Vienna, Miinster was 
 at first cautious ; it was his wish, so he wrote to the prince 
 regent, not to anger the Prussian statesm-en, and not to impose 
 
 21 
 
History of Germany 
 
 difficulties in the way of the fluctuating negotiations concerning 
 the rounding-off of the Guelph realm. His was an easy-going 
 and dilettantist nature, that of " the painter," as his friends were 
 accustomed to call him. He was in any case disinclined to per- 
 sistent activity, and he was long kept to his room by an illness ; 
 \but wherever he had opportunity he worked zealously against 
 \prussia, and he was unfortunately only too precisely informed 
 Iconcerning the ideas of the chancellor by that evil-minded tale- 
 bearer, the Hanoverian Hardenberg. 
 
 In Haiis von Gag grn. the constitutional federaHst, was incor- 
 porated yet another variety of the particularist pro-foreign spirit. 
 Who did not know this busybody, the restlessly moving little man 
 with the brightly flashing eyes and the winning smile ? He must 
 always be there wherever there was amusement and feasting, 
 and wherever there was any negotiation concerning a territory 
 and a people ; completely uninvited, he thrust himself into all 
 the affairs of the congress, with an unceasing flow of great words 
 regarding the European balance of power and the protection of 
 the lesser states. The celebrated wine-cellar of the House of 
 Nassau and the friendship of Talleyrand, afforded him the means 
 of making a nest for himself among the ambassadors of the great 
 powers. Years before, the much-occupied imperial knight had 
 been an enthusiast on behalf of the Holy Empire ; subsequently, 
 always with the same zeal for the fatherland, he had served the 
 Confederation of the Rhine, and had philanthropically saved from 
 destruction a good dozen of condemned petty princes. Now he 
 recommended a federation of perfectly equal kings, grand-dukes, 
 and dukes, under the protection of the Austrian imperial crown, 
 but he also recommended a considerable number of fundamental 
 rights for the German people, for this wonderful man, ever young 
 in spirit, remained a faithful liberal and a child of the French 
 enlightenment. 
 
 f Gagern sought in Holland, just as Miinster sought in Eng- 
 iland, the centre of gravity of Central European policy. Quite 
 recently thrown by chance into the Dutch service, he had in his 
 inconstant imagination conceived an ideal image of the Emropean 
 destiny of the House of Orange ; and just as Miinster spoke of 
 " Guelph freedom," so did Gagern speak of the " Orange policy 
 of the golden mean." What did it matter to him that the old, 
 heroic race of Orange had long passed away, and that the new 
 line' of Nassau-Diez had not inherited the least trace of the great 
 sentiments of its ancestors ? Generally speaking, the enthusiast 
 
 22 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 was untroubled even by the insatiable land-hunger of the new k. 
 of the Netherlands, although he was occasionally alarmed by thy 
 excess of avarice. For Germany, especially, he anticipated wonder^ 
 fully happy results from the wise poUcy of the princely house whose 
 motto was je maintiendray ! In his intoxication, he was no longer 
 able to distinguish between Dutch and German interests. He 
 sent his favourite and most talented son into the Dutch army, ' 
 without for a moment feeling that he was sending him into 
 foreign service ; just as recklessly did he endeavour to secure 
 for his master one fragment after another detached from the 
 German left bank of the Rhine. His king would hear nothing 
 of the Germanic Federation ; and the ambassador himself regarded 
 it as a doubtful policy to attach to the German state, in accordance 
 with Hardenberg's desu-e, the whole of the Netherlands as a 
 member of the Germanic Federation ; and he therefore put for- 1 
 ward the preposterous proposal that the Netherlands, Uke Austria, \ 
 Prussia, and Denmark, should adhere to the Germanic Federa- 
 tion only with a portion of the Netherlands territory, that of 
 Luxemburg. This half-measure was by no means regarded by 
 Gagem as a last resource, but rather as a triumph of genuinely 
 Germanic statecraft ; for the more intricate, absurd, and nebulous 
 the frame of German constitutional law, the more, to his mind, 
 did this seem to correspond to the ancient spirit of German free- 
 dom. In the old empire there was nothing he had admired so 
 greatly as the extraordinary legal relationships of Silesia and 
 Old Prussia, of which no one had been able to say with certainty 
 whether they belonged to Germany or not. It was in such bastard 
 structures that he foresaw the true essence of the corpus nommque 
 Germanise ; how delighted he was with the hope of adorning the 
 western frontier of Germany with a similar master-work of Teutonic 
 state-construction. 
 
 At first the grown-up children of particularism trotted along 
 joyfully upon their hobby-horses, delicately patching and polish- 
 ing at the state structure of their fatherland, until the German 
 constitution became as meaningless, mendacious, and senseless 
 as had formerly been that of the old empire. Towards Prussia, 
 Gagern cherished a strange sentiment of mingled terror and 
 respect ; in this good-nature^ soul there was no place for hatred, 
 for he ever looked upon all that came in his way, animate or in- 
 animate, from the most friendly side. In his historical fantasies, 
 when he went back as far as the days of William III, he even 
 at times regarded Brandenburg and Holland as natural allies, 
 
 23 
 
History of Germany 
 
 and ardently assured his Prussian friends that the existing system 
 of states was largely dependent upon the good understanding 
 between Berlin and The Hague. But the contentious neighbour 
 state must not draw too near to his beloved Holland ; moreover 
 the Saxon claims of Prussia seemed monstrous to the old advocate 
 of the petty princedoms. With fiery zeal he constituted him- 
 self the defender of the " most sacred rights " of the German high 
 nobility, and wrote to the Prussian statesmen expressive letters 
 in that ludicrously didactic tone which this pigmy was always 
 glad to employ towards the long-suffering great ones of the earth. 
 On one occasion, when he sent the chancellor one of his well- 
 meaning, confusedly-learned pamphlets, he permitted himself 
 to express the censure : " There is so much that is noble in your 
 disposition that I return ever to the best hopes, even though 
 things have happened which I find myself unable to approve." 
 Thereupon Hardenberg, playing gently upon the protean nature 
 of the particularist patriot, replied : " Regarding your annota- 
 tion, however much value I place upon your approval, I do not 
 feel it necessary to recognise in you the censor of my public 
 actions, just as little as I venture to compare your excellency's 
 own political behaviour in different epochs of your life, or to 
 decide which of us two has done the most for Germany's peace 
 and harmony, and for the establishment of her internal con- 
 fidence." Notwithstanding such sarcasms, Hardenberg's good 
 nature made it impossible for him to become seriously annoyed 
 with this wonderful saint. His friends regarded the indefatigable 
 man with a touch of humour. Alopeus wrote aptly : " This 
 restless statesmen, to whom it is a matter of indifference what 
 subject occupies his talents as long as he can appear thoroughly 
 busy, has now become a Dutchman. "» 
 
 Among statesmen of such a cahbre, it was inevitable that 
 the influence of Talleyrand should soon make itself felt, for of 
 all the diplomats at the congress he was the ablest and the most 
 determined opponent of Prussia. Upon the slippery floor of the 
 salon, an imperturbable firmness of tread has always been more 
 conducive to victory than a courteous amiability. Whilst Metter- 
 nich and Hardenberg obtained great successes in the distin- 
 guished society by means of agreeable and winning methods 
 Talleyrand's cynical audacity proved even more irresistible. What 
 an impression was produced when the ungainly figure of this 
 
 Gagern to Hardenberg, November 12 and 18 ; Hardenberg to Gagern 
 November 16 ; Alopeus to Humboldt, October 11, 1814. 
 
 24 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 limping club-footed man, dressed in an old-fashioned style dating 
 from the Directory, pushed into the brilliant circle of the court : 
 above the high stock was an enormous mouth with black teeth ; 
 the small, deeply-set grey eyes were utterly devoid of expression ; 
 the features were repulsively common, the countenance was im- 
 passive ; he was incapable of blushing or of betraying the inner 
 movement of his thoughts. A thoroughly mephistophelian figure 
 was his. In Hardenberg's diary he is always spoken of as 
 " Tallesnrand with the goat's foot." The ladies were intoxicated 
 with delight when, with a fawning smile, he threw to them some 
 double-meaning observation or ill-natvirtd jest ; to the questions 
 of the diplomats he gave unctuous answers with imperturbable 
 and cold-blooded phlegm. Unclean habits, which in another 
 would have been termed plebeian, were in him regarded as 
 original ; the distinguished lord from the ancient house of the 
 princes of Perigord, the oracle of all the epicures of Europe, the 
 habitue of courts, dictated the laws of good society. He had seen 
 them aU come and go, the ephemeral heroes of a time of con- 
 fusion ; he had been acquainted with the marquis of the ancien 
 regime, with the orators of the revolution, and with the minions 
 of the empire. He had seen into the innermost soul of the petty 
 German sovereigns during the days when he had been in charge 
 of the territorial exchanges of the Rhenish Confederate policy, 
 always ready to take money from anyone's hand, but good- 
 natured as well, obUging to devoted friends, profoundly impressed 
 with the truth that one hand must wash the other. Consequently 
 he, almost alone among the contemporaries of the old regime, 
 had always remained the successfvd favourite of fortune, and 
 was glad to boast that the limping tortoise had after all come 
 sooner to the goal than the Napoleonic hare. None knew better 
 than he how to spread the opinion that he had been a party to 
 all Napoleon's successes and had counselled against every one of 
 the emperor's mistakes. He possessed that dignified demeanour 
 and secure knowledge of men which were peculiar to the noble 
 princes of the Church in the eighteenth century, and was further 
 regarded as deeply initiated in all personal secrets of the distin- 
 guished world He had been of service to every party ; in the 
 celebrated Dictionary of Political Weathercocks, his name indis- 
 putably occupied the first place. As indifferently as in his 
 episcopal days he had prayed for the salvation of enfranchised 
 France, so now did he stand as lord high chamberlain behind the 
 throne of the legitimate king, waving the oriflamme at the coronation 
 
 25 
 
History of Germany 
 
 I festival of the Bourbons. " It has been my. invariable experi- 
 ence," he said with dignity, "that every system from which I 
 \ detached myself collapsed shortly afterwards." In the depths of 
 / his soul he had, however, always remained a thorough-going aris- 
 tocrat. For this reason he had ever desired an alliance between 
 the old powers of Austria and England, for he could get on with 
 the proud nobles of these two countries ; whereas the rule of the 
 j Russian upstarts, and still more the bourgeois-militaiy straight- 
 ' forwardness of the Prussian state, were to him contemptible. 
 
 Thus in Vienna he could, with inward satisfaction, play the 
 part which was imposed upon him by the interests of his court ; 
 he appeared as the representative of the most legitimate of all the 
 dynasties, describing boastfully, only a few months before the 
 Hundred Days, how firmly established was the power of the French 
 royal house, how every threatened r'ight would find protection in 
 the Bourbons, and he delighted the empty-headed protagonists of 
 the dynastic policy with the cleverly coined catch-word " legiti- 
 macy." With an unctuous formality he at once announced the 
 three principal aims of Bourbon statecraft, which had already 
 been declared in his memorandum. These were : tjie deposition 
 j " of the man who rules in Naples " (the name of Murat was never 
 1 allowed to pass the chaste lips of Talleyrand) ; the warding-off 
 \ of the Russian attack upon Poland ; finally, and above all, the 
 I reinstatement of the king of Saxony. It was in the Saxon nego- 
 tiations that the Frenchman's keen insight recognised the wedge 
 which was to drive the coalition asunder. Pathetically he spoke 
 of the cause of Frederick Augustus as " the cause of all kings " ; 
 and expressed his sorrow for unhappy Europe, whose pubhc law 
 was so seriously threatened by the violent deeds of Prussia and 
 Russ;ia. 
 
 § 2. THE TERRITORIAL NEGOTIATIONS. 
 
 The mere formal leadership of this many-headed and varie- 
 gated assembly offered the greatest difficulties, more especially 
 since the leading men could for the most part appear only as 
 modest assistants of the monarchs. Since Russia and Austria 
 had dehberately postponed the decision of all contested matters 
 until the congress, the great powers were for the moment united 
 upon nothing, not even upon the question as to who was entitled 
 to take part in the deliberations. Consequently the formal opening 
 
 26 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 of the congress was at first impossible, nor could there take place 
 a common sitting of all its members, nor even an examination of 
 credentials ; it was only when a separate understanding had been 
 signed that the negotiators exchanged their credentials. 
 
 In order to bring a certain amount of order into this chaos, 
 the ministers of the four aUied great powers met for preUminary 
 dehberations as early as the middle of September, before the 
 arrival of the French. The Prussian statesmen jealously main- 
 tained the newly acquired position of their state as a great power ; 
 anti-French from the foundation, not only did they resist the 
 Napoleonides, but they also dem3.nded the enforcement of that 
 secret article by which the Bourbon covurt was excluded from all 
 negotiations regarding distribution of territory. For both these 
 reasons they endeavoured to exclude the petty states from 
 the more important deliberations, for the participation of these 
 wotild inevitably strengthen the influence of France. It was in 
 this sense that Humboldt drew up a plan for the conduct of 
 the business,* which he handed to the "Committee of Four." 
 The congress, according to this document, was not a peace con- 
 gress, for the peace had long been concluded ; and it was not in 
 any way a deliberative assembly of Eiurope, since Emrope did not 
 exist as a constituted whole. The purpose of the congress was to 
 deal with a number of different affairs, which must be treated in 
 different ways ; questions of territorial distribution, special con- 
 cerns, and institutions which were important for the whole of 
 Europe. In the case of the territorial questions, the PoUsh 
 problem was, according to treaty, reserved for the decision of the 
 three partitioning powers, but England could play the part of 
 mediator in a manner welcome to the other three powers. 
 The general principle regarding the distribution of German terri- 
 tory was, in accordance with the peace of Paris, the concern of 
 the four powers alone ; France, Holland, Deiunark, and Switzer- 
 land must be kept aloof, because they did not look at the matter 
 from the European standpoint ; and Bavaria and Wiirtemberg 
 could not be admitted to participation until after the conclu- 
 sion of the dehberations. The distribution of ItaUan territory 
 was a matter for deUberation between Austria, Piedmont, 
 the pope, the Bourbons of Sicily, and their protector, England ; 
 Murat was excluded. Among the " special concerns," the most 
 important was the German constitutional question : this was to 
 
 1 Humboldt's Proposals for the Management of the Congress, drawn up on 
 September i8th and following da3rs. 
 
 27 
 
History of Germany 
 
 be decided by the German states alone, with the addition of 
 Denmark (on account of Holstein) ; the Netherlands, which must 
 have a say in the matter ; and Switzerland, for a perpetual alli- 
 ance between the Germanic Federation and the Swiss Confederacy 
 would be "extremely desirable." There thus remained for 
 the common dehberations of all the powers, only a few common 
 concerns. The chief of these was the constitution of Switzerland, 
 since a civil war was imminent in that country. Next came the 
 Neapolitan affair ; the ruler of Naples, who was not recognised 
 by all the powers, must be deposed. There was the removal of 
 Napoleon from Elba, for this fire-brand must not remain in such 
 threatening proximity to Europe. Finally, there were the aboli- 
 tion of the slave-trade, the regulation of the international navi- 
 gation of rivers, and the precedence of the diplomats. These 
 affairs of general European import should be discussed by a com- 
 vmittee and then laid before the whole congress. 
 
 The Prussian proposals immediately encountered vigorous 
 resistance, although they were strictly based upon the incon- 
 testable legal foundation of the treaty of Paris. Talleyrand had 
 long before taken care that his secret memorandum should reach 
 the hands of the Hofburg, and the Austrians gratefully recognised 
 the praiseworthy designs of the court of the Tuileries regarding 
 the Saxon and Polish questions. They now found it most im- 
 proper that France should be excluded from any important part 
 of the negotiations. Castlereagh agreed with the Austrians, for 
 the relations between the courts of Paris and London had been 
 continually improving, and Castlereagh on his way to Vienna had 
 once more paid a visit to the Tuileries. King Louis esteemed 
 the Guelphs even more highly than the Lorrainers, for the 
 latter had committed an unpardonable sin against legitimacy by 
 the marriage alliance with the Corsican. Russia alone supported 
 Prussia. Thus there was a dead-lock, two against two ; and at 
 length on September 23rd harmony was reached by the adoption 
 of an unfortunate middle course. It was determined that the 
 German constitutional questions should be elaborated by a com- 
 mittee of the five German royal courts ; that all European affairs 
 should be dealt with by the four allied great powers and the two 
 Bourbon powers (France and Spain). But the designs for the 
 territorial distribution, in accordance with the understanding of 
 Paris, was in the first place reserved for the four powers ; these 
 were subsequently to communicate their decisions to France and 
 Spain, and finally were to inform also the smaller courts. 
 
 28 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 Obviously this compromise enabled the French to overthrow 
 all that had been previously resolved, and TaUeyrand, who had 
 now appeared upon the scene, was not slow to take advantage 
 of the error. On September 30th, when the French minister and 
 his devoted friend Don Labrador, the ambassador of the Spanish 
 Bourbons, were invited to the Committee of Four in order to learn 
 the decision of the four powers, Talleyrand's impassive face lighted 
 up with triumph. With incomparable audacity, as if the secret 
 article of the Peace of Paris had had no existence, the Frenchman 
 demanded that all the states should take part in the negotiations 
 of the congress, and by resounding phrases regarding the sacred- 
 ness of public law he so greatly confused the ministers of the four 
 powers that the sitting was suspended without any decision having 
 been arrived at. Not one of the other ambassadors possessed 
 sufficient presence of mind to make a quiet appeal to the peace 
 of Paris, and thus to nip in the bud the Frenchman's presump- 
 tion, which was contrary to the treaty. Hardenberg, owing to 
 his unfortunate deafness, could not readily find the right thing 
 to say in face of such surprises. Humboldt, however, and the 
 Russian plenipotentiary were plainly altogether unprepared for so 
 audacious an infringement of the treaty that had so recently been 
 signed. Finally, Castlereagh and Metternich, through their secret 
 negotiations with the Tuileries, had themselves already broken 
 the Peace of Paris. In a theatrically coloured report, which was 
 calculated word by word to effect the conspicuous display of the 
 superiority of the writer, Talleyrand informed Louis XVIII of 
 the victory he had secured. To his Rhenish Confiederate friends 
 he said proudly : " J'ai su m'asseoir." 
 
 The Frenchman did not at first secure a decisive success. 
 In the following sittings he proposed that all sovereigns who had 
 not formally declined, including, therefore, Frederick Augustus of 
 Saxony, should be admitted to the congress, and that then a number 
 of committees should be appointed by the states as a whole. Both 
 these proposals were rejected, for they manifested too plainly 
 the intention to secure for the French court, as the well-wisher 
 of the petty states, the leadership of the congress. Finally it was 
 resolved to appoint an executive committee from among the eight 
 powers which had subscribed the peace of Paris. This committee 
 of eight was the ofl&cial congress, but it was rarely summoned and 
 then only -pro forma, for three of the signatory powers still counted 
 for very little in the society of states. So far Talleyrand had 
 simply secured that everything should be shapeless and involved. 
 
 29 
 
History of Germany 
 
 ( Without asking the committee of eight, the four allied great powers 
 i began among themselves confidential negotiations concerning the 
 Polish question. 
 
 How notably had Talleyrand's prestige increased within a 
 few days ! When he first arrived he had been anxiously avoided 
 in the drawing-rooms, and so had his colleague the duke of Dalberg, 
 who, as a turn-coat, was in bad repute among the Germans; 
 it was only the good-natured Gagern who would speak to the 
 neglected man. Now the diplomats eagerly sought favour with 
 the clever Frenchman, and most eagerly of all the harassed Saxons. 
 It is extremely probable that Talleyrand, like Metternich, had 
 received large sums of money from the Saxon court. In these 
 circles this was regarded as a perfectly harmless proceeding ; 
 Gentz in his diary recorded with a good conscience the sums which 
 had been paid to him by the French ambassador. Talleyrand's 
 secret intercourse with the imprisoned king was well known to 
 the Prussian statesmen,* and he was not accustomed to give his 
 friendly services for nothing. Documentary proof of his corrup- 
 tion will probably never be attainable, for the accounts of the 
 Saxon privy purse were subsequently burned by order of the king 
 of Saxony, who doubtless had his reasons. Moreover, the whole 
 question is of importance only to the scandal-monger or to the 
 minor moralist, and not to the serious historian. Talleyrand's 
 venality is universally known, and is not denied even by his 
 panegyrist Hans von Gagern ; it is therefore indifferent how often 
 and from whom he received bribes. To the Saxon court, how- 
 ever, the disgrace attaches of this continuance of the ancient 
 policy of treason ; and whether money was or was not paid on this 
 account is of no importance. These tainted negotiations remained 
 altogether without influence upon the course of the congress ; 
 it was not the money of the Albertines but the well understood 
 interest of their own states which determined the attitude of the 
 Austrian and of the Bourbon statesmen. The French ambassador 
 in Berlin declared openly to everyone that Frederick Augustus 
 of Saxony had been the most faithful ally of France, and that 
 France could not desert him. 
 
 At the same time, Talleyrand played the part of the mag- 
 nanimous protector of the German sovereigns. The petty princes 
 were all in an evil humour ; in Vienna there was no prospect of 
 territorial enlargements, and the natural predominance of the 
 great powers made itself strongly felt. WitliJmasterly skill 
 * Humboldt to Hardenberg, January 27, 18 13. 
 30 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 Talleyrand availed himself of this ill-humour of the middle-sized 
 states ; he alleged that the whole fabric of public law was put 
 in question if the rulers of Bavaria and Wiirtemberg could not 
 have the same voice in the reordering of Europe as had Prussia 
 or Russia. Consequently within a brief period he restored his 
 humiliated country to its traditional position as leader of the 
 German petty states. It was with good reason that the French 
 esteemed their adroit n^otiator. King Louis overwhelmed him 
 with praise, and felt himself entirely satisfied when the minister 
 wrote pathetically that it seemed to him very unseemly that here 
 in Vienna three or four kings and a number of princes could be 
 ioxmd at a dance in the house of a private individual, adding, 
 " One must go to France in order to see kingship in that glory 
 and dignity which make it appear at once subUme and lovable 
 in the eyes of the people ! " Alexander, however, said : " Talley- 
 rand is playing here the role of minister of Louis XIV ! " This 
 was an apt mot which has since then been frequently applicable 
 to the neo-French poUcy. 
 
 In barely a fortnight after that stormy sitting Gentz had com- 
 pletely reconciled himseU with the audacious Frenchman. The 
 czar, too, summoned this dangerous opponent on several occa- 
 sions to secret conversations regarding Poland, and thus gave 
 him the right to intrude into the Pohsh negotiations. Above all, 
 the German petty states thronged zealously around the magnani- 
 mous man who so expressly advocated the equal rights of Russia 
 and of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen. Victorious Germany had 
 now to endure the disgrace that her high nobility should once 
 more seek the favour of a French subordinate official, as they had 
 sought it in the days of German defeat. Just as the petty lords 
 had in the year 1803 gone to Matthieu, and three years later to 
 old Pfefel, as place-himters, so now they abased themselves in 
 the modest room before Talleyrand's confidential adv^er, the 
 same La Besnardiere who, seven years before, had in Poland 
 practised the art of estabUshi'ng German fatherlands. The 
 most clamorous were the Bavarians ; on the journey to Vienna, 
 Talleyrand had had a conversation with Montgelas in Baden. 
 Even Charles Augustus of Weimar could not lift himself above the 
 sentiment of cousinly participation, and did not until a late date 
 draw back from the Albertines, when he saw through the unclean 
 arrieres pensees of the Saxon party. Busily did the French nego- 
 tiators retail aU kinds of arrogant utterances which were supposed 
 to have been heard in the Prussian camp. The newspapers of 
 
 31 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Paris reported that "the insolent behaviour of the Prussian 
 generals in Vienna " had repelled even the warmest friends of the 
 land-hungry state, whereas of all the notable Prussian generals 
 the only one present in Vienna was the dignified and cautious 
 Knesebeck. 
 
 The objections to Prussia's Saxon plans raised by historians 
 at a later date, had occurred to no one in the year 1814. To us 
 to-day it appears a weak idea that the imprisoned king should not 
 be simply dethroned, and that he should be compensated else- 
 where with land and people ; but the allotting of such compensa- 
 tion seemed a matter of course to the sentiments of those days, 
 and if it had not been proposed to give it, the Prussian plan would 
 have appeared to the other courts far more ruthless. The learned 
 man of to-day may well think that Frederick Augustus was hardly 
 more blameworthy than the king of Bavaria, upon whom favoiirs 
 were now heaped ; but neither Max Joseph nor Talleyrand 
 advanced such reasons in excuse of their Saxon protege. Nor 
 did the sober-minded statesmen in Vienna ever think about the 
 reputed services of the Wettins on behalf of German civiUsation. 
 The party contrast which manifested itself in the Austrian capital 
 was far simpler. On one side was the desire of the young Grer- 
 man great power to provide for its lacerated and threatened terri- 
 tory a tenable southern frontier, and at the same time to give the 
 treasonable sentiments of the Rhenish Confederate courts a whole- 
 some warning ; on the other side was the traditional enmity of 
 Austria and France for the state wherein they obscurely perceived 
 the culture-ground of German unity, and there was the dynastic 
 j envy of the petty courts. The House of Wettin was a " house " 
 ! like that of Wittelsbach and that of Wiirtemberg, and all the 
 thoughts of the petty princes were centred in the preservation 
 ^ of the power of their houses. Talleyrand speedily recognised how 
 to gather round himself all the forces of resistance, and he did not 
 conceal his view that the fate of Frederick Augustus was far nearer 
 to his heart than the destiny of Poland. The Rheinische Merkur 
 wrote warningly that the Napoleonic bees and wasps were still 
 hidden among the Bourbon lilies. That great European alliance 
 which assembled under the banner of France, gave the Saxon 
 negotiations a historical significance far greater than the value 
 of the country that was in dispute. The Prussian state now 
 '1 learned, as at the time of the Silesian war, that the whole world 
 was united in fighting Prussia. 
 
 Meanwhile the prisoner of Friedrichsfelde played with con- 
 
 32 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 siderable ability, and certainly in good faith, the part of 
 profoundly injured innocence. All his life he had conscientiously 
 taken his stand upon the ground of positive law, and as long as the 
 Holy Empire had persisted he had precisely fulfilled his duties as 
 an imperial prince. But the idea that the sovereign king of 
 Saxony could possibly sin against Germany, remained altogether 
 incomprehensible to his intelligence. In the summer of 1814 he 
 sent a memorial to the czar, setting out in absolute seriousness 
 the compensations which Saxony had a right to demand from 
 Prussia ! The landless king magnanimously demanded from the 
 conqueror no more than the Beeskow-Storkow circle, a few 
 Prussian enclaves, and favourable assistance for the Saxon 
 negotiations ; in addition, compensation for Warsaw. However 
 preposterous this bungling piece of work may appear, it constituted 
 a suitable prelude to a second memorial which was printed at 
 Nuremberg in July, with the approval of the Bavarian govern- 
 ment. In this it was stated that the king had heard with the 
 utmost astonishment a report that the allies were proposing to 
 deprive him of his hereditary dominions ; he feared that he would 
 do wrong to the exalted powers if he were to place any credence 
 in such a calumny. Next the conduct of the Saxon court was 
 justified, aU errors having been due to force freponderante (such 
 was the phrase now used by the great ally) ; and with all the 
 self-satisfied frankness of the German petty prince, the apt truth 
 found expression that " great states alone can remain faithful to 
 their ideals." Frederick Augustus then declared to aU the courts 
 that he would never agree to abdicate, and in an autograph letter 
 of September 19th appealed for help to Louis XVIII. His 
 envoy in Vieima, Count Schulenburg, was not indeed admitted 
 to the negotiations of the congress, and in the deUberations of the 
 committee on the German constitution the king of Saxony was 
 regarded as non-existent. But Wrede serviceably reported to the 
 Saxon all that was worth knowing. At the same time Prince Antony 
 treated secretly with his brother-in-law. Emperor Francis : the 
 Saxon Langenau was the most intimate confidant of Gentz. The 
 cause of the Albertines gained ground day by day. 
 
 Among the Saxon people, too, the condition was very 
 different from what the chancellor imagined. A number of far- 
 sighted Saxon nobles had sided with the general government of 
 Prince Repnin. Among these were Carlowitz, Miltitz, Oppell, 
 Vieth, and some of the higher officials, such as Schiller's friend, 
 the father of Theodor Komer. With their aid, the Russian 
 
 -33 D 
 
History of Germany 
 
 administration had done excellent work ; within a brief time it 
 had uprooted a number of obsolete abuses. Among the bourgeoisie 
 there existed a small Prussian party, for the merchants of Leipzig 
 had long been out of humour with the rule of the nobles. It was 
 from the existence of these friendly circles that Stein and Harden- 
 Iberg derived their hopeful view of the mood of the coimtry. In 
 reality the mass of the people was in a condition of profound 
 languor, exhausted by the tribulations of the war. Under the 
 rule of the nobles, the population had been disaccustomed to political 
 thought ; Uke all Germans, in all ages, they regarded a tribal 
 princely house as an indispensable jewel of the fatherland in the 
 narrower sense, but at first they remained passive and equable. 
 There were only two notable Saxons who took part in the lively 
 paper warfare which accompanied the diplomatic struggle con- 
 cerning the future of Saxony : Carl Miiller, who wrote from the 
 Prussian point of view ; while Kohlschtitter was representative 
 of the servile officialdom. One party alone displayed lively 
 activity, that of the oligarchs of the high nobility. They had 
 ruled the land for centuries, and the strong hand of the Prussian 
 kingship threatened to reduce them to the rank of ordinary sub- 
 jects. As long as the war continued, the court nobility and the 
 higher officials had remained on terms of intimate friendship with 
 the numerous French prisoners in Dresden ; their emissaries 
 exercised an influence over the Saxon troops in Rhineland ; 
 they kept up a Uvely correspondence with the friendly diplomats 
 in Vienna ; accustomed to dominate, they knew how to browbeat 
 the docile populace to ^such an extent that the great majority 
 soon united in the cry, " Let us have our king back again ! " 
 People began to stigmatise as renegades the excellent men who 
 were at the head of the provisional administration. A few years 
 ago there was still living in the poorhouse at Wahren an old man 
 who was popularly spoken of as " the traitor " ; during the bloody 
 battle at Mockern, he had guided a Prussian battalion along a 
 hidden pathway. 
 
 In the memory of the people the image of recent events 
 gradually became distorted ; the king's sins were forgotten, and 
 the change in side of the troops during the battle of Leipzig was 
 soon regarded as simply a shameful desertion of the flag. A par- 
 tition of the country seemed, indeed, even less desirable than 
 incorporation in the Prussian state. Appeals were made to the 
 czar, who to Saxon deputations had repeatedly guaranteed " the 
 integrity of their country." Such was the lack of political per- 
 
 34 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 ception among the masses that they failed to recognise that this 
 integrity was possible only if the former king did not return. The 
 favourable news from Vienna increased the immeasurable self- 
 esteem which Ues in the very nature of particularism ; the Saxons 
 cheerfully expected that the whole of Europe would take up arms 
 in order to restore to the imprisoned Albertine the last of his vil- 
 lages. It is true that the leaders of the particularist party had 
 more insight than this, but they would rather continue the ancient 
 supremacy of the nobles in a diminished Saxony than subject ^ 
 themselves to the common law of the Prussian state. Prince 
 Repnin, the governor-general, wrote after the catastrophe sharply - 
 and aptly to his assistant, the able councillor Merian : " My com- 
 plaint against the higher of&cials is that, just like myself, they 
 were convinced that the return of the king could not be effected 
 without the dismemberment of their country. These egoists 
 preferred a disaster to the fatherland to the loss of their personal 
 advantages. The Saxons wanted their prince back again, and by 
 their behaviour gave moral support to the aim of that power 
 which regarded the partition of Saxony as advantageous." * 
 
 Such was the position of affairs when the four powers began 
 their indefinite negotiations concerning Poland. Hardenberg was \ 
 still unable to see that his Saxon hopes must inevitably be ruined ' 
 if in the PoHsh negotiations he worked hand in hand with Austria 
 and England. Either the czar would yield to the resistance of i 
 the three united courts, and in that case the Prussian crown would 
 be once more encumbered by her faithful ally with those Pohsh 
 possessions which Prussia herself regarded as dangerous, and 
 Prussia would at the same time lose all claim to compensation 
 in Saxony ; or else both parties would agree upon a compromise, 
 and this issue seemed the more probable, since at this moment 
 neither Austria nor England desired war. For it could be antici- 
 pated with certainty that Alexander, if embittered by Prussia's 
 opposition, would no longer support the Saxon claims of the Prussian 
 court. Abandoned on all sides, our stafi, if it were unwiUing to 
 venture a struggle against the whole^f Europe, would be forced 
 to content itself with a strip of land along the Warthe and with 
 a few fragments of Lusatia. So simple was the calculation. 
 Metternich's first task was to delude the chancellor about the 
 inseparable connection between the PoUsh question and the Saxon ; 
 to postpone the solution of the Saxon problem ; and for the 
 moment, in unison with Prussia and England, to resist Alexander's 
 
 1 Repnin to Merian, Vienna, February 15-25, 1815. 
 
 35 
 
History of Germany 
 
 designs. In this way the alliance between Russia and Prussia 
 would be broken, and the humiliation of the North German power 
 would be assured. The snare was astonishingly clumsy. As 
 early as September, Gentz wrote hopefully to Karadja that if it 
 were but possible to restrict Russia's enlargement in what had 
 formerly been Prussian Poland, the sole ground for the annexation 
 of Saxony would be removed ! 
 
 In actual fact the attention of the Prussian statesmen was 
 almost completely engaged in Polish affairs. The generals were 
 unanimous in demanding an eastern frontier that should be tenable 
 from the military point of view. Humboldt's wish was that 
 Prussia should act on behalf of the threatened European balance 
 of power. With the certainty of genius Stein declared to the 
 czar that the construction of a Polish kingdom under the Russian 
 sceptre would lead, either to the detachment of Poland from 
 Russia, or else to the complete subjection of the Poles. In 
 Hardenberg's entourage could be found certain eloquent friends of 
 the Poles ; among these were the amiable prince Anton Radziwill, 
 and the privy councillor Zerboni, a talented liberal and an 
 enthusiastic admirer of Sarmatian freedom. To the chancellor 
 himself, the advance of Russia westward seemed far less dangerous 
 than the re-establishment of the kingdom of Poland and the 
 threatening Polish propaganda. All these tendencies, however 
 fundamentally divergent, coincided in the idea that Alexander's 
 plans must be resisted, and the question was not even seriously 
 mooted how in that case Prussia's own claims could be secured. 
 
 The czar was, however, somewhat alarmed by the unanimous 
 opposition of the court of St. Petersburg, and he began to doubt 
 whether he could expect the Russians to accept the union of 
 Lithuania with Poland ; nevertheless he held obstinately to his idea 
 of the re-establishment of the Pohsh kingdom. In Vienna, he 
 immediately and openly proposed that the whole of Warsaw as 
 far as the Prosna, including Thorn and Cracow, should be handed 
 over to the Russian imperial house as an independent kingdom. 
 At the same time he warmly supported Prussia's claims upon 
 Saxony, and on September 28th he gave a formal pledge to hand 
 over the administration of the country to Prussia without delay. 
 In the German constitutional question, too, he expressly advocated 
 the Prussian plans ; he did not conceal how profoundly he 
 despised the self-seeking of the Rhenish Confederate courts but 
 he prudently avoided all intrusive intervention. Cappdistrias' also 
 ardently desired the consolidation of the Germanic Federation 
 
 36 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 and the younger Alopeus, Alexander's ambassador in Berlin, was a 
 fervent admirer of Prussian military renown. In a word, Russia's 
 attitude towards Prussia remained thoroughly friendly, although 
 Prussia had not as yet pledged herself in any way to support the 
 Polish plans of the czar. It seemed indisputable that, by an open 
 advance to the side of the czar, Hardenberg could secure an under- 
 standing also about Thorn and Kulmerland, and could secure 
 the unquaUfied adhesion of the two powers. But the chancellor 
 remained upon the side of Mettemich, hoping that England 
 and Austria would, hke Russia, agree to the provisional occupa- 
 tion of Saxony by Prussia. 
 
 The king regarded the chancellor's poUcy with some anxiety, 
 and considered that the immediate occupation of Saxony would 
 be a premature step, for he himself, less sanguine than Harden- 
 berg, drew the right conclusion from the behaviour of Emperor 
 Francis, that Austria would with difficulty be induced to coun- 
 tenance the expulsion of the Albertines. Had it been possible 
 to effect the occupation a year earlier, immediately after the 
 battle of Leipzig, this would have been an efiective means of 
 paving the way for complete annexation. In the existing posture 
 of affairs, immediately before the decision of the congress, the occu- 
 pation no longer offered any advantage, but exposed Prussia to 
 the danger of humihation in case she should not prove to be in 
 a position to retain the whole of the occupied territory. For 
 this reason, the king opposed the step. Yet he had too Uttle 
 confidence in his own judgment, especially where diplomatic 
 questions were concerned ; he unwUHngly let the chancellor foUow 
 his own coimsel, and subsequently, when Hardenberg's plans 
 came to nought, the king said angrily, after his maimer : " I told 
 you so, but you all wanted to be wiser." But when Hardenberg 
 proposed to nominate Prince WiUiam as viceroy of Saxony, 
 Frederick WiUiam immediately refused, for he would not expose 
 any of the personahties of the royal house to humiUating defeat. 
 
 The reasonable anxieties of his royal master did not distiurb 
 the chancellor's self-satisfaction. In alUance with Metternich he 
 opened his diplomatic campaign against the czar. Upon the 
 invitation of the three partitioning powers, England undertook 
 to mediate, and hardly ever in the whole history of modem 
 diplomacy was any negotiator so stupid and clumsy as the noble 
 lord, of whom his pohtical associates were accustomed to say : 
 " For all good things we must thank God and Castlereagh." 
 He was to mediate, and he conducted himself as a partisan, 
 
 37 
 
History of Germany 
 
 immediately putting forward demands which went iar beyond the 
 wishes of Austria and Prussia. The simplest consideration of 
 propriety demanded that he should display moderation, for in 
 accordance with the wording of the treaties England had no right 
 to intervene in the Polish negotiations ; and yet from the first he 
 assumed an 'aggressive tone which no crowned head, and least 
 of all the excessive conceit of Alexander, could possibly tolerate. 
 In his very first memorandum of October 4th he hurled at the 
 czar the accusation that Russia's procedure was in absolute opposi- 
 tion to the letter and to the spirit of the treaties— a plainly false 
 assertion, for Alexander had wisely guarded himself against giving 
 any binding pledges whatever. Castlereagh was even audacious 
 enough to falsify the intentions of his principals, and declared 
 that Austria and Prussia would gladly greet the re-establishment 
 of a completely independent Polish realm, a view in absolute 
 conflict with the opinions of the courts both of Vienna and of 
 Berlin. 
 
 The only excuse for this unprecedented conduct was to be 
 found in Castlereagh's profound ignorance ; it was quite obvious 
 that he had no idea as to what the^^ independence of Poland 
 really signified. With ingenuous self-satisfaction, he wrote to 
 Wellington in Paris saying that the vigorous language of his 
 memorandum could not fail to make an impression upon the czar.* 
 Still more plainly was manifested the incapacity of this remark- 
 able mediator in his second memorandum of October^ 14th. 
 Here he demanded that Austria, if possible in unison with Prussia, 
 should submit the following proposals to the czar : Either the 
 re-establishment of the free realm of Poland under an independent 
 prince, as it had existed before 1772 ; or, if this were unattainable, 
 the re-establishment of the status quo of 1791 ; or, in the last 
 resort, a partition of the duchy of Warsaw in such a way that 
 Prussia should receive all the country as far as the Vistula, whilst 
 Russia should retain merely the narrow strip to the east of this 
 river. Whilst Hardenberg had never asked more for Prussia 
 than the line of the Warthe, this Englishman, who was supposed 
 to be speaking in Prussia's name, wished to burden our state once 
 more with almost the whole of its ancient Polish dominion, and 
 he even declared that Prussia was prepared " to make all neces- 
 sary sacrifices " for the re-establishment of the Poland of 1771 — 
 that is to say, to hand over once again to the Sarmatians the 
 Marienburg and the Vistular territories of the Teutonic Knights ! 
 
 1 Goltz's Report, Paris, October 21, 1814. 
 38 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 Nay more, Castlereagh demanded that all the documents 
 exchanged in the PoUsh negotiations should be laid before the 
 congress, and that all the European states should be asked to oppose 
 the designs of Russia. In his blind zeal he thus adopted the 
 guileless Talleyrand's proposals, and desired, in opposition to the 
 treaties, to draw all the petty states into the Pohsh negotiations, 
 which would have involved making France the arbiter of 
 Europe ! In a third memorandum, dated November 4th, he 
 permitted himself the use of language which at other times could 
 only have been heard just before the outbreak of war. He 
 declared that the intentions of the czar "threw to the ground 
 all the accepted principles of international loyalty and faith," 
 and he asserted once more that a Russian emperor who ruled as 
 far as the Prosna could at his will hurl his armies against the 
 Danube and the Oder, and hold Austria and Prussia completely 
 in check. 
 
 It seemed as if Castlereagh desired to stimulate the czar 
 to the extremity of resistance. Alexander was in fact pro- 
 foundly affronted ; and in two memorials, dated October 30th 
 and November 21st, he bluntly rejected the proposal. In high- 
 sounding words he developed the views which have since then 
 remained dominant in semi-official Russian histories. In the 
 spring of 1813, he said, Russia could readily have concluded a 
 glorious peace, and had continued the struggle only on behalf 
 of Europe. The enlargement Russia demanded was not a menace 
 for Russia's neighbomrs but was essential to content the Russians 
 as well as the Poles. Therewith came a well-deserved snub for 
 Castlereagh : "A mediator is useful only when he brings 
 people nearer together ! " If matters should be carried further 
 on such lines, the world, which was yearning for peace, would soon 
 be driven into a new war. 
 
 Meanwhile the Prussian chancellor was far from comfortable 
 in the society of his strange aUies. He saw the British 
 mediator making demands which had no longer anything in com- 
 mon with Prussia's own views, and yet he himself wa.s still far 
 from certain whether his faithful friends would support him in 
 his Saxon plans. Hardenberg therefore resolved to obtain cer- 
 tainty, and on October gth sent a cordial letter to Mettemicb 
 to the following effect : Prussia desired to remain faithful to the 
 system " d'une Europe intermediaire " (that is to say, to the 
 system of a closer aUiance of the three " German " great powers), 
 but in her present insecure situation she must think first of her 
 
 39 
 
History of Germany 
 
 own interests, and therefore desired a plain answer to three ques- 
 tions. Would Austria agree to the Prussian annexation of the 
 whole of Saxony ? Did the Austrian imperial government approve 
 of the transference of Frederick Augustus to the Legations ? Did 
 Austria renounce the idea of handing Mainz over to Bavaria ? 
 (Concerning this intention, which two months before had been 
 still unknown to Humboldt, Hardenberg had at length arrived 
 at a clear understanding.) If the Austrian imperial government 
 would answer these three questions in the afi&rmative, and would 
 at the same time promise to give a firm support to Prussia's inten- 
 tions in respect of Mainz and Saxony, then, said Hardenberg, 
 " I shall be able to act in the fullest understanding with you in 
 respect of the Polish question." Last of all Metternich was asked 
 to agree at once to the provisional occupation of Saxony. The 
 same request was made to Castlereagh. Hardenberg still hoped 
 that his Austrian friend would magnanimously give to him Saxony, 
 and in addition the Polish territory for which Saxony was to 
 serve as a compensation ! 
 
 Castlereagh answered on October nth, approved the pro- 
 visional occupation, and declared that his court would also agree 
 to the complete annexation of Saxony. England desired the 
 entire re-establishment of the Prussian power, and the. chastise- 
 ment of the political immorality of Frederick Augustus. He 
 continued, in exceedingly bad French : "If this annexation should 
 be effected as a means to compensate the Prussian state for the 
 losses which it might suffer through the disquieting and dangerous 
 enterprise of Russia, and as a means to place Prussia with unde- 
 fended frontiers in manifest dependence upon Russia," then he 
 could not hold out any prospect of the assent of England. What 
 was the meaning of this rigmarole ? Prussia declared : Fii^t^ve 
 us a guarantee for the possession of Saxony, only then can we 
 venture to break the alliance with Russia and to support your Polish 
 plans. Castlereagh replied : " First bring it about that Russia 
 will not advance her western frontier too far, and then we will 
 agree to your annexation of Saxony." Thus Castlereagh simply 
 turned the Prussian demand upside down and attached an 
 impossible condition to his assent. Since at this moment none 
 of the three powers desired war with Russia, it was plainly not 
 within the power of Prussia alone to effect a moderation of the 
 Russian demands ; and yet the Prussian* enlargement was to be 
 made dependent upon this senseless condition, whereas the gains 
 of Austria in Italy had secured the unconditional assent of Eng- 
 
 40 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 land ! This extraordinary contradictoriness makes so ambiguous 
 an impression, that the involuntary suspicion arises that Metter- 
 nich or Miinster must have guided the noble lord's pen. Never- 
 theless the clumsy English statesman was beyond question acting 
 in good faith, and was by no means hostile towards Prussia ; just 
 as Uttle as Hardenberg did he understand that, in the existing 
 situation, Prussia was forced to choose between Warsaw and 
 Saxony, and could not possibly demand both at the same time. 
 
 Hardenberg's plain enquiries put the Austrian statesmen 
 in a position of painful embarrassment. Gentz wished straight- 
 way to break with Prussia and Russia ; more passionately than ever 
 did he rage against the greed of the Prussian revolutionaries, and 
 against Alexander's tutor, Laharpe, who so audaciously displayed 
 his hberal principles ; more confidential than ever became his 
 intercourse with Talleyrand and Langenau. Mettemich saw 
 further. He reahsed that it was not yet time to drop the mask, 
 and wished to keep his credulous Prussian friend a prey to the 
 latter's fine illusion until Prussia had herself broken with Russia 
 and stood completely alone ; for this reason he was inclined to 
 agree to the provisional occupation of Saxony. A few days later, 
 on October 14th, Gentz himself was brought over by Castlereagh's 
 persuasion to the views of his calmer friend. Austria agreed that 
 Prussian troops should enter Saxony — sans reconnattre le principe, 
 as Gentz added with satisfaction. This indication of good feeling 
 strengthened the Prussian chancellor in his artless confidence, 
 and yet Mettemich was left free for the ultimate decision. 
 
 All the more difiicult became the answer to Hardenberg's 
 three questions, and Metternich was not ready to reply until 
 October 22nd. The second of the Prussian questions, that relat- 
 ing to the transference of Frederick Augustus to the Legations, 
 was ignored in the Austrian reply, and this, in accordance with 
 ancient diplomatic custom, was tantamount to an unconditional 
 refusal. The third question, that regarding Mainz, was answered 
 with a definite negative. This place, which in the year 1797 
 Emperor Francis had himself sacrificed to the French in exchange 
 for Venice, was now declared by Metternich to be the only for- 
 tress which hindered a march upon the Danube, and to be the 
 only commercial centre which gave Austria access to the northern 
 seas — ^an astonishing claim which was expUcable only in view of 
 the still more astonishing geographical and economic ideas of 
 the imperial statesman. " Never," he said, " will the emperor 
 renounce Mainz." If the Germanic Federation were to be subjected 
 
 41 
 
History of Germany 
 
 to the equally balanced influence of Austria and Prussia, and 
 if the legitimate claims of South Germany were to be satis- 
 fied, Prussia must not advance beyond the left bank of the Moselle. 
 Thus even Coblenz was now refused to the Prussian friend, and the 
 most untenable of all the German river frontiers was offered ! 
 To Hardenberg's first question, finally, Metternich replied, that 
 it was only with pain that the emperor could witness the dethrone- 
 ment of one of the oldest royal races ; the annexation was opposed 
 to Austrian interests, and among the German princes could not 
 fail to arouse mistrust of Prussia and to give rise to complaints 
 against Austria ; the emperor hoped that Prussia would leave 
 the imprisoned king at least a portion of land on the Bohemian 
 frontier. " If, however, the force of circumstances should render 
 the annexation of Saxony unavoidable," then Austria would 
 reserve for herself the right of discretion regarding the fortresses 
 and frontier places, regarding commerce and navigation. The 
 emperor counted on "an unconditional agreement upon proce- 
 dure " between the two courts in respect of PoMsh affairs, and on 
 an understanding regarding the common carrying out of the, 
 " luminous " memorial of Castlereagh. Metternich, in addition,' 
 permitted himself the unbecoming observation that the personal 
 feelings of King Frederick William ought not to be allowed to stand 
 in the way of a sound poUcy. 
 
 On receipt of this reply a resolute Prussian statesman should 
 immediately have recognised that there was no dependence to be 
 placed upon the two allies, and that a firm adhesion to the side of 
 Russia was essential. Of the three Prussian conditions, Metternich 
 had flatly refused two ; and anyone who knew how little even a 
 decisive assent signified in this mouth, might easily reckon 
 what the unwilling, confused, and half-hearted assent to the 
 third condition was really worth. Was it not obvious that " the 
 force of circumstances would no longer render the annexation^ of 
 Saxony unavoidable," if Prussia were to retain the greater part of 
 Warsaw? Metternich, however, counted upon the credulous 
 confidence of his Prussian friend, and was delighted with the 
 adroitness with which he had concealed his thoughts. Gentz, 
 also, was in agreement with his friend's documentary achievement! 
 and prophesied at Wiede's table that within a fortnight the sys- 
 tem of European alliances would have been disarranged — meaning 
 that a rapprochement between Austria and France would have 
 been effected. 
 
 It was Gentz who had persuaded Metternich to give so dis- 
 
 42 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 tinct a negative in the matter of Mainz ; his angry feeling was 
 that Mainz must be saved from Prussian greed even though it 
 should entail an aUiance with France. This view found support in 
 the undying tendency of our petty princes to do anything other 
 than that which was plainly expedient, and always to entrust the 
 threatened parts of the fatherland to the weakest hands. The 
 Ernestine courts, Nassau and Hesse, declared on October 25th 
 that this important fortress should not be handed over to any of 
 the greater states, neither to Bavaria nor to Prussia ; it belonged 
 to Germany as a whole. It was resolved to establish a new 
 Teutonic Order for the protection of the fortress on the Rhine. So 
 general was the opposition to the establishment of Prussian power 
 upon the Middle Rhine, that Baron von Stein at length conceived 
 the artificial plan of installing the crown-prince of Wiirtemberg 
 in Mainz, as German field-marshal. Anyone who chose to open 
 his eyes could perceive from other indications that Austria was 
 antagonistic to Prussia. The map, shown to Mettemich in abso- 
 lute confidence, displaying that " isthmus " of southern Hano- 
 verian territory which Prussia demanded to connect the eastern 
 with the western provinces, had been, as Munster himself related, 
 betrayed to the Guelph diplomats by the Austrian statesman. 
 
 Simultaneously with the reply to Hardenberg (October 22nd) 
 Mettemich declared, in a despatch to Castlereagh, that it was 
 only with extreme unwilhngness that Austria could allow the 
 destruction of a buffer state which had so often proved 
 useful to the balance of power in Germany and in Europe ; but 
 if the annexation of Saxony was regarded by the aUies as 
 ima voidable, then Austria would accept this severe sacrifice upon 
 the twofold condition, that the balance of power in Germany 
 should not be distiurbed by the advance of Prussia southward of 
 the Moselle, and that the annexation " should not constitute a 
 precedent for demanding assent to further enlargements of terri- 
 tory." The almost verbal coincidence of this obscure sentence 
 with Castlereagh's note of October nth suggests the idea that 
 the noble lord had in this confused intrigue been no more than 
 an innocent tool in the hands of Metternich. The Austrian states- 
 man regarded the game as aheady won, and was so svure of the 
 blind assent of the Prussian chancellor that, in a new note of 
 November 2nd, he even demanded that Prussia should, in unison 
 with Austria, support the preposterous Pohsh programme of Lord 
 Castlereagh. Prussia was to demand, either the restoration of 
 the PoUsh realm of 1771, or the status quo of 1791, or at least the 
 
 43 
 
History of Germany 
 
 partition of Poland by the line of the Vistula ! This " at least ' 
 was obviously the true aim of the Hofburg. Prussia's states- 
 men must indeed be stricken with blindness if they did not 
 even yet observe that Austria was everywhere, in Saxony, in 
 Poland, and on the Rhine, pursuing aims which absolutely con- 
 flicted with those of Prussia. 
 
 Yet it was still some time before the eyes of the chancellor 
 and of Humboldt were opened. It is astonishing to note how the 
 two able men turned hither and thither in order to avoid seeing 
 what lay obviously before them, the disloyal game played by 
 the Hofburg. Immediately after the receipt of the Austrian 
 note of October 22nd, Uvely discussions began in the Prussian 
 cabinet. On October 23rd Humboldt put together the leading 
 ideas for an answer to the Austrian note. ^ In this he still speaks 
 quite without mistrust, reiterates all the grounds that favour 
 the annexation of Saxony ; Prussia's claim to compensation based 
 upon the treaties, and the need that " a political demonstration 
 should be given that a prince cannot escape punishment if 
 he act against the interests of the nation to which his people 
 belongs." The treaty of KaUsz and the enlargement of Russia 
 in Poland were undesirable but unavoidable consequences of the 
 situation — " of the false system by which the excessive power 
 of the west was fought by the east. Precisely in order that this 
 might not recur, the powers of Central Europe, and especially 
 Prussia, must be strengthened." Scattered domains in Poland, 
 Germany, or Belgium, did not suffice to effect this strengthening; 
 the great powers must not be treated as mere numerical values. 
 Consequently the annexation of Saxony was a sacrifice to be made 
 by Austria, not to the Prussian alliance, but on behalf of the 
 European balance of power ; a partition of the country seemed 
 altogether unacceptable. Next Humboldt discussed the Mainz 
 question and declared : " Since we regard the place as necessary 
 for the defence of Germany against France, we have only to 
 demand that Bavaria shall gain no influence over Mainz, unless 
 this state should openly and honourably adhere to the Germanic 
 Federation, and should renounce the right of independent war- 
 making." This inalienable right of Bavaria as a European power 
 had, during the last few days, been boastingly advocated by Wrede 
 in the committee on the German constitution. Humboldt, how- 
 ever, continued, with imperturbable moderation, that if Bavaria 
 
 ^ Humboldt's Memorandum regarding Prince Metternich's letter, October 
 23, 1814. 
 
 44 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 should exhibit a better sentiment towards the Grermanic Federa- 
 tion, " we must endeavour to win over this court instead of 
 regarding it with suspicion." Finally, the question of the Moselle 
 frontier was purely a statistical one ; it could easily be dealt with 
 if Austria should agree to accept the results of Prussian territorial 
 negotiations with the minor German states. 
 
 Thus Humboldt continued to see in the Hofburg the loyal 
 but unfortunately somewhat weak friend who must be furnished 
 with reasonable arguments in support of his praiseworthy resolves ; 
 he himself hoped to convert the Bavarians, who were already 
 without concealment preaching war against Prussia ; finally, in 
 order to keep Austria in a good humour, he wished to give up 
 Mainz and to abandon the right bank of the Moselle. The town 
 of Coblenz itself was, indeed, not included in this concession. 
 
 Two days later the mood of the Prussian cabinet was already 
 less friendly. It is obvious that in the meanwhile the English 
 and Austrian despatches had been examined more closely, and 
 no doubt something had been learned of the secret intercourse 
 between Gentz and Talleyrand. Perhaps the king himself may 
 have remarked to his diplomats that the agreement of the Hof- 
 burg to the annexation of Saxony was a very indefinite one, and 
 that Lord Castlereagh's Polish plans went far beyond Prussia's 
 own wishes. However this may be, a second memorial from 
 Humboldt to Hardenberg* displays lively anxiety ; it gives a 
 very striking picture of the brilliant mind of its author, fur- 
 nishes a broad exposition of the wealth of his ideas, which come 
 to light in mutual opposition, and yet in the end does not 
 effect a plain, clear, and unambiguous utterance. Humboldt has 
 examined Castlereagh's proposals, and now at length propoimds 
 the obvious idea that the frontier question and the constitutional 
 question must be kept distinct. It is undesirable to oppose the 
 Polish constitutional plans of the czar ; for " Alexander cer- 
 tainly finds himself in a position of great embarrassment if he 
 wishes to carry out what he appears to have promised to the Poles, 
 and the powers will increase this embarrassment if they fail to 
 offer to his views an opposition which must not be too decisively 
 expressed. Regarded from this point of view, the proposed 
 I^ohsh constitution is perhaps an antidote to the disadvantages 
 which arise from the successful enlargement of Russia." Regard- 
 ing the frontier question he remarks that hitherto Prussia has 
 
 1 Humboldt's Memorial sur le memoire de Lord Castlereagh, October 25, 
 1814. 
 
 45 
 
History of Germany 
 
 never asked more than the line of the Warthe with Thorn and 
 Cracow, and that the occasionally voiced demand for the Vistular 
 frontier has never been seriously made. A prudent moderation 
 is requisite to avoid the danger of " bringing about a breach, and 
 of leading to an appeal to Europe — ^that is to say, above all, to 
 France against Europe. France will always take advantage of 
 disputes, especially with the aim of rendering perpetual the dis- 
 sensions between the cabinets, in order to derive a casual profit 
 therefrom, and subsequently to sacrifice us and to come to an 
 understanding with Russia, as soon as the private interests of the 
 French nation have been gratified." 
 
 He then turns to consider Prussia's peculiar position. In 
 addition to what Russia offered, Prussia demanded only Thorn 
 and some half-German areas ; Austria, on the other hand, 
 demanded the important Cracow, which the Poles would never 
 surrender. Thus the gain for Austria was incomparably greater, 
 whereas we, on account of more trifling advantages, ran the 
 danger of breaking with Russia, and of finding ourselves in an 
 extremely embarrassing situation. Deserving of very serious 
 consideration, too, was " the manner in which Austria has agreed 
 to the annexation of Saxony. Instead of saying loudly and boldly 
 that the imperial government will defend Prussia's cause against 
 all, she agrees only with reluctance, as if out of complaisance, and 
 wishes us to buy this favour by other and most grievous sacrifices. 
 It must be plainly conceded to be as very doubtful whether 
 we shall not sacrifice the true and permanent interests of Prussia 
 to a purely temporary advantage, if in the Polish affair we go 
 hand in hand with Austria. It must rather be admitted that 
 Prussia would in that case sacrifice her personal interests in the 
 cause of Europe. But Prussia must always act in accordance 
 with principles and must never seek simple convenience." 
 Prussia's demand, he went on, was that, in the establishment of 
 the frontiers claimed by Russia, the allied powers should take 
 into account Prussia's difficult situation ; in such a way that 
 they " should defend the cause of Prussia and of her new acquisi- 
 tions, openly and vigorously against all other powers ; that they 
 themselves should undertake the task of conscientiously carry- 
 ing out the treaties which secured for Prussia complete re-estab- 
 lishment and even moderate enlargement of territory ; that, 
 finally, they should agree formally to our occupation of the strip 
 of land without which we should remain dependent upon Russia." 
 If the powers should refuse to give these pledges then indeed 
 
 46 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 Prussia would not follow a policy she herself condemns, but would 
 to her great regret feel compelled " to think first of her own self- 
 preservation." Once more, in conclusion, Prussia must yield in 
 the constitutional question, and must demand only the Warthe 
 line ; should Alexander refuse, the three powers could not con- 
 clude any treaty with him, but must leave the question open, 
 and must definitely declare themselves unable to change their 
 views ; but in this case also they must hold as far aloof as possible 
 from France. 
 
 It is astonishing to note how this able man again and again 
 rides his horse up to the edge of the ditch, and yet cannot pluck 
 up heart to leap over it. He sees that the alleged allies are fol- 
 lowing designs altogether different from those of Prussia, that 
 Prussia can in this diplomatic field win nothing of importance 
 for herself ; he perceives the valuelessness of the Austrian pro- 
 mises ; he sees that a struggle between Prussia and Russia would 
 bring advantage to France alone. We imagine, as we read, that 
 the only possible conclusion is on the brink of utterance by the 
 far-sighted thinker. Then an extraordinarily artificial thought- 
 process leads him to the preposterous view that the first and self- 
 evident duty of every Prussian statesman, the duty to safeguard 
 the power of his own country, is a base pre-occupation for "the 
 personal interest of Prussia " ! Even this cool head is intoxicated 
 by the hypocritical English phrase of " the cause of Europe " ! 
 It is the same superhuman magnanimity, and same over-intellec- 
 tualised weakness of will, which in our history, with a sinister 
 regularity, invariably follows the great times of bold and incisive 
 activity. The learned Hoffmann, too, contents himself with 
 fruitless complaints regarding the hostihty displayed towards 
 Prussia by almost all the other powers.^ Just as Httle as 
 Humboldt does he draw the simple conclusion that the oppressive 
 mass of opponents must be shattered, and that an agreement 
 must be come to with at least one of the foreign powers. 
 
 Only to good-natured weakness could there stiU be any doubt 
 as to what was to be expected from Austria. At this very 
 moment, upon the emperor's orders, Metternich, Stadion, and 
 Schwarzenberg assembled in council and determined that in any 
 case Prussia must advance as far as the line of the Vistula. At 
 the same time Metternich informed the czar in confidence that 
 Austria was prepared to yield in the Polish question if Russia 
 would no longer support Prussia's Saxon claims. Alexander 
 
 ^ Hofimann's Notes upon his statistical survey, October 30, 1814. 
 
 47 
 
History of Germany 
 
 gave Frederick William Ms definite personal assurance that this 
 ofier had been made. Mettemich, after his custom, denied every- 
 thing. Since, however, this offer harmonises precisely with the 
 policy which was subsequently carried out by Austria, we may 
 be certain that on this occasion it was not the czar who was lying. 
 
 An unprecedented humiliation was now imminent for the 
 Prussian state, but Frederick William came to the rescue. It 
 was perhaps the most valuable diplomatic resolve of his hfe. On 
 November 6th he had a prolonged private interview with the 
 czar.i The two friends cam-e to an understanding, and the king 
 at length ventured to recommend to his diplomats the policy 
 which he had himself for months regarded as the only safe one. 
 He ordered the chancellor to refrain in future from any hostile 
 steps against Russia. Frederick William had never wished to 
 reacquire the millions of disloyal Poles, and could therefore 
 learn only with hostility how obstinately England and Austria 
 were demanding the Vistular frontier. He knew better than did 
 Hardenberg what obstacles there were to the annexation of 
 Saxony ; from confidential personal association he had justly 
 perceived that the czar had at least m.ore upright good feeling 
 towards Prussia than had the good emperor Francis. His straight- 
 forward understanding could not conceive why Prussia should 
 run the risks of losing her best ally simply in order to resist at all 
 hazards the fantastic idea of the Russo-PoUsh kingdom, which 
 would be far more dangerous to Russia herself than to Germany. 
 Now, when he saw his own statesmen vacillating in hopeless con- 
 fusion, he determined upon personal intervention, and exhibited 
 once more the clear and far-seeing soldier's vision which he had 
 displayed on the day of Kulm, and so often upon the battle-fields 
 of the last winter campaign. It is possible that personal inclina- 
 tion may have played some part, but sober political calculation 
 was here in harmony with his emotional impulses. 
 
 Hardenberg was profoundly hurt by the decisive appearance 
 of his royal master upon the scene, and seriously thought of 
 demanding his dismissal ; Metternich and Castlereagh endeavoured 
 to strengthen him in this resolve. The king's change of position 
 was immediately taken advantage of by the adroit opponents. 
 The French circulated an effective fable relating that Alexander 
 had talked his friend and himself into an emotional state, and 
 
 1 It is possible that this interview took place on November 5th,, as Hardenberg 
 reports in his diary, which, however, is often extremely inaccurate. 
 
 48 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 had then secured the momentous promise from the unsuspecting 
 king. This story found the readier credence among the ill-natured 
 foreign diplomats inasmuch as the king's determination com- 
 pletely disordered all their calculations ; since the well-known 
 appearance at the grave of Frederick the Great, everyone knew 
 how much the czar was able to effect in artificially stage-managed 
 emotional scenes. As early as November 7th, Talleyrand trium- 
 phantly informed Gentz of the great act of treason of the 
 Prussians, and then gave the word, which was soon repeated by 
 Metternich and Castlereagh, that Prussia had abandoned " the cause 
 of Europe," and that therefore she could not retain Saxony ! But 
 this falUiag away of false friends was not the fault of the king ; 
 there can be no doubt that it would have occurred within a few 
 weeks whatever Frederick William had done ; and had events 
 been different it would have occurred with the co-operation of the 
 czar himself. It remains the king's service that in face of the 
 inevitable conflict with Austria and the western powers, he secured 
 for Prussia the co-operation of Russia, and thus at least rendered 
 certain a tolerable compensation. 
 
 Unfortunately the king did not carry his good work to a 
 conclusion. It sufficed him to have put an end to the breach 
 with Prussia's only aUy ; after his retiring manner he left the 
 rest to the chancellor. In the conversation above recorded, the 
 monarchs had come to an agreement upon two points alone : since 
 the czar guaranteed the king in the possession of Saxony, 
 Frederick WiUiam wished no longer to oppose Alexander's assump- 
 tion of the crown of Poland, and he rejected the demand for the 
 Vistular frontier made by Austria and England as extreme, and 
 as being disadvantageous to Prussia herself. But opinions 
 diverged widely regarding the future of the territory between the 
 Warthe and the Prosna, and it was certainly Hardenberg's duty 
 to get rid of this boundary question immediately by means of 
 confidential negotiations, to settle all the contested points that 
 still existed between Russia and Prussia, so that these two powers, 
 safeguarded doubtless by binding mutual pledges, might encounter 
 the western 'powers and the Hofburg with a common programme. 
 The jldng's definite command had completely changed the situa- 
 tion. The chancellor 'could no longer play the part of mediator, 
 and [must now become a partisan. In view of the disloyal 
 subterfuges of Metternich, the senseless phrases of Castlereagh, 
 and the manifest hostility of Talleyrand and all the minor courts, 
 it was Prussia's duty to think of nothing but her own safety. 
 
 49 ^ 
 
History of Germany 
 
 The hypocritical charge of "treason to the cause of Eiirope 
 had now to be faced. 
 
 In addition, however, to the Prosna Hne abready offered by 
 Russia, it was only Thorn and the neighbouring domains of the 
 ancient Ordensland which were indispensable to Prussia. These 
 important positions on the Vistula and their German hinterland 
 must be restored to the great fatherland; this was an indis- 
 pensable task of national poUcy. At the first indefinite news 
 of the proposed reunion, the local governments of Engelsburg 
 and Rheden immediately expressed to the chancellor their cordial 
 delight, relating in moving terms with what indescribable sensa- 
 tions diuring seven long years they had watched close to their 
 frontier the happiness of the Prussians, and had themselves been 
 forced to bear the yoke of foreign tyranny.* The re-acquirement 
 of these loyal German territories was, as the result showed, by no 
 means impossible, although Alexander regarded the fortress of 
 Thorn as one of great value. All that was necessary was to adopt 
 a definite resolve, to renounce the purely PoUsh areas roimd Kalisz 
 and Czenstochowa, and, above all, no longer to give any support to 
 Austria's claims upon Cracow. Cracow, if Prussia could acquire 
 the town, would be of inestimable value as a fnontier fortress, 
 and also as a market for the Upper Silesian trade ; under the 
 Prussian rule it might be anticipated that this old nursery of 
 German citizenship would soon re-acquire a German stanip. But 
 as things were, it was only Austria and Russia which were disput- 
 ing for possession of the place ; and why should Prussia prefer 
 the neighbourUness of Austria to that of Russia, or indeed support 
 the claims of the Hofburg to Zamosc and to the flats of the 
 Nida ? As soon as the king had come to a decision, it was essential 
 to secure an immediate understanding with Russia regardiflg the 
 frontier question. 
 
 Hardenberg, however, had already been too greatly influ- 
 enced by the English and Austrian views, and could not overcome 
 his mistrust of Russia. All his honourable hopes for Germany'is 
 future were based upon the " league of the three German great 
 powers." For this reason he even now desired to steer a middle 
 course between the two parties, and the day after the above con- 
 versation (November 7th) he wrote confidentially to Castlereagh. 
 He guarded himself, indeed, against saying anything about the 
 king's command, and merely narrated how in the course of the con- 
 versation he had gained the conviction that Alexander's Polish 
 1 Petition to Hardenberg, November 5, 1814, 
 SO 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 crown must be recognised. For Prussia he once again demanded 
 the Warthe line and Thorn ; for Austria, the territory as far 
 as the Nida, Cracow, and Zamosc, although Mettemich himself 
 regarded the last-named place as of Uttle value. It was hardly 
 possible to act more maladroitly. The chancellor was trying to 
 sit between two stools. By recognising the kingdom of Poland 
 he gave the Hofburg the desired excuse for complaining of Prussia's 
 treachery ; and at the same time he ran counter to the czar's 
 wishes by demanding a frontier which Russia would not accept. 
 
 Nor did Humboldt obey the king's command without 
 reifionstrance. In a third memorial, dated November 9th, he 
 drew attention to the danger that by our alliance with Russia 
 Austria would be rendered hostile to Prussia in all German ques- 
 tions :^ " Since these matters remain the nearest and most impor- 
 tant for Prussia, Russia cannot give us any compensation. 
 Repose, balance, and security are no longer conceivable should 
 Prussia, without the most just and important motives, detach 
 herself from her natural poUtical system, an aUiance between 
 Austria, Germany, England, and HoUand." Again and again the 
 fine dream of German dualism diffused its atmosphere through 
 the minds of the Prussian statesmen. Moreover, a very remark- 
 able reason was discovered by Hmnboldt's over-acute spirit in favour 
 of Hardenberg's policy ; namely, the circumstance that the two 
 worst enemies of Prussia and of the peace of Europe, France and 
 Bavaria, were also in conflict with Russia ; from this it was deduced, 
 not as ordinary persons would imagine, that Prussia, should she 
 unite with these enemies, would most probably be shamefully 
 betrayed, but conversdy that " France and Bavaria would at once 
 lose all interest in the matter as soon as Prussia should adopt the 
 same side as their own in respect of Polish affairs ! " 
 
 From such artificial premises were drawn the conclusion 
 that Prussia ought to side openly with England and Austria ; but 
 she must demand that the two powers should in a definite under- 
 standing immediately recognise Prussia's just demands, and 
 should in especial guarantee the annexation of Saxony. If it should 
 happen that, contrary to expectation, the powers should refuse 
 to agree to these conditions, "they would then show that they 
 had not the interest of Europe truly at heart, and that they were 
 unwilling to concede to Prussia the energies which the latter 
 requires to preserve her independence ; consequently Prussia 
 would then be justified in detaching herself from them in the face 
 
 ^ Humboldt's Memorial upon the Polish question, November 9, 1814. 
 
 SI 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of Europe, and in carving out a way of her own in unison with 
 Russia." 
 
 In truth, a blind devotion to Russia is the very last reproach 
 that can be made to the diplomats of the Prussian chancellery; 
 until the twelfth hour they continued to build upon Austria's 
 friendship. Within a few days it became apparent that neither 
 Austria nor England would give any definite pledges for the re- 
 establishment of Prussia. For some weeks thereafter Hardenberg 
 continued to exhaust himself in fruitless attempts at media- 
 tion ; Prussia secured, first of all, on account of her " desertion," 
 nothing more than the hatred which usually accrues in consequence 
 of any change of diplomatic front. But when subsequently the 
 dispute became embittered, it resulted from the nature of things, 
 almost in opposition to the will of the Prussian statesmen, that 
 that grouping of parties which the clear insight of the king had 
 from the first recognised as inevitable, came into existence. On 
 one side were Prussia and Russia ; upon the other Austria, Eng- 
 land, all the petty enviers of the growing German state, and as 
 leader of the great conspiracy, France. The Prussian state, 
 bleeding from a thousand wounds, had its king alone to thank 
 for its ability to emerge from such a struggle without complete 
 humiliation. 
 
 On November 8th Prince Repnin handed over the Saxon 
 administration to the Prussian plenipotentiaries, General von 
 Gaudy and Minister von Reck. The Leipzig burgomaster Sieg- 
 mann and the commercial delegates immediately expressed in 
 the name of the town and of the mercantile class their com- 
 plete confidence, thanking the dxanceUor for his admirable choice 
 of the higher ofiicials. ^ There was no lack of unedifying disputes, 
 for the northern state with its strict supervision made a sudden 
 entry amid the cobwebs and the dusty traditional institutions of 
 this decayed old feudal administration. Councillor Friese was 
 appointed at the head of financial affairs ; he was one of the 
 finest intelligences of the Prussian officialdom, the same man 
 who in Konigsberg had played so effective a part in connection 
 with Stein's reforms. He could not find terms sufficiently strong 
 for the description of the sins of thj national economy, which 
 indeed was not more seriously indebted than were the exhausted 
 finances of Prussia, but which had gone to wreck through a lazy, 
 
 1 Petition from the commercial delegates of Leipzig to the Chancellor, 
 November 15, Siegmann to Hardenberg, November 16, 1814. 
 
 52 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 cumbrous, and venial administration ; and Friese came into 
 serious conflict with the members of the Saxon financial college.' 
 The Saxon nobles, who had hitherto presided over the depart- 
 ment of the general government, had now associated with them 
 bourgeois officials, such as the privy councillor Kriiger, a true son of 
 the efficient, relentlessly severe Old Prussian official school, and 
 the Saxon councillor Ferber, an old opponent of the feudal 
 dominion and long abused by the nobles as a demagogue. Con- 
 sequently great wrath was displayed. The offended nobles 
 regarded the sacred rights of " the Saxon nation " as endangered, 
 for the confusion of personal interests with general interests 
 remains the original sin of the particularist mind. They even 
 brought their troubles before the congress. Stein, whose atti- 
 tude in quarrels between nobles and " officials " was seldom im- 
 partial, found fault with the roughness of the Prussians. The 
 chancellor, however, rejected the complaints with some severity 
 saying : " You cannot make these purely personal differences an 
 affair of the Saxon people, for you can by no means be regarded 
 as representatives of that people." 
 
 In Leipzig, reasonable business men soon conceived a confidence 
 in the new strict and just regime ; the value of the treasury bills 
 and of the Saxon bank-notes immediately rose. Gruner, the 
 commercial counsel, thanked the chancellor warmly for oppos- 
 ing the regime of the nobles, for in this, said Gruner, is to be found 
 the true reason " of the cumbrousness characteristic of our 
 administration." The head of the great banking house of 
 Reichenbach expressed himself in still more decisive terms.' 
 Certainly some of the ancient abuses were dear even to the valiant 
 citizens of Leipzig. The town had hitherto formed almost a 
 state within the state ; it maintained its own town soldiers ; no 
 sovereign troops might appear within its waUs ; the town council 
 enjoyed the convenient right of having to account to no one con- 
 cerning the administration of communal property. Requests 
 were immediately made for the preservation of these privileges. 
 The chancellor, however, dear to him as the town was, could agree 
 merely to the preservation of the old fair-privileges and of a free 
 communal constitution ; he also promised that the necessary 
 new taxes should be imposed only " with the assent of an 
 
 1 Upon this matter we have an express report from Finance Minister von 
 Billow to the chancellor, dated Berlin, December 8, 18x4. 
 
 2 Gruner to Stagemann, November 27, Reichenbach to Hardenberg, 
 November 28, 1814. 
 
 53 
 
History of Germany 
 
 assembly of the estates to be elected from the nation," and 
 undertook not to impose a garrison upon the tovm in time of 
 peace. 1 He wetit no further. It was impossible that the common 
 law of the monarchical administration should allow oligarchical 
 privileges to persist undisturbed. 
 
 There is no doubt that a few mistakes were made in 
 Saxony; in none of our new provinces could the emergence 
 from the narrows of particularism be effected without a certain 
 harshness of touch. The mass of the people, however, not- 
 withstanding their unquestionably particularist sentiments, had 
 no thought of resistance. Von Zeschau, commissary of the 
 government in Wittenberg and subsequently Saxon minister of 
 finance, who possessed a profound knowledge of the situation, 
 declared frankly that it could not be expected " that the Saxon 
 people should completely forget a prince under whose rule they 
 had, until the year 1806, hved very happily " ; yet the modera- 
 tion of the government was finding recognition ; certainly no 
 disturbances were to be feared, and the people would soon 
 accustom themselves to the new order. ^ Everyone knows how 
 precisely this prophecy was subsequently fulfilled in the northern 
 half of Saxony. But just because it was so, because it was 
 unquestionable that the country would readily become fused with 
 the Prussian state, the nobles' club in Dresden, the old meeting- 
 place of the high nobility and of the bureaucracy, passionately 
 resisted the threatened loss of their old supremacy. The forest- 
 rangers — almost the only men in the country to whom the old 
 king had displayed his human side, free from the oppression 
 of etiquette — eagerly forwarded the letters of the prisoner and 
 of his agent Marcolini. The uncertainty of the future gave 
 continually fresh nourishment to the intrigues of the junkers. 
 People anxiously looked for every item of news from Vienna, 
 for every hint from Freidrichsfelde. In November, when the 
 Duke of Brunswick passed through Dresden, he regarded it as 
 his duty as a Guelph to speak to everyone about the approaching 
 return of the tribal sovereign. Privy Councillor Kriiger imme- 
 diately noticed how the excitement in the palace increased, and 
 he wrote to the chancellor : " My own office is quaking at the 
 prospect ! " ^ 
 
 "• Hardenberg to Miltitz, December 12, 1814 ; Hardenberg to Biilow, January 
 25, 1815. 
 
 » Despatch of Zeschau to von Btilow, provisional chief of the Saxon police, 
 November 18, 1814. 
 
 ^ Kriiger's Report to Hardenberg, November 29, 1814. 
 
 54 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 Meanwhile, throughout the camp of the Rhenish Confede- 
 rates, and loudest of all in Bavaria, there raged a furious 
 paper war, so hopelessly mean in character that the Saxon Carl 
 von Nostitz aptly described it as " pamphleteering incendiarism." 
 These pamphlets, mostly issued by the cabinets themselves or at 
 their instigation, served only to excite the passions of the day 
 and to aggravate the conflict. Here was assembled the entire 
 armoury of poisoned weapons which from that date onwards for 
 a whole generation were directed against Prussia ; there was 
 already manifest the design, which subsequently in the days 
 of the persecution of the demagogues was crowned with so much 
 success, of inspiring the crown of Prussia with suspicion regarding 
 the War of Liberation and its heroes. The Guelph Sartorius here 
 rivalled Adam Miiller, the friend of Gentz, the editor of the ultra- 
 montane Tiroler Boten. The learned historian of Gottingen, when, 
 in the ante-rooms of the diplomats at Vienna he was engaged in 
 confidential intercourse with Gentz, composed under the name 
 of " A Prussian Patriot " the pamphlet Upon the Union of Saxony 
 with Prussia. With all the sorrow and shame of a loyal Prus- 
 sian, he recorded the rumour that blind counsellors wished to 
 besmirch the hands of the king with stolen goods. Corruption 
 was on the watch ; the state stood at the parting of the ways. 
 Was the suum cuique rapit once again, as formerly in Silesia, West 
 Prussia, and Hanover, to be the motto of our eagle ? At this 
 juncture, as in every great crisis of our recent history, the Augs- 
 burger Allgemdne Zeitung was among the enemies of Rrussia. 
 
 Still more vigorous was the language of Aretin and Hermann, 
 the two tried catchpoles of Bonapartism, in the Munchener Ale- 
 mannia. Aretin's writing Saxony and Prussia exposes the idea 
 which has since then been a favourite notion of our federalists: 
 The inflated Prussian frog must remain a power of the second rank ; 
 should it attain to the first rank, the quiet and the balance of 
 Europe will be destroyed. This is followed by the usual assurance 
 that the Prussian land-hunger aspires also towards Hamburg, 
 Bohemia, and Moravia. Simultaneously from the circles of Mont- 
 gelas and of the Bavarian government was issued a pamphlet 
 Prussia and Germany which after a flood of invective made a 
 solemn appeal to " the Saxons, Rhinelanders, and Mainzers " to 
 defend their freedom against the talons of the Prussian eagle. The 
 climax of this literature was found in the Sdchsische Aktenstiicke aus 
 der Dresdener umgeschrieben Zeitung, secretly printed in Bavaria — 
 this was a falsification of so preposterous a character that we 
 
 55 
 
History of Germany 
 
 find it difficult to understand to-day how it could ever have found 
 any credulous readers. Here Duke Ernest of Coburg intercedes 
 on behalf of his imprisoned relative in a touching epistle which 
 had plainly been composed by La Besnardifere upon Talleyrand's 
 orders. The Prussian generals (York, Biilow, Kleist, Gneisenau, 
 and Massenbach) write a threatening address to the chancellor, 
 demanding, with rattling of sabres, the immediate annexation of 
 Saxony ; and saying " where would the Prussian monarchy be if 
 we had blindly obeyed the pusillanimous cabinet ? " In a memo- 
 rial Hardenberg warns the king of the unbridled spirit that prevails 
 in the army, and of the dangerous intrigues of those secret societies 
 which had been so useful in the struggle against Napoleon. Wilhelm 
 Humboldt writes triumphantly to Niebuhr pointing out that the 
 Prussians have well understood how to follow the example 
 of the robber nation of the Romans, so magnificently depicted 
 by the great historian himself : " Nothing now stands in our 
 way but Bavaria with its iron ministry ! " In face of such feats 
 of Bavarian Bonapartism, the trifling manifestations in Saxony 
 itself seemed tame and harmless. From Saxony came a pitiful 
 " appeal to all the German nations," an anonymous pamphlet 
 issued at the pubhshing house of " St. Land-Hunger," a few letters 
 by officials and barristers, with repeated assurances that the 
 writers took up their pens only out of " inward conviction " — 
 that is all. Even the few pamphlets favourable to annexation 
 that appeared in Saxony, displayed the same character of political 
 decadence. Nowhere is there a great national outlook ; nothing 
 but petty bourgeois complaints of the misdeeds of the noble nepo- 
 tists and of the bigotry of the Catholic court — ^how different was 
 it in Prussia, where princesses and burghers' wives alike wore the 
 order of Louise, and where all the religious parties enjoyed the 
 royal justice ! 
 
 Even foreign newspapers began to intervene in the party 
 quarrel, and all of them against Prussia. Since the tory cabinet 
 at first appeared favourable to the Prussian claims, the whigs, 
 in accordance with the old rule of English party tactics, eagerly 
 took the side of the imprisoned king, ahke in parliament and the 
 press, and they were supported by public opinion. During the 
 last two generations the English nation has been just as hostile 
 as the French to the strengthening of the German North, although 
 the English have not m.ade so much noise about the matter. At 
 that time it was the English view that her dearest commercial 
 interests were threatened by Prussia ; Leipzig, a leading centre 
 
 56 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 of British trade, must not be allowed to enter into a customs- 
 union with a great state. In holy anger, the whig orators 
 denounced the cunning attacks of the despots against " the Saxon 
 nation," and with the same subhme enthusiasm the union of Genoa 
 with Piedmont was stigmatised as the death-blow to Italian free- 
 dom. The French press adhered like one man to Napoleon's 
 faithful ally. On November 7th, before Paris had received news 
 of Frederick William's decisive step, the semi-official Quotidienne 
 openly announced the programme of the Bourbon Confederation 
 of the Rhine. The government of the most Christian king was 
 perhaps the only one in Europe which could count upon the 
 support of a unanimous popular vote. " The justified greatness 
 of France, the legitimate and inalienable strength of the country, 
 is found in its adoption of the fine role of defender of the oppressed 
 and protector of the weak, or armed guarantor of the sacredness 
 of treaties " ; for this reason there must be demanded the com- 
 plete independence of Poland, which as a state already in existence 
 required merely to be established on a firmer foundation, there 
 must be unrestricted sovereignty for the German states, respect 
 for the national individuaUty of the Saxons, of the Bavarians, 
 and of the other German peoples ; " then a free and strong 
 Confederation will for ever separate the French arms from the 
 arms of Austria and Prussia." 
 
 The Rheinische Merkur valiantly resisted the full-voiced 
 chorus of the Rhenish Confederates, and was for this reason 
 spoken of by the journaUsts of Montgelas as the Thersites of the 
 German newspapers. Gorres in his figurative language issued 
 warnings against the basilisk eggs of the GaUic cock. But not 
 even in these circles was there any assured understanding of the 
 great problem of power. The Merkur opened its columns not 
 to friends alone, but also to the moderate opponents of the Prus- 
 sian claims. Among these must be reckoned Jacob Grimm, who, 
 delighted at the return of his Hessian electoral prince, desired the 
 like joy for the Saxons. An impassioned article begged the sons 
 of Germania to spare Saxony, " the more spiritual brother, who has 
 studied alone " — ^as if this brother could not have continued his 
 studies undisturbed under Prussian tutelage ! The literary defence 
 of Prussian pohcy was, on the whole, conducted only by men who 
 stood near to the government. At the request of the chancellor, 
 Vamhagen published a pamphlet, as superficial as everything 
 else which this poHtical dilettantist wrote about affairs o,f state, 
 full of empty phrases concerning "the spirit of liberalism which 
 
 57 
 
History of Germany 
 
 animated Prussia's endeavours." Arndt, Eichhorn, and J. G. 
 Hoffmann wrote more seriously and more worthily. The statist 
 tician's Prussia and Saxony, written with a quiet modesty, 
 gives an eloquent answer to the fashionable complaints concern- 
 ing Prussian arrogance. Never, says Hoffmann frankly, had 
 Prussia been so unanimously abused by the German world as in 
 the days of the laws of Stein and Hardenberg ; yet good must 
 preponderate in the Prussian state, for the nation had made such 
 memorable sacrifices for the re-establishment of this abused com- 
 munity. This cool-headed and documented demonstration of 
 the faults of the imprisoned king, aroused such bitterness in 
 Friedrichsfelde, that the Saxon minister. Count Einsiedel, was 
 audacious enough to demand that the Prussian government should 
 suppress Hoffmann's work ; naturally the note was returned to 
 him. 
 
 By far the most important work produced during this paper 
 war was Barthold Niebuhr's pamphlet Prussia's Right against 
 the Saxon Court. In general, it may be said to be the most notable 
 production of the German publicists at this epoch, combining as 
 it does, Arndt 's noble passion and rhetorical fire with the wealth 
 of ideas and the wide political knowledge of Friedrich Gentz. 
 How freely and boldly does the great historian expoimd the two 
 central ideas of our national policy, never before expressed with 
 the same clarity, but which since then have become part of the 
 very tissue of all noble-minded Germans. He shows that a great 
 nation, conscious of its own unity, must punish as felony a deser- 
 tion of the national cause, even when the traitor has not infringed 
 any written law. " The community of nationality is higher than 
 the relationships of state which unite or separate the different 
 peoples belonging to a single stock." Then, with the certainty 
 of the seer, he prophesies that the days of German particijlarism 
 are numbered : weak communities, those which are unable to 
 maintain themselves by their own energies, " cease to be states." 
 Such are the views forced upon this conservative thinker, who, 
 within a year of the battle of Leipzig, sees the German petty 
 princes once more following the banner of France. In the con- 
 fidential exchange of letters among the Prussian diplomats, their 
 disquiet concerning the revival of particularism finds even sharper 
 expression. Alopeus wrote to Humboldt : " The very men who 
 after the battle of Leipzig were crying out ' serves him right,' 
 are now expressing their compassion for the pious Idng ; and the 
 Bourbons, who in June had their work cut out to keep their own 
 
 58 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 heads above water, have now energy to spare for the preservation 
 of others. One is almost carried away by one's anger to see that 
 the very German emperor who was so scandalously abandoned 
 by his vassals, now receives in the imperial town, with all the 
 honours due to sovereigns, this crowd of vassals besmirched with 
 the crime of treason-felony. We ask ourselves what can be the 
 hidden aim of a condescension which there is no need to display ? " 
 
 Naturally neither the wrathful words of Niebuhr, nor the 
 reasoned considerations of Hoffmann exercised any influence 
 upon the course of the congress. It had been the hope of Austria, 
 in conjunction with England and Prussia, to drive the czar into 
 a corner, and then to come to an understanding with Russia over 
 Prussia's head. This plan had now been frustrated by the king's 
 intervention, and Mettemich immediately altered his tactics. 
 To him, as to the French, the Saxon question was far more impor- 
 tant than the future of Poland. As early as November nth, in 
 conversation with Castlereagh and Hardenberg, he took back the 
 word he had given to the chancellor, and declared that the general 
 resistance to the annexation of Saxony was invincible, and that 
 at least Dresden and the southern portion of the country must 
 be restored to the imprisoned prince. In this way the idea of 
 the partition of Saxony, which in the summer had already been 
 mooted by Stadion to the negotiators of Frederick Augustus, 
 was at length openly declared to be the aim of Austrian policy. 
 The Hofburg was quite unconcerned at the contemplation of this 
 arbitrary disruption of the old Saxon conraiunity, at the dis- 
 turbance of its customary channels of intercourse by the institu- 
 tion of new customs-barriers. The intention of Austria was simply 
 to re-estabUsh the faithful House of the Albertines in a position 
 where it would be a nuisance to Prussia, and at the same time 
 to keep a sore open in the body of the Prussian friend. Since 
 the Lorrainers themselves had never attempted to awaken an 
 Austrian national sentiment among the immediate subjects of 
 their house, they naturally had no understanding whatever of the 
 nation-building energy of the Prussian monarchy ; it was their 
 hope that partitioned Saxony would become for Prussia a second 
 Poland. Emperor Francis said confidentially to the duke of 
 Weimar : " Now, now, what are you worrying about ? If the 
 country is partitioned, it will soon come together again." 
 
 Hardenberg decisively rejected Mettemich's proposal, and 
 himself suggested that the Albertines should be compensated, 
 
 59 
 
History of Germany 
 
 . not by the Legations, but by a portion of Catholic Westphalia. 
 In Vienna he had at length noticed that Austria _ desired to 
 retain for herself the northern portion of the Pontifical State, 
 and hoped that this offer would render the Hofburg more compliant. 
 No one in all Germany had at that time drawn the attention of 
 the Prussian statesmen to what was signified by handing over 
 the two fortresses of Romanism in the German north, Miinster 
 and Paderborn, as an independent state, into the hands of a 
 bigoted Cathohc princely house. By all the free spirits, of that 
 generation, the Holy See was lightly esteemed and was regarded 
 as utterly powerless, whilst by the romanticists it was admired 
 as an enemy of the revolution. On the other hand, the patriots 
 recognised very justly that, in accordance with Hardenberg's latest 
 proposal, which was unquestionably rendered inevitable by the 
 course of the diplomatic discussions, the Saxon negotiations lost 
 much of their national significance. If the most faithful of Napo- 
 leon's vassals was to be re-established upon German soil, the ques- 
 tion was whether he should receive the passes of the Erzgebirge, 
 or a portion of Lower Saxony. No doubt this question was still 
 one of considerable importance in relation to Prussia's military 
 power, but it could no longer count upon awakening the warm 
 interest of the general public. Even Arndt admitted that, hence- 
 forward, the Saxon problem was to him a matter of indifference. 
 Metternich declared that this plan also was extremely unsatis- 
 factory, and repeated with increasing definiteness that nothing 
 but the restoration to the prisoner of a portion of his territory 
 could appease the profound discontent of the German princes. 
 
 England, also, withdrew from her pledged word. Castle- 
 reagh now reaped the fruits of his arrogant presumption. He 
 had offered the greatest affronts to the czar ; and since Prussia 
 refused to take part any longer in the diplomatic campaign against 
 Russia, the logic of facts threw the English statesmen upon the side 
 of that power which was most decisively attacking Prussia and 
 Russia. As early as November 15th, the fairly honourable Charles 
 Stewart came to Stein and complained, full of distress and shame, 
 that the English were forced to throw themselves into the arms 
 of France ! The dread of the British cabinet before the angry 
 speeches of the parliamentary opposition, and the sympathy 
 of the prince regent for the imprisoned king, accelerated the change 
 of front. Castlereagh received orders from home that he should 
 completely abandon the Prussian cause, and such was his thick- 
 headedness that he never clearly perceived the treacherous 
 
 60 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 character of this abandonment. Even in parliament, the noble 
 lord, when excusing his change of sentiment, could only say that 
 pubhc opinion in Germany was definitely unfavourable to the 
 annexation of Saxony — surely a remarkable opinion to find expres- 
 sion in the mouth of this high tory, who in all other respects 
 displayed the utmost contempt for the wishes of the people. 
 
 Nothing but Castlereagh's stupidity and Metternich's cun- 
 ning can explain how it was that England and Austria should now 
 suddenly declare all that to be black which they had previously 
 proclaimed to be white. The PoHsh crown of Alexander, which 
 they had so long contested, now appeared to them to be a " snare " 
 which the czar had set for his own hurt ; the annexation of 
 Saxony, which both of them had accepted in dubious words, was 
 now regarded by them as a grave infringement of international 
 law. It had been recognised that Russia could not be diverted 
 from her Polish plans without a war ; "the Polish affair," wrote 
 Gragern on December ist, "is nearly finished from lack of 
 fighters." All the more securely did Mettemich reckon upon the 
 frustration of the Prussian claims, which were far less strongly 
 supported. He was now fully in unison with Talleyrand, and 
 in conjunction with the Frenchman he examined and approved 
 the formulation of new securities for justice on behalf of the 
 imprisoned king. 
 
 Delighted at such success, Talleyrand's demands became 
 daily more exacting. He made Dalberg and La Besnardiere 
 compose an apology for the Albertine. He assured the faithful 
 Gagem that France would never again tolerate the Prussians 
 on the left bank of the Rhine, nor yet in Saxony. A " Memorial 
 concerning Saxony from the French Point of View " enumerated 
 Prussia's sins against the German fatherland : the peace of Bcisle, 
 the principal resolution of the Diet of Deputation, the neutrality 
 of 1805, all sins from the French point of view ! The Moniteur 
 solemnly announced : " The only prince who might perhaps have 
 the right of condemning Frederick Augustus, the king of France, 
 discharges the accused." The article went on to speak enthusias- 
 tically of eternal dismemberment as the glorious characteristic 
 of the German nation : "In the German character we find a strong 
 adhesion to sacred customs ; the most sacred of these is obedience 
 to particular princes." 
 
 These princes -particuUers were in full accord with the 
 Moniteur's philosophy of history. Upon Talleyrand's demand 
 they were ready to sign a common protest against the annexation 
 
 61 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of Saxony, and nothing prevented the undertaking but a warn- 
 ing from the czar. For every one of the petty princes, 
 Talleyrand had alluring promises ready, and each one of them 
 hoped to gain at least a thousand souls at the great territorial 
 market of Vienna. The sentiment of German particularism found 
 faithful expression in the numerous memorials of the Land- 
 grave of Hesse-Homburg, which expounded the luminous thesis 
 that " since all the neighbouring powers had been enlarged," so 
 also must Homburg be enlarged in order not to decline from her 
 historical position of power, and it was absolutely necessary that 
 she should annex the villages of Ober-Ursel and Ober-Rossbach ! 
 Von Tiirkheim, the envoy of Darmstadt, even ventured, amid 
 this high legitimist society, to base the claims of his serene master 
 for compensation upon a formal appeal to the inahenable droits 
 de I'homme.^ If Talleyrand's plans should prove successful, if 
 Prussia should receive compensation neither upon the Rhine nor 
 in Saxony, there would remain more land available to satisfy the 
 desires of the petty princes ; for this reason, all, without excep- 
 tion, were upon the side of France, and the conquered enemy once 
 more appeared to them as the powerful protector of Germany. 
 
 The wretched dispute about Saxony brought all the other 
 labours of the congress to a stand-still. The committee upon 
 the German constitution had already broken up some time before, 
 with nothing accomplished. In the interim, pitiful personal dis- 
 putes were rife. Metternich, endeavouring to arouse suspicion 
 of the Prussian chancellor in the mind of Alexander, laid before 
 the czar the anti-Russian note which Hardenberg had written at 
 the opening of the congress — ^and in general made all the mischief 
 he could. Notwithstanding these proofs of Austrian friendship, 
 the chancellor allowed himself to be persuaded by Metternich to 
 intermediate once more between Russia on the one hand and 
 England and Austria on the other. On November 23rd, he made 
 the old demands : the Hne of the Wa,rthe for Prussia, Cracow and 
 Zamosc for Austria— although by the king's command he was 
 pledged not to separate himself from Russia. Fortunately Stein 
 came to his assistance. This great man had perceived in the 
 meanwhile that he had taken too one-sided a course in opposing 
 the Polish plans of the czar. In accordance with his franik and 
 admirable manner, he immediately determined to atone for the 
 pre\dous error, and at once devoted all his energies to saving Saxony 
 
 Memorial of the hereditary prince of Homburg to Humboldt ; of Tiirkheim 
 to Hardenberg (January and Februaty, 1814). 
 
 62 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 for Prussia. It was through his good offices that Alexander's 
 answer was comparatively favourable. On November 27th, the 
 czar declared that he would never abandon his Prussian ally, who 
 had supported him " so energetically, nobly, and enduringly," 
 He demanded the whole of Saxony for Prussia, Mainz for the 
 Germanic Federation ; of his Polish claims he abandoned Thorn 
 and Cracow, which were both to be recognised as neutral free 
 towns. 
 
 This declaration solved the Mainz problem. Metternich 
 renounced the design of handing over the fortress to Bavaria, 
 for in opposition to this plan Russia and Prussia were in unison 
 with the particularist envy of the petty princes. Hardenberg 
 Would not entrust the key of Rhineland to faithless hands ; 
 the petty princes, on their side, were afraid, as the Wiirtemberg 
 plenipotentiaries expressed it, that a strong state in possession^ 
 of Mainz " would subordinate the destiny of all the other German 
 states to its own." Thus an expedient was adopted which, however 
 unnatmral and absurd it might be, was nevertheless in a sense a 
 necessary outcome of the chaotic conditions of the Germanic 
 Federation. The golden Mainz, once the seat of the most dis- 
 tinguished of German princes, was subjected to the supremacy of 
 the grand-duke of Darmstadt, because this potentate could never 
 be a danger to his neighbours ; the fortress was occupied by the 
 Germanic Federation with an Austro-Prussian garrison. Here, 
 at any rate, Prussia was to keep a foot in the stirrup. No one 
 foresaw the unending dispute which was to result from the joint 
 occupation with Austria ; people still cherished the dream of a 
 peaceful dualism. Just as artificial was the Russian proposal to 
 make Thorn and Cracow free towns ; it was inevitable that a 
 republic of Cracow would be the focus of an extremely dangerous 
 Pohsh propaganda, dangerous especially to Austria. For the 
 moment, however, the only thought of the Hofburg was to secure 
 that the dominant position on the Upper Vistula should not serve 
 as a frontier fortress for the Russians, Metternich raised little 
 objection to the plan. 
 
 The Polish negotiations now offered httle further difficulty, 
 especially since Alexander dropped the idea of uniting Lithuania 
 and Poland, and demanded merely the Warsaw territory for the 
 new Polish kingdom. To the complaints of Czeurtoryski he 
 replied indeed, with the secret consolation that this mutilated 
 kingdom was merely une pierre d'attente. Nevertheless, the Saxon 
 
 1 Wintzingerode and Linden to Hardenberg, December 8, 1814. 
 
 63 
 
History of Germany 
 
 question remained henceforward the only serious point in dispute 
 among the powers. More and more violent became the general 
 opposition to the Prussian plans. In his perplexity, the chan- 
 cellor determined upon one of the greatest diplomatic mistakes 
 of his Hfe. Upon December 3rd he wrote to Metternich an 
 incredible letter, which was to touch the good heart of his 
 Austrian friend through its moving expressions. " Dear Prince, 
 save Prussia from her present difficulties," and he added some 
 turgid verses from the Rheinische Merkur, inviting the double 
 eagle to be good enough to build its eyrie side by side with the 
 black eagle of Prussia upon the same giant oak ! 
 
 In a confidential note of December loth, Metternich replied 
 with scarcely concealed disdain. He now officially withdrew his 
 formal consent, and offered his Prussian friend no more than a 
 fifth of Saxon territory, a portion of Lusatia with somewhat 
 over 400,000 inhabitants : if the Albertine were not to receive 
 his crown back, the Germanic Federation could not come into 
 existence, and France would regain the protectorate of the petty 
 states. Whilst he himself thus warned Prussia of the French 
 intrigues, on December i6th, upon the command of Emperor 
 Francis, he showed this confidential note to Talleyrand, in order 
 that King Louis might learn " how complete was the harmony 
 of views " between Austria and France in the Saxon question ! 
 The faithlessness of the Hofburg was manifested so unashamedly 
 as to lead the honourable Gorres to write angrily that Prussia 
 need merely print the two Austrian notes of October 22nd and 
 December loth side by side for all right-minded people to see that 
 she was in the right. Hardenberg had fallen as if from the clouds. 
 " Non fidem servavit," he wrote despairingly in his diary when 
 recording the receipt of this " totally unexpected answer." ^ He 
 saw very well that the opinion of right-minded people amounted 
 to nothing in this struggle for power. To the Austrians, in a 
 joint note with Alexander dated December i6th, he expressed 
 his profoimd astonishment at the change of sentiment of the Hof- 
 burg, and since his WestphaUan plan of compensation did not 
 find acceptance, he now proposed that a portion of territory on 
 the left bank of the Rhine, with Treves and Bonn, should be pro- 
 vided for Frederick Augustus. To-day, no one can fail to recog- 
 nise the preposterous nature of this proposal, which was the out- 
 come merely of the most painful embarrassment : to establish the 
 Albertine close to the French frontier would simply open for the 
 
 ^ Hardenberg's Diary, December lo and 12, 1814, 
 64 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 French a convenient gate of attack upon Germany. But when 
 Metternich immediately detected the weak side of the Prussian 
 proposal and unctuously rejoined that the left bank of the Rhine 
 must never again be thus exposed to the French, he was only 
 playing with words, being himself akeady in cordial understand- 
 ing with this dreaded land of France. In order to divide his 
 opponents, Hardenberg simultaneously demanded that Bavaria 
 should restore the Franconian margravates. This was an unfor- 
 tunate move, although the blustering ill-nature of the Bavarian 
 statesmen merited chastisement. It is true that the chancellor 
 had not yet ceded Ansbach-Bayreuth in a formal treaty, but he 
 had on several occasions verbally declared that he was prepared 
 to accept the duchy of Berg as compensation. By now reopening 
 the old dispute, without the remotest prospect of success, he gave 
 a welcome excuse to Metternich, Wrede, and Talleyrand to 
 complain of " Prussian trickery." He closed his note with the 
 assurance that Prussia still counted above all upon the support 
 of Russia and Austria. 
 
 In reahty both parties were already weighing the possibiUty 
 of a war. Among the Prussian people embitterment was mani- 
 festly increasing. An address from Berlin placed the forces of 
 the coimtry at the king's disposal for the justified struggle. 
 Stagemann sang wrathfully : 
 
 "The flag of Brandenberg, my song, 
 
 Streams on the breeze once more, 
 And once again our wrath is stirred, 
 
 Seize steel like those of yore ! . . . 
 The dogs of France, from our last chase. 
 
 Their wounds still gape amain — 
 On, Lightning-blast, on. Lance and Mace, 
 
 Fierce hounds with leash astrain ! " 
 
 It was learned from Goltz* that the French army was being 
 quietly strengthened, upon Talleyrand's advice. It was reported 
 that there was a plan that the Saxon troops which were to the 
 north of the Moselle, under Prussian command, should at the chosen 
 moment be united with the Bavarian and Austrian forces upon 
 the right bank of the Moselle. Among the Austrian generals, 
 Schwarzenberg displayed the most cheerful confidence of victory, 
 for in the last war he had learned enough to despise the mean 
 intelligence of Blucher and Gneisenau. On December i6th, 
 
 » Goltg's Reports from Paris, November 24 and December 19, 1814. 
 
 65 F 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Metternich disclosed to Count Miinster his intention to form a 
 Germanic Federation without Prussia, unless Prussia should 
 abandon her Saxon claims ; of course Austria was to demand 
 merely the modest position of first among equals. The Guelph 
 statesman immediately recognised that this would mean war 
 and the dissolution of the congress ; he was ready for anything, 
 although the Austrian greed of power and the unfavourable 
 geographical situation of Hanover caused him some anxiety, and 
 he demanded from England the prolongation of the subsidies-treaty 
 in order that the Guelph army might be equipped. 
 
 The Prussian Minister of War at once took measures for 
 resistance. On December 26th Grolman sent the chancellor the 
 plan of campaign he had drawn up in conjunction with Boyen, 
 Gneisenau, and Scholer.^ In accordance with the good old 
 Frederician manner, two great armies were to open the campaign 
 simultaneously by a bold offensive in Saxony and on the Rhine, 
 whilst an observation corps protected Silesia. The situation was 
 so threatening that all ordinary considerations of miUtary prece- 
 dence were disregarded, and Blucher and Gneisenau were recom- 
 mended as commanders of the respective armies ; after these two 
 Billow was the only general to be considered, since York, Kleist, 
 and Tauentzien were no more than excellent leaders of army 
 corps. Colonel Krauseneck, who commanded the Prussian garrison 
 in Mainz under the Austrian governor Frimont, received 
 orders that, at the first sign, he should seize the fortifications on 
 the right bank ; they would be sufficient to hold the place in 
 check, but his modest force would not suffice for the occupation 
 of the whole fortress. Boyen also had the other fortresses 
 secretly equipped. The Saxon troops on the Rhine were quietly 
 moved northward, into the vicinity of Prussian regiments. Boyen 
 assumed that the smaller North German contingents, with the 
 exception of the Hanoverians, must all follow the Prussian flag. 
 The monarchy was determined to make its appearance imme- 
 diately as master of North Germany ; who, in such a struggle 
 for existence, could pay any attention to the outcries and the 
 claims for sovereignty of the petty princes ? 
 
 Amid this general confusion, Talleyrand saw his harvest ripen- 
 ing. After Metternich had officially communicated to him the 
 last Austrian note concerning Saxony, the Frenchman considered 
 himself justified in intervening officially in the Saxon negotia- 
 
 1 Grolman to Hardenberg, December 29, 1814, with a raemorial upon the 
 plan of operations. 
 
 66 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 tions, and answered his Austrian friend on December 19th. Since, 
 he said, the Polish problem had become a mere question of 
 frontier, the Saxon affair was now the matter of greatest import- 
 ance to Europe from the point of view of principle. Here the 
 principles of legitimacy and of the balance of power were both 
 at stake. To-day the detestable doctrine was diffused that kings 
 could be sentenced, that the punishment of confiscation could be 
 reintroduced, that the nations could be divided like the herds of 
 a dairy farm, that there was no such thing as public law, " that 
 everything was just for the stronger." But Europe execrated 
 these doctrines ; " they arouse the Uke detestation in Vienna, 
 St. Petersburg, London, Madrid, and Lisbon " (not, that is to 
 say, in Berlin). The annexation of Saxony would also destroy 
 the balance of power in Europe, introducing into the Germanic 
 Federation " an offensive power of incomparable strength." For 
 this reason the legitimate king must be restored ; if certain 
 cessions of territory were unavoidable for the compensation 
 of Prussia, France would advise the legitimate ruler in this 
 sense. 
 
 By this note, Talleyrand tore up the secret article of the 
 treaty of Paris, and threw the fragments at the feet of the four 
 powers. Whilst for a long time he had worked counter to the 
 treaty in obscurity, he now entered into the territorial negotia- 
 tions with an official memorial, into those negotiations from which 
 by treaty France had been excluded, and he supported the 
 Austrian proposal for the partition of Saxony — although this did 
 not prevent him in the same breath from expressing the execra- 
 tion of Europe for the policy of partition. A second note from 
 the Frenchman to Castlereagh (December 26th) assumed the tone 
 of legitimist unction which was irresistible to the high tory. The 
 aim of the congress was " to close the revolution " ; formerly 
 republic and monarchy were fighting one another, to-day it was 
 a struggle between the revolutionary and the legitimist dynasties; 
 the revolutionary dynasties had disappeared with one exception, 
 that which ruled in Naples, and the legitimist dynasties had been 
 all re-established with one exception, that of the unfortunate king 
 of Saxony ; " consequently the revolution was not yet con- 
 cluded " ; France expected that the congress would fulfil its 
 duty. The proceedings of the next few days showed that France's 
 breach of the treaty was extremely welcome alike to the Austrian 
 and to the English statesmen. The three powers were at one. 
 As early as December 14th, Mettemich regarded the coming triple 
 
 (>7 
 
History of Germany 
 
 alliance as so sure, that he told the Saxon agent Schulenburg to 
 write to his royal master that Saxony was rescued ! 
 
 Since these formless negotiations led to nothing, it was finally 
 determined that the Committee of Four should be summoned once 
 more, and that the territorial questions should be ceremonially 
 laid before the forum of the four allied great powers. On 
 December 29th the committee reassembled. As was to be expected, 
 the course of the proceedings was as follows. Everyone was 
 agreed about Mainz ; everyone was agreed about the principal 
 point in the PoUsh affair ; it was only the Saxon problem regard- 
 ing which nothing had been settled. A new note from Harden- 
 berg to Mettemich (December 29th) asked of the opponents : 
 " Is Prussia to have the necessity forced upon her of striving in the 
 future for enlargement ? " This aroused a storm of indignation, 
 for the justice of the reproach was perceived. A memorial from 
 Stein (December 20th) served only to strengthen the Austrian 
 minister in his views. Stein declared that a re-established 
 Saxony would be as great a source of dissension in the north 
 as was Bavaria in the south ; he did not realise that the Hofburg 
 desired nothing more ardently than this North German Bavaria. 
 
 The secret aims of Austria were displayed already in the 
 first sitting of the Committee of Four, when Mettemich demanded 
 that Tallejnrand should be admitted to the committee ; at the 
 same time he declared that the Saxon question could not be 
 decided without the approval of Frederick Augustus. This meant 
 that the Albertine was to be made master of the situation. Castle- 
 reagh would not go so far as this, but he also advocated the 
 admission of the French minister. According to the Englishman's 
 wonderful logic, the admission of France was necessary " because, 
 in accordance with the secret article of the treaty of Paris, the 
 treaties of Kalisz and Reichenbach are legally binding upon France 
 as well " — and yet this very article expressly excluded France 
 from all co-operation in the territorial negotiations. These 
 demands were repeatedly and strongly opposed by Russia and 
 Prussia ; they did not desire to admit Frederick Augustus in any 
 circumstances, and they were willing to admit Talleyrand to the 
 committee only after the four powers had come to an agreement. 
 Bitter expressions, and even serious threats, were exchanged. 
 It was under the influence of this passionate scene that Castlereagh 
 first hit upon the unhappy idea for which the way had been paved 
 for months by Talleyrand through agitation and incitement. He 
 
 68 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 secretly proposed a war alliance between England, Austria, France, 
 and their smaller well-wishers. It is essentially futile to demand 
 the motives that actuated such a mind as his. The noble 
 lord was what his countr3mien speak of as stubborn; with 
 a bUnd ardour the English bull charged upon the red cloth of 
 the Saxon question which Metternich and Talleyrand, the adroit 
 matadors, waved before his eyes. Moreover, Castlereagh had 
 just received news that in Ghent England had concluded peace 
 with the United States, and that the English armies were there- 
 fore free. There was not indeed a single interest in the world 
 which could lead the English state into war with Prussia ; but 
 for many weeks the diplomats had been working up their indigna- 
 tion against the country which was supposed to have betrayed 
 the cause of Europe, and once again the fire laid by "the dogs of 
 France " was about to burst out into bright flames. Even 
 Gagem, seeking excuse for the British frenzy, could find nothing 
 more to say than : " The pot boiled over." 
 
 Wliilst Metternich was discussing with the western powers 
 an attack upon the Prussians, the social intercourse of the diplo- 
 matic world was pursued with undisturbed serenity. The good 
 emperor Francis played the host with the accustomed loyal good- 
 nature to those princely guests whom he hoped to stab in the back. 
 As late as January 2nd, Metternich wrote "to his dear prince " 
 Hardenberg a friendly note, inviting him on the ground of urgent 
 business to postpone that day's sitting until the morrow.^ A few 
 hours later, he came personally to visit the chancellor for a con- 
 sultation regarding the article about Thorn and Cracow. The 
 reports of the sitting of January 3rd record only that Austria, 
 in general agreement with the Russian proposals, demanded an 
 increase in the Austrian share of Poland. On the same day on 
 which the course of affairs was so decisive, Metternich signed 
 with Castlereagh and Talleyrand a war-alUance against Prussia 
 and Russia. The wording of this remarkable treaty was no less 
 obscure than were the intentions of its originators ; there was 
 good reason for shunning the light. " In consequence of recently 
 published claims," the three powers pledged themselves mutually 
 to support one another with at least 150,000 men, in case any one 
 of them should be attacked or threatened on account of the just 
 and proper proposals they had brought forward in common ; an 
 attack upon Hanover or the Netherlands was to be regarded as 
 tantamount to an attack upon England. At the same tune it was 
 
 1 Metternich to Hardenberg, January 2, 1815. 
 69 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the purpose of the three powers " to complete the proposals of 
 the treaty of Paris in the manner which would express as fully 
 as possible its true purpose and spirit." Other powers, especially 
 the Netherlands and Hanover, were to be invited to co-operate. 
 Thus, in order to carry into effect the treaty of Paris, which 
 refused France any right to intervene in the territorial questions, 
 Austria and England concluded an alliance with France ! The 
 treaty spoke only of a defensive alHance ; its real object was 
 offensive. For should any opposition be offered to the " recently 
 published claims," the status of Prussia in Saxony must first be 
 attacked. In addition, a secret article contained the definite 
 threat that if Bavaria, Hanover, or the Netherlands would not 
 accept the invitation, they would " lose every right to the 
 advantages which they might claim in virtue of the present 
 treaty." 
 
 In the view of its prime originator, Talleyrand, the unques- 
 tionable intention of the alliance was to attack exhausted Prussia 
 with an overwhelming force, and to overthrow her newly acquired 
 position as a great power. The Frenchman stood at the goal 
 of his desires. He said with perfect justice, " I have gained for 
 France a position which could hardly have been secured by 
 fifty years of fortunate negotiations"; and he sent for General 
 Ricard from Paris, to discuss with Schwarzenberg and Wrede the 
 plan of campaign for the ensuing spring. Troops were already 
 assembled in Bohemia, Wrede boasted of certain victory, but 
 Miinster displayed the spirit of this incomparably disloj^l policy 
 by the frivolous exclamation, " We are playing a game en trots ; 
 if the enemy is beaten we shall then quarrel with one another." 
 Henceforward, Stein was never willing to repose any confidence 
 in the Guelphs. In Friedrichsfelde a breath of relief was drawn. 
 The imprisoned king gave his brother Antony full power to 
 assume the regency in Saxony as soon as the army of the triple 
 alliance should enter the kingdom, and received from the prince 
 the joyful message : " My brother-in-law Francis will not treat 
 our neighbours very graciously ! " Count Schulenburg looked 
 for the speedy approach of the happy days when Prussia's power 
 should have fallen, and Hanover should assume the leadership of 
 the north- — a prophecy in which may be readily recognised the 
 echo of Guelph boasts. 
 
 The compact of January 3rd had long-enduring indirect con- 
 sequences. It reintroduced France into the society of states, 
 and founded between the western powers that widely celebrated 
 
 ;o 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 entente cordiale which has since then, broken only by brief inter- 
 vals, persisted down to our own days. At the court of Vienna, 
 it led to the revival of Choiseul's idea of an alliance between the 
 Catholic great powers, a policy which henceforward never failed 
 to find powerful friends at the Hofburg. At the same time it 
 foreshadowed a natural grouping of the powers, a grouping that 
 was sure of a great future : on the one side, the western powers, 
 Austria and the Porte ; on the other, the young states, Prussia, 
 Russia, and the United States of America. Finally, Prussia 
 learned what was to be expected from Austria, even under the 
 aegis of peaceful duahsm. Hardenberg, indeed, magnanimously and 
 aU too soon, forgot the " unhappy precipitation " of his Austrian 
 friends ; but among the younger and more vigorous men of 
 goverrmiental circles, the memory of this breach of faith long 
 remained active. The ancient and glorious Frederician traditions 
 once more secured courageous recognition; and Eichhorn, the 
 statesman who in the subsequent long and quiet years of peace 
 was to pursue with caution the policy of the great king, Eichhorn 
 the principal founder of the customs-union, took part in the 
 Saxon negotiations with his incisive pen, and formed his judg- 
 ment upon Austria from his experience of the congress of Vienna. 
 
 There exists, however, an ultimate stage of folly, which in 
 an orderly society of states cannot permanently be surpassed, 
 Hardly had the treaty been signed when Castlereagh came to ast 
 himself how he could face parhament with so utterly un-Englisi 
 a poUcy. Had England been fighting against the French powei 
 for a quarter of a century, in order that now 150,000 of Napoleon's 
 veterans should once more cross the Rhine under the banner oj 
 the hlies ? In Vienna, notwithstanding Talleyrand's denials, th( 
 Bonapartist sentiments of the French army were well known 
 Was the peace which had only been attained at the cost of bloodj 
 struggles to be disturbed once more — for the sake of one o: 
 Napoleon's satraps ? The criminal folly of such an undertaking 
 began to enter the Englishman's understanding ; and ever 
 Mettemich was concerned at the loud jubilation of the Frencl 
 and of the Rhenish Confederates. During the foUowing weeks 
 Sardinia, Bavaria, Hanover, and Darmstadt joined the alhance o 
 January 3rd, and the inertia of the Orange government was s( 
 great as to lead to the tragi-comic result that the Netheriand 
 did not formally join the war alhance against Prussia until Apn 
 —at a moment when the worid had for some time been metamoi 
 phosed once more by Napoleon's return, and when Prussia's arm; 
 
 71 
 
History of Germany 
 
 was already on the way to defend the Netherlands against France. 
 But in truth the aUiance was still-bom, and a real danger of war 
 existed for six days only. 
 
 Already in the sitting of January 9th, Austria and England, 
 upon Castlereagh's instigation, took the first step towards recon- 
 ciliation. They gave a formal declaration that the negotiations 
 about Saxony had as their sole purpose to provide for the 
 Prussian state the compensation promised by treaty, and that, for 
 this reason, the decision was in no way dependent upon the assent 
 of Frederick Augustus. It was upon this condition alone that 
 Prussia and Russia agreed to the now unavoidable participation 
 of the French minister in the negotiations. On January 12th, 
 Talleyrand took his place in the council of the great powers. The 
 Committee of Four became enlarged to a Committee of Five, and 
 these five constituted the real congress.^ The illustrious assembly 
 had taken four months to constitute itself ! The overwhelming 
 strength of the five great powers was manifested in face of all 
 opposition. Now even Talleyrand did not find the hegemony of 
 the great powers incompatible with " public law " ; not a word 
 did he now utter of the fine-sounding reasons with which, at the 
 beginning of the congress, he had defended the equal rights of 
 all the states of Europe. 
 
 The Prussian statesmen, too, began to recognise that some 
 concessions were necessary. They did not, indeed, know any- 
 thing at all about the compact of January 3rd. When the frontier 
 negotiations made no advance, the Prussian plenipotentiaries, 
 on one occasion, threatened the Netherlands minister, Nagell, 
 that if Holland continued to prove intractable, Prussia would join 
 herself to France. The Dutchman, triumphing over the unsus- 
 pecting ignorance of the Prussians, immediately reported this 
 threat to his English friends — so little was Hardenberg's chan- 
 cellery aware that the war-alliance of the opponents had already 
 been concluded. But the Prussians had long recognised that 
 war was possible ; among numerous other threatening signs, there 
 now came the definite news that England and Austria, upon 
 Talleyrand's instigation, were endeavouring to induce the Porte 
 to make an attack upon Russia. It could no longer be ignored 
 that the annexation of Saxony could probably be secured only 
 at the cost of a European war. Was the question whether the 
 Albertine was to establish himself in Munster, Treves, or Dresden, 
 
 * Thus writes Humboldt in his manuscript Systematic Description of the Pro- 
 ceedings of the Congress of Vienna, June 15, 1815. 
 
 72 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 of sufficient importance, for it to be necessary on that account to 
 summon the exhausted nation once more to arms ? The well- 
 meaning men of the Prussian chancellery could not fail to be 
 overcome at times by sentiments of patriotic shame when they 
 looked back upon the lamentable course of the congress ; four 
 months of unceasing disputes, and yet not a single positive gain 
 for Germany ! So high did this discontent rise in the disillusioned 
 nation, that even Goethe on one occasion descended wrathfuUy 
 from his Ol3nnpian repose. On January 2nd, one of the Jena 
 papers published a poem by the old master in which he declared 
 that the congress had wasted its time in junketing, but had done 
 nothing to establish the fatherland on a secure foundation — and, 
 having dehvered himself of this censure, the old man went 
 imperturbably to the jubilee festival to wish happiness to the 
 " worthy and upright " Frankenberg, the minister of Gotha. Varn- 
 hagen assures us that the distinguished contempt expressed by 
 the poet made a profound impression upon the best of the German 
 diplomats : they realised even more painfully than before that as 
 yet nothing whatever had been effected. Was the congress, which 
 had been summoned in order to secure a permanent ordering for 
 this distracted comer of the world, to end with a new European 
 war ? 
 
 Hardenberg speedily recognised that he could not accept 
 such a responsibility. On January 12th, in the sitting of the 
 Five, he still, indeed, demanded the whole of Saxony ; but 
 secretly he had for several days been discussing with the faithful 
 Hoffmann whether it was not desirable to renounce a portion of 
 Saxony, and on January 13th he drew up a Plan tres-confidentiel, 
 wherein he admitted the possibihty that 840,000 of the inhabi- 
 tants of Saxony should be restored to Frederick Augustus. In 
 return for this concession, he demanded Bayreuth, " the cradle 
 of our ancestors. Pohtical and military considerations urge us, 
 and the other powers as well, not to allow France, Bavaria, and 
 Saxony to enter into the possession of an unbroken hue cutting 
 across Germany from the French frontier to Bohemia and Prussia." 
 The dread of a new Confederation of the Rhine was now, as before, 
 determinative of Prussia's policy. 
 
 As soon as this resolution had been made known to the Five, 
 the ground was levelled for an understanding. The Saxon affair 
 ceased to be a matter of principle, and there began an unedifying 
 dispute for the individual fragments of Saxon territory. But 
 the task of the Prussian negotiators still remained extremely 
 
 73 
 
History of Germany 
 
 difficult. They demanded, above all, the defiles of the Saale as 
 well as the fortresses of Wittenberg and Torgau ; the importance 
 of these positions for the warfare of the day had been sufficiently 
 proved in the wars of 1806 and 1813, and Hardenberg and Hum- 
 boldt did not attempt to conceal their view that for many years 
 to come it would be impossible to hope for a friendly and neigh- 
 bourly relationship with the Albertines. They also demanded 
 the greater part of Lusatia, with the wealthy Gorlitz, and, finally, 
 Leipzig. The place was not only of much importance as the centre 
 of the spiritual and economic life of Upper Saxony ; the great 
 fair-town, if it were to remain a Saxon frontier town, was likely 
 to be extremely dangerous for the Prussian customs-system, as 
 the seat of a vigorous smuggling traffic. Almost every one of 
 these demands was vigorously opposed by the allies of January 
 3rd. Talleyrand trembled for the German balance of power: 
 if Torgau were to be allotted to Prussia, Austria would be com- 
 pelled to maintain an invincible and costly army, Mettemich 
 desired to limit the Prussian share to Lower Lusatia, and even 
 offered the chancellor Tarnopol, which had already been specified 
 for Austria herself, if he would only moderate his Saxon claims. 
 Castlereagh, finally, wished to save Leipzig, in especial, for the 
 Albertines, that is to say, to save it for the Enghsh smuggling 
 traffic. 
 
 It is extremely probable that Prussia, in face of so general a 
 resistance, would, in this last stage of the Saxon question, still 
 have chosen the shorter course, however reluctant to use the 
 sword. But now there became manifest the advantageous conse- 
 quences of the king's greatly criticised change of front. The czar 
 firmly and openly supported all his friend's claims ; and since 
 the opponents, with the solitary exception of France, did not 
 really desire war, they ultimately conceded most of the Prusso- 
 Russian demands. Talleyrand's muse revelled once more in the 
 discovery of devices by which the firm understanding of the two 
 powers might be broken. Alexander was supposed to have 
 angrily exclaimed : " Oh ! if only I had not committed myself 
 so far ! If only I had not given my word ! " and numerous 
 similar anecdotes were circulated. It is quite possible that Czar- 
 toryski advised his imperial friend to sacrifice Prussia : Talley- 
 rand himself described the Pole as his most useful go-between. 
 But the interests whereby Russian policy was bound to Prussian 
 were stronger than Alexander's caprices, and stronger than the 
 anti-German spirit of his Sarmatian adviser. Unless Prussia 
 
 74 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 were to be adequately compensated, Russia could not acquire the 
 desired Prosna frontier. For this reason the czar remained true 
 to his friend ; and, as Gentz angrily wrote to Karadja, he advo- 
 cated the Prussian claims as zealously as his own. In the whole 
 course of these final negotiations, Russia did not once separate 
 herself from Prussia. If ultimately the czar derived greater 
 advantage from the dispute than his ally, this was not owing to any 
 breach of faith on the part of the Russians, but because it was 
 only the Prussian claims, and not the Russian, which were any 
 longer disputed by Austria and the western powers. It was the 
 king's judicious policy which Prussia had to thank for the fact 
 that, after arduous disputes, the defiles of the Saale and the North 
 Thuringian land of Luther, the fortresses of the Elbe and 
 Gorlitz, were acquired. It was only Leipzig which was obstinately 
 defended by the EngUsh commercial policy. When all attempts 
 at an understanding came to nought, Alexander finally resolved, 
 upon the urgent representation of Castlereagh, to make a " sacri- 
 fice " which went very much against the grain. On February 8th 
 he offered as a substitute the fortress of Thorn and its neighbour- 
 hood. 
 
 This was a poor exchange, and yet it was a proof of Alex- 
 ander's goodwill. His Russians had long before made them- 
 selves thoroughly at home in the fortress on the Vistula, and it 
 was long before they could forgive the czar for yielding in this 
 respect. Taking everything into consideration, the only possible 
 solution, in view of the approximate equality in strength of the 
 two parties, and in view of the reluctance of both to enter upon 
 a war, was the partition of the land in dispute, however pamful 
 this compromise might be to the Saxon nation ; and it was due 
 solely to Russia's assistance that the partition was conducted in 
 a way so favourable to Prussia and that the Albertine had to 
 surrender the greater half of his domain. 
 
 The next thing to do was to seek elsewhere in Germany for 
 the territory still necessary for Prussia's complete compensation. 
 The chancellor soon abandoned the unhappy idea of re-opening 
 the Bayreuth question. On the other hand, Mettemich reUn- 
 quished the Moselle frontier to which he had so long and so 
 obstinately adhered ; Prussia received Coblenz and the mountain 
 country between the Saar and the Nahe. The Prussians did not 
 conceal their feeUng that the king took over the territory on the 
 left bank of the Rhine for the sake of Germany, " only on behalf 
 of the general welfare " ; in this way Prussia entered into a 
 
 75 
 
History of Germany 
 
 threatened position just as much as Austria had formerly done so 
 by the acquirement of Belgium. It was precisely this endanger- 
 ment, forced upon his rival, which was in Metternich's eyes the 
 only consolation for the unwelcome advance of Prussia towards 
 South Germany. " What a good thing it is," he said to his con- 
 fidants, "that Prussia is now directly 'compromised' with 
 France ! " For the rest, he grudged a sufficient rounding-off 
 of territory for Prussia even upon the left bank of the Rhine. 
 A portion of the old department of Saar was retained, in order 
 that here, immediately upon the endangered frontier, the claims 
 of Oldenburg, Coburg, Romberg, StreUtz, and Pappenheim, 
 should be satisfied. In Austria's view, it was a wise policy to 
 involve as many petty states as possible in the defence of the 
 Rhine frontier. It seemed as if the Hofburg desired to convince 
 the neighbouring Alsace-Lorraine of the blessings of French 
 national unity by offering a daily spectacle of the miseries of 
 German particularism. Castlereagh, too, agreed that the demands 
 of territory put forward by Hanover and the Netherlands ought 
 to be somewhat modified for Prussia's advantage. 
 
 During the last weeks an understanding was arrived at also in 
 the Polish negotiations. By the convention of May 3, 1815, the 
 neutral repubhc of Cracow was founded. A commission of the 
 three partitioning powers (on which Jordan and Stagemann repre- 
 sented Prussia) went to Cracow, to draw up the new constitution 
 But it was felt from the first how nonviable was this most ludicrous 
 of all the artificial creations of the congress ; the very instruc- 
 tions to the commissaries threatened the intervention of the three 
 powers if the young Free State should become a centre of disturb- 
 ance. 
 
 The English plenipotentiary could not refrain from assum- 
 ing once more that role which was so agreeable to British virtue, 
 and at the same time so inexpensive, of protector of Sarmatian 
 freedom ; he hoped in this way to pacify the whigs regarding the 
 sacrifice of Poland. In a verbose circular note of January 12th, 
 he demanded that, since an independent Poland under a Polish 
 ruUng house was unfortunately impossible, the three partitioning 
 powers should at least pledge themselves " to treat the Poles as 
 Poles." To the frank ignorance of the noble lord, it seemed 
 possible to treat the three partitioning powers alike in this 
 respect ; who could have hanunered into his head the idea that 
 Prussia was in quite another position towards the small territory 
 of Posen, which was already partially Germanised, from that 
 
 76 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 occupied by Austria in relation to the Polish-Ruthenian Galicia, 
 or by Russia in relation to the main part of the old nobles' 
 republic ? If the eastern powers had wished to deal with this new 
 and uncalled-for encroachment of England according to its 
 deserts, they should have urgently exhorted the cabinet of St. 
 James's to begin by treating the Irish as Irish. But they wisely 
 refrained from provoking a vain struggle, and answered in polite, 
 unmeaning letters. Hardenberg replied (January 30th) : Prussia 
 was prepared to give to the Posen territory a constitution suitable 
 to the customs and spirit of the inhabitants, and to show that 
 national existence could continue undisturbed under any govern- 
 ment. He would not agree to any limitation of Prussian 
 sovereignty. For Austria as for Prussia, it was an urgent duty 
 that the hands should not be tied, for no one could foresee the 
 course of Alexander's Polish experiments ; and the czar himself 
 did not desire to be supervised in his plans for the promotion of 
 national happiness. Consequently neither the closing act of the 
 congress, nor the convention entered into by the three partitioning 
 powers on May 3rd, contains a word to the effect that the Poles 
 had any claim to poUtical independence. All that the three powers 
 said was : " Their Polish subjects are to retain institutions which 
 shall secure the maintenance of Polish nationality in accordance 
 with the governmental forms which the three participating govern- 
 ments respectively think proper to impose." There was also an 
 agreement concerning freedom of trade, subject at most to a duty 
 of ten per cent., in the spontaneous produce of all the regions 
 which had formerly been Pohsh ; and concerning free transit, sub- 
 ject to moderate duties, and free shipping (not subject to any 
 prohibitions) upon the Polish rivers down to the seaports. The 
 partitioning powers were pledged only to respect the language 
 and the customs of the people, and to favour commerce to a 
 moderate extent ; in all other respects they retained a free hand. 
 
 Towards the middle of February, the territorial negotiations 
 among the great powers were nearly completed. Talleyrand's 
 desire for war had encountered an insuperable obstacle in the 
 general longing for peace ; he gained no decisive influence in the 
 Committee of Five, and the yelping pack of his Rhenish Con- 
 federate associates was simply ignored by the great powers. It is 
 true that the German constitution still remained in profound 
 obscurity ; but since the Hofburg regarded the speedy solution 
 of this question as of trifling importance, Gentz drew up a pom- 
 pous manifesto to announce to a wondering world, " the great 
 
 i77 
 
History of Germany 
 
 work of the congress is now concluded." At this moment Napoleon 
 /returned from Elba, and before the breath of the Imperator the 
 card-house of the Bourbon glories, which had been so boastfully 
 described by Talleyrand, was dispersed to all the winds of heaven. 
 The French minister, who had just given a pathetic assurance that 
 milUons of French arms would be raised against the Corsican, 
 became in a single night an impotent man. On January 4th, 
 Talleyrand had written in triumph to the king : " The coalition 
 is dissolved for ever ! " Now the common danger once more drew 
 the four allied powers together, and the remaining territorial 
 questions were speedily settled. Vainly did Napoleon endeavour 
 to break the new coalition by sending to the czar the original copy 
 of the compact of January 3rd which he had found in the Tuileries, 
 in Louis XVIII's writing-table. Alexander, in Stein's presence, 
 burned the unclean document before Mettemich's unashamed eyes. 
 It was no longer a time to think of past disloyalties. 
 
 The Imperator's return brought to a final conclusion the long 
 drawn out negotiations concerning the future of Italy. Here 
 in the south, as elsewhere, England proved the most trusted ally 
 of the Hofburg. With Russia's aid, however, the Piedmontese 
 statesmen, D'Aglie and Brusasco, frustrated the secret aim of Met- 
 temich to constitute an Italian league of princes under Austrian 
 leadership. Austria's desire to exclude the Savoy-Carignan line 
 from the succession to the throne of Piedmont also proved 
 impossible of attainment owing to the decisive opposition of Russia 
 and France. All the more tenaciously did the Hofburg maintain 
 its old claims upon the Legations ; Austria had occupied the entire 
 Pontifical State with her troops, and hoped with good reason to 
 retain at least the land to the north of the Apennines. Metter- 
 nich rejected the proposal of the Bourbon court to constitute an 
 Italian committee at the congress, after the example of the 
 German committee, for the decision of this question ; he feared to 
 be outvoted, especially since the Bourbons also had put in a claim 
 for Tuscany. Meanwhile disturbances began in the peninsula ; the 
 premature rejoicings of the Lombards on account of the entry of 
 the Tedeschi soon gave place to profound discontent ; the popu- 
 lace of Romagna intrigued against the Austrian troops; a few 
 patriotic conspirators carried on secret intercourse with the prisoner 
 of Elba. When now the greatest of the Italians opened his adven- 
 turous campaign, and when Murat in Naples armed for war, in 
 Vienna incalculable comphcations were feared. A prudent change 
 of policy was effected, and an understanding was speedily arrived 
 
 78 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 at with the so-called legitimist powers of the peninsula. Tuscany 
 was rescued for the archdukes, the Bourbons were temporarily 
 put off with Lucca, and the whole of the old Pontifical State was 
 restored to the pope. It was only Polesine, the rich lowlands 
 in the delta of the Po, which remained in Austrian hands. Prussia 
 took little part in these negotiations ; but the king, out of con- 
 sideration for his new CathoUc subjects, regarded it as his loyal 
 duty to intervene repeatedly and expressly on behalf of the 
 re-establishment of the Pontifical State ; in the general view of those 
 romantic days the existence of the Roman Church was inseparably 
 associated with the temporal power of the papacy. The Roman 
 See entered a formal protest against the reduction in size of the 
 Pontifical State. No one paid any attention. Modem Europe 
 was already accustomed to find that all its great peace- 
 determinations were accompanied by the execrations of the 
 curia. The nuncio, however, conveyed to Piquot, the 
 Prussian charge d'affaires, the pope's cordial thanks for the 
 good feeling that the chancellor had displayed towards the 
 CathoUc Church.^ 
 
 No imderstanding was reached upon the eastern question ; 
 nowhere else was so crudely displayed as here that internal decay 
 from which, despite all external glitter, the Austrian monarchy 
 was unmistakably suffering. The state which in former days 
 when the Turks were a great power had been the defender 
 of the Christian world against Islam, new, when the Porte had 
 been overthrown, blind to the signs of the times, pusillanimously 
 left to Russian pohcy the completion of its own work. 
 In February, the czar laid before the powers a comprehensive 
 proposal in accordance with which they were all to pledge them- 
 selves to intervene on behalf of the rights of the rayahs, Russia 
 in especial playing the part of protector of the Orthodox Chris- 
 tians, and Austria and France that of protectors of the Latin 
 Christians. "There is," said the Russian note, "an unwritten 
 law-book of international rights, whose powers are in full 
 operation, and which guarantees equal rights to all nations." 
 Metternich rejected this i evolutionary proposal with great 
 indignation. The czar, however, was far from inchned to give the 
 guarantee desired by the Hofburg for the existence of Turkey ; 
 nor was England wilUng to burden herself with such incalculably 
 onerous responsibilities. The result was that in Vienna absolutely 
 no resolution was arrived at regarding Turkey, and the eastern 
 
 1 Piqnot's Report, Vienna, September 29, 1814. 
 
 79 
 
History of Germany 
 
 question was tacitly shelved among the numerous other unsolved 
 duties of the congress. 
 
 Whilst the great powers were carrying on their deUberations, 
 Hardenberg completed another difficult diplomatic task, the 
 settlement with Hanover, Sweden, and Denmark. These three- 
 fold negotiations, which were protracted over several months, 
 displayed, in their extraordinarily complicated interconnections, 
 how wide a horizon must be embraced by the vision of Prus- 
 sian statesmen, and how closely our state, thanks to its central 
 position, was affected even by the most remote affairs of Europe. 
 They secured for the fatherland one permanent gain, the libera- 
 tion of Pomerania from the last vestiges of foreign dominion. 
 Notwithstanding the peace of Kiel, which handed over to Den- 
 mark the territory to the north of the Peene, the chancellor held 
 firmly to his plan to secure Hither Pomerania and Riigen for 
 Prussia ; the hard struggle in which, with pen and with sword, the 
 HohenzoUems had for nearly two hundred years been engaged 
 on behalf of their ancient hereditary dominion, was to be ter- 
 minated once for all. But how was the legal possessor, Denmark, 
 to be compelled to cede the country, since Prussia had nothing 
 whatever to demand from the Danish crown ? Hardenberg 
 rendered this important acquisition possible by a clever utilisation 
 of the confused disputes which were agitating the Scandinavian 
 world. 
 
 In order to influence the Danes to an amicable cession of Hither 
 Pomerania,|^it was first of all necessary to resume friendly rela- 
 tions with this thorny little neighbour. It was characteristic 
 of Hardenberg's finesse that, on Augustjas, 1814, he unhesi- 
 tatingly signed peace with Denmark. The wits mocked Harden- 
 berg's family peace ; the chancellor signed for Prussia, and his 
 son, Coimt Hardenberg-Reventlow (who was completely estranged 
 from his father), signed for Denmark. Since the two powers 
 could hardly be said to have fought seriously against one another, 
 the treaty involved no more than the simple confirmation of the 
 peace of Kiel, and the repetition of the assurance given in that 
 peace that Denmark should receive compensation for Norway in 
 addition to Swedish Pomerania. But Prussia reserved the right 
 to demand compensation for the losses which her flag had suffered 
 from the Danish privateers. Regarding HeUgoland, which by the 
 peace of Kiel had been definitely ceded to England, not a word 
 was said either in these BerUn negotiations or subsequently at 
 the congress of Vienna. There was no legal right to demand the 
 
 80 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 island for Germany, since it had never belonged to the old empire ; 
 such was the inland limitation of German policy that there 
 was no general understanding of the value of this place, whose 
 importance in relation to German trade had so recently been dis- 
 played in the days of the Continental System. The widespread 
 enthusiasm for generous-hearted Albion found no objection in 
 England's quiet foundation of a httle North German Gibraltar. 
 
 Confiding in this treaty, the king of Denmark came to 
 Vienna, hoping there to acquire, in addition to Hither Pomerania, 
 Liibeck and Hamburg, or at least the princedom of Liibeck. He 
 was the boon companion of the illustrious society, arousing much 
 amusement by his droll sailor's jests, but his policy found no sup- 
 porters ; Napoleon's faithful ally stood quite alone among the 
 statesmen of legitimacy. Lord Castlereagh did not consider it 
 his duty even to keep the pledge given to the little state upon 
 which England had twice made a predatory attack. All that the 
 king of Denmark could secure was the continuance of the Sound 
 dues, which was, indeed, a valuable concession to the Danish 
 finances. When Mettemich, taking leave, said to the king, " Sire, 
 vous emportez tous les coeurs ! " the betrayed man answered, 
 with a sigh, " Mais pas une seiile ame." Meanwhile, even Hither 
 Pomerania had been lost to the Danes. The Norwegians, led by 
 the Danish stadtholder. Prince Christian, had disregarded the 
 peace of Kiel, had given their land an independent constitution, 
 and had chosen their stadtholder as king ; thereupon Bemadotte 
 had invaded the country with his Swedes, and, after a campaign 
 lasting a fortnight, in the treaty of Moss (August 14, 1814) 
 Prince Christian abandoned his claims. Subsequently, by negotia- 
 tions between the crown of Sweden and the Storthing of Norway, 
 the union of the two kingdoms of the Scandinavian peninsula 
 was effected. Even to this day it remains obscure to what 
 extent the famous Danish loyalty co-operated in this uprising of 
 the Norwegians. Naturally, however, the cunning Frenchman who 
 now guided the destinies of Sweden had no doubt regarding the 
 complicity of the court of Copenhagen ; he declared that the 
 peace of Kiel had been broken by Denmark, and that for this 
 reason Hither Pomerania could not be handed over. 
 
 Naturally, it was not for Prussia to play the part of unpre- 
 judiced judge in these unedifying negotiations among the northern 
 powers. National policy demanded that the dispute for German 
 territory among the foreigners should be turned to German 
 advantage, in order to restore the lost Mark to the fatherland. 
 
 81 G 
 
History of Germany 
 
 The task was one specially created for Hardenberg's supple adroit- 
 ness. Fortunately, on this occasion, Austria and France, in former 
 days the most obstinate enemies of the Pomeranian policy of the 
 HohenzoUems, remained altogether indifferent. The chancellor 
 first came to an understanding with Sweden. Bernadotte was 
 prepared to cede to Prussia his claims upon Hither Pomerania in 
 return for a sum of money ; on May 13, 1815, Miinster reported 
 it to the prince regent as indubitable that Prussia and Sweden 
 had long before come to terms. Thus protected on the side of 
 Sweden, Hardenberg produced his claims against the Danish 
 privateers, endeavouring to induce the Danes to renounce Hither 
 Pomerania. This could be effected only by the offer of some 
 compensation in land and people, for Denmark had unquestion- 
 ably the better legal right to Hither Pomerania. In the whole 
 wide world there was, however, only one territory which might 
 perhaps be offered to the Danes in compensation. This was the 
 duchy of Lauenburg, on the right bank of the Elbe. But what 
 a proposal ! For the seventy-five square miles [German] of 
 wealthy Hither Pomerania, were to be offered nineteen square 
 miles in Lauenburg ; for the naval fortress of Riigen, for the 
 beautiful Stralsund, and for the University of Greifswald — ^no more 
 than the tomb of Till Eulenspiegel, and two-thirds of the good 
 town of Ratzeburg (for the cathedral square belonged to Strelitz) ! 
 Nothing but the difficulties by which the Copenhagen cabinet was 
 threatened from all sides made it seem possible that Denmark 
 would agree to so unequal an exchange, which offered but one 
 advantage, the rounding-off of the Holstein territory. 
 
 Legally, however, Lauenburg belonged to the House of 
 Hanover, and for this reason the acquirement of Hither Pomerania 
 was dependent upon an understanding with the Guelphs, to whom, 
 in addition, Prussia was indebted to the extent of 250,000 to 
 300,000 souls on account of the enlargement stipulated for at 
 Reichenbach. It was already determined that Hildesheim was 
 to be utilised for this compensation ; on the other hand, the king 
 had steadfastly rejected the cession of East Frisia, and since 
 then the loyal little people had become even dearer to his heart. 
 Nevertheless disquieting rumours ran through the country, where 
 it was beheved that cession to the Guelphs was still likely to be 
 effected. Greatly concerned, Vincke, the lord-lieutenant, wrote 
 to the chancellor; on no account must this essentially German 
 people be sacrificed, for an East Frisian was worth more than 
 twenty semi-French Rhenish Confederates ; moreover, the posses- 
 
 82 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 sion of the Ems afforded the only free access to the north, and was 
 the sole means of escaping the Rhine dues of the Dutch. 
 
 Thus the dispute for Hither Pomerania gave the Guelph 
 diplomats a convenient excuse for renewing the attempt which 
 had failed at Reichenbach. The chancellor now demanded Lauen- 
 burg from the Guelphs, and since in addition he had in accord- 
 ance with the treaty to provide further enlargement for Hanover, 
 Munster speedily saw his advantage, and in compensation asked 
 for East Frisia and that " isthmus " of Gottingen territory which, 
 according to Hardenberg's plans, was to connect the eastern 
 province of Prussia with the western. This last demand could 
 not be rejected, but it was long remembered in Berlin as a plain 
 proof of the ill-will of the Guelphs, for if Hanoverian sentiments 
 had been honourable, if there had been a genuine desire to keep 
 on good terms with Prussia, to be surrounded by Prussia could 
 not have been regarded by the Guelph court as a threatening 
 situation. Still more profoundly hurt was the king by the pro- 
 posal regarding East Frisia ; no other of the many disillusion- 
 ments of this unhappy period touched him so profoundly. For 
 many months, on into March, he obstinately refused ; how often 
 did he send Kneseheck to the chancellor on this account, and this 
 was always an unmistakable sign of depression. The Guelphs, 
 however, stood fast upon their documentary rights. It was not 
 as if the mouth of the Ems had any real significance to them from 
 the point of view of commercial policy ; in the eyes of the nobles' 
 government of the Guelphs, the magnificent rivers of Lower 
 Saxony existed simply in order to be burdened with lucrative 
 customs dues. But East Frisia bordered on Holland ; and alike 
 in London, in Hanover, and in The Hague, an uninterruptedly 
 continuous north-western Guelph-Orange power was regarded as 
 essential to maintain a balance against the Prussian neighbour. 
 For this reason Miinster persisted in his demand, and Frederick 
 Wilham was ultimately forced to decide whether Hither Pomerania 
 or East Frisia was the more important for Prussia. Hardenberg's 
 opinion was absolutely in favour of retaining Hither Pomerania ; 
 for, since the land frontier in the east had been rendered so 
 unfavourable by the loss of Warsaw, it was indispensable to 
 Prussia that upon the coast at least she should be able to protect 
 herself, and should retain the control of the mouths of the Oder 
 entirely in her own hands ; East Frisia, important as it was, was 
 after all no more than an outpost. 
 
 A still more serious consideration in Hardenberg's eyes was 
 
 83 
 
History of Germany 
 
 that of national policy. The long struggle for the Uberation of 
 Pomerania must not come to an end by the instalment of the 
 Danes, who were already in the bay of Kiel, upon the Strela Sound. 
 On the other hand, Hanover, even during her union with England, 
 had always counted as a German land ; and at that time, when 
 Princess Charlotte was still alive, its complete separation from 
 Great Britain seemed near at hand, for this might be expected to 
 follow upon the death of the prince regent. Ceded to Hanover, 
 East Frisia would not be lost to Germany. It was not in criminal 
 levity that Hardenberg sacrificed East Frisia, although such was 
 the accusation brought against him by embittered patriots ; he 
 weighed the pros and cons of the complicated question conscien- 
 tiously, and then, with his sound political sense, chose the lesser 
 of two evils. As early as February 15th, he had an article for 
 the Berlin newspapers composed in the chancellery, intended to 
 prepare readers for the cession of East Frisia, and at the same time 
 to indicate that this painful sacrifice was the only means for the 
 acquirement of the incomparably more valuable Hither Pomerania. 
 This article, however, was unnoticed alike by contemporaries and 
 by subsequent historians. Finally, in March, the king gave a 
 reluctant assent. Thereupon there appeared an ultimate and 
 unexpected obstacle. According to the absurd family tradition 
 of the Guelphs, East Frisia was an ancient hereditary dominion 
 of the Guelph House, which had accrued to Prussia only through 
 force and cunning. Consequently the prince regent learned with 
 extreme indignation that for the return of this primitively Guelph 
 territory he was to hand over Lauenburg. He resisted to the 
 utmost ; this most unloving of all sons suddenly experienced senti- 
 ments of filial tenderness, declaring that it was impossible for his 
 " delicacy " to allow him to cede a province while his mentally 
 disordered father was still alive. Miinster had to use all his 
 eloquence ; he explained to the enraged prince that Lauenburg was 
 in fact absolutely essential for Prussia's Pomeranian plans. Should 
 difficulties be raised, it was likely that the king of Prussia, already 
 greatly embittered, would throw up the entire negotiation ; finally, 
 too, there was the delightful prospect that in the new war with 
 Napoleon Prussia would once more have need of the good English 
 gold, and then Lauenburg could be again detached from the ally ! 
 This reasoning had its due effect, and the tender conscience of the 
 Guelph was appeased. 
 
 Thus on May 29th the treaty of exchange between Prussia 
 and Hanover came into effect : Lauenburg was exchanged for 
 
 84 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 Hildesheim, Goslar, East Frisia, and part of County Lingen ; 
 in addition, there were to be two Prussian military roads through 
 Hanover as a substitute for the desired " isthmus." In this way, 
 the demands the Guelphs had formerly made at Reichenbach were 
 by the Saxon negotiations reduced by about 50,000 souls. On 
 June 4th Denmark ceded her rights in Swedish Pomerania to 
 Prussia, receiving in exchange Lauenburg with two million thalers ; 
 but the state-treasury was so utterly depleted that it had to be 
 made a condition that this trifling sum should be paid in four 
 half-yearly instalments, beginning with the new year of 1816J 
 Fin^y, on June 7th, Sweden, in return for three and a half 
 million thalers, abandoned her last claims to German soil, and 
 simultaneously restored to the new suzerain the Hither Pomeranian 
 domains which had been alienated during recent years. Thus 
 Prussia exchanged East Frisia and more than five milhon thalers 
 for a land which at that time (it is true under very lax adminis- 
 tration) produced a yearly surplus of no more than 224,000 thalers. 
 From the purely mercantile outlook, this was certainly a bad 
 stroke of business, and it was only Sweden which stood to gain 
 by the compUcated transaction ; but the German nation had good 
 reason to thank the chancellor for the fulfilment of this difficult task. 
 It was full time to separate Hither Pomerania from the life 
 of Scandinavia. For nearly two centuries the country had been 
 wholly attached to the three crowns of the north ; how late in 
 life had even Amdt, when nearly forty years of age, regained 
 consciousness of his German nationality ! How many hun- 
 dred times had the people of Riigen opened their festivals to the 
 strains of the ancient Swedish song : Gustafs skal ! In the begin- 
 ning of the century, upon solemn occasions, the merchants of 
 Stralsund sang the national song : 
 
 "Themselves let politicians please ! 
 
 Should France or England win the day, 
 No ship of ours can either seize. 
 What matters then to us the fray ? " 
 
 Subsequently, when the blue and yellow flag could no longer adorn 
 the vessels of the Stralsund shippers, this comfortable sentiment 
 began indeed to give place to a more manly feeling ; but the landed 
 gentry and the patriciates of the towns, loaded by the Swedish 
 crown with valuable privileges, regarded the equal justice of 
 Prussian administration with extremely mixed sentiments. Then 
 
 85 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the feeling of the country became transformed with remarkable 
 speed. The crown of Sweden itself recognised that the natural 
 order of things was re-established by the entry of the Prussians. 
 King Charles XIII, taking leave of his loyal Pomeranians, said 
 that Sweden had gained " an insular situation " by the acquire- 
 ment of Norway, and was therefore less than ever in a position 
 to defend the remote German province. And within a few years 
 this valiant German land was to confirm the promise uttered by 
 Count Bohlen, the spokesman of the knighthood, at the swear- 
 ing in, when he said : " We shall show that under a foreign 
 government we have not forgotten how to be Germans." 
 
 In East Frisia, on the other hand, profound distress prevailed. 
 For a long time no one would believe the bearers of evil tidings ; 
 the royal authorities gave repeated assurances that they had no 
 official news of the cession. The brave Landwehr regiment of the 
 province continued to fight under the Prussian flag at Ligny and 
 Waterloo ; as late as July, 1815, a deputation of the estates was 
 despatched to Paris, whose members, in unison with the men of 
 the Landwehr, implored the king not to hand over the province. 
 Hostility to the noble land of Hanover was so general in this 
 country of commerce and of peasant freedom, that the authori- 
 ties did not venture to complete the cession until the end of 1815. 
 Even then the old loyalty persisted. For how long a date did the 
 East Frisian students in Gottingen continue to wear the black- 
 and-white cockade in their caps, and when, singing the Landesvater, 
 they raised the strains, Friedrich Wilhelm lebe hoch, it was with tears 
 in their eyes. Until the king's death. East Frisia continued to 
 celebrate its " ancient and glorious festival " ; as late as August 
 3, 1830, the visitors at the marine spa of Norderney saw with 
 astonishment that at every fisherman's cottage on the island the 
 Prussian flag was waving. 
 
 Whilst in these transactions the chancellor was able cleverly 
 to maintain the interests of the state, in the negotiations with 
 the Netherlands he had to pay the consequences for his early 
 precipitation. None of the extravagant concessions which, during 
 the winter campaign, had been made to the pet child of English 
 policy, could now be recalled ; nor did Hardenberg himself, while 
 in Vienna, succeed in learning that this House of Orange, which 
 had been re-established by the force of Prussian arms, cherished 
 decidedly hostile sentiments towards Germany. He continued 
 to regard the Netherlands as a firm outwork of {Germany, and 
 was delighted that Luxemburg, at least, should join the Germanic 
 
 86 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 Federation. Although this Uttle country was still animated by a 
 warMke spirit and by decidedly anti-French sentiments, the memory 
 of the Austrian Latour-dragoons and of the yagers of Le Loup, 
 still remained fresh in the minds of the people. The Prussian 
 diplomats did not resent the legitimist zeal exhibited by the Orange 
 representative in the Saxon negotiations, for, to Gagem's astonish- 
 ment, they manifested an " unusually yielding disposition." 
 
 There was, indeed, no longer any question of Jiilich and other 
 promises made in Paris ; but Prussia declared herself to be pre- 
 pared to cede a portion of Guelderland and the vicinity of the 
 fortress of Venloo, and here once again learned the hostile senti- 
 ments of the EngUsh statesmen. Gagern demanded la lisidre de 
 la Meuse ; Prussian Guelderland was to be cut off from its natural 
 water-course, the Meuse ; the frontier was to be withdrawn every- 
 where at least two and a half miles to the east of the river. He 
 appealed to the duke of Wellington, who, still completely under 
 the dominion of the doctrine of the balance of power traditional 
 in the eighteenth century, and inspired by a profound mistrust 
 of restless Prussian ambition, had expressed as a miUtary expert 
 the extraordinary view that without this lisUre the Nether- 
 lands would be threatened by Prussia. In the good-natured hope 
 of securing the House of Orange for all future time as a grateful 
 ally, Hardenberg was weak enough to give way to this preposterous 
 claim ; and it was in this way that Germany acquired that north- 
 west frontier whose like cannot be found upon the map of Europe. 
 
 Within the next few months, Prussia was to learn the grati- 
 tude of the Dutch traders. Among all Prussia's neighbours, the 
 House of Orange displayed itself as the most hostile and the most 
 grasping. In opposition to the spirit and the wording of the 
 treaties of Vienna, the Netherlands immediately reimposed those 
 scandalous Rhine dues whereby the Dutch Republic had formerly 
 misused the German hinterland. Since the statistical resources 
 of that day were extremely defective, and Hasselt's Handbook of 
 Geography served the diplomats as the last source of wisdom, into 
 all the territorial agreements of the congress there entered a few 
 minor errors, which by a Httle good feeling on the part of the states 
 concerned could subsequently have easily been rectified. It was 
 through such an oversight that the two Prussian roads from Aix- 
 la-Chapelle to Eupen and Geilenkirchen passed, for two short 
 stretches, across Dutch territory; here the Dutch temporarily 
 erected customs houses, and subjected the Prussian internal traffic 
 to their tolls. When at length a mixed commission met to effect 
 
 ?7 
 
History of Germany 
 
 a definite determination of the frontier, the Dutch contested every 
 soul, every tree, and every inch of land. ' Concerning the zinc- 
 mines of Altenburg it was absolutely impossible to come to an 
 understanding ; this celebrated " neutral territory " on the Belgo- 
 Prussian frontier still reminds us to-day of the friendly and neigh- 
 bourly sentiments of the Dutch. Such accumulated proofs of 
 Orange gratitude, and in especial the increasing hindrance offered 
 to the Rhine shipping, soon had as their result the cooling of the 
 friendly feelings of the Berlin cabinet for the court of The Hague. 
 Another of Prussia's smaller opponents, Bavaria, had occa- 
 sion bitterly to repent her fooUsh hostility. If any one of the 
 German princely houses was dependent upon the friendship of 
 Prussia by dynastic interests, this was unquestionably the House 
 of Wittelsbach, which had so often been saved by the Hohen- 
 zollerns. Even in the year 1814, Prussian statesmen, despite 
 their well-grounded mistrust of Montgelas, had no hostile feelings 
 towards the Bavarian state. It is true that they did not wish to 
 confide the fortress of Mainz to these untrustworthy hands ; but 
 in Paris Hardenberg was incUned to give the Palatinates of Baden 
 and of the left bank of the Rhine to Bavaria ; and even in Vienna 
 Humboldt advised that the Bavarians should be won over by 
 concessions if they should exhibit any kind of goodwill for the 
 Germanic Federation. The shamelessly un-German sentiment 
 openly displayed by the associates of Montgelas, the boastful 
 hostility of Wrede, and the filthy attacks of the " literary 
 incendiaries " of the court of Munich, compelled the chancellery 
 to adopt a different attitude. By old inclination and by custom 
 Montgelas was bound to France, and was personally hostile to 
 the leaders of the North German patriots, especially to Stein and 
 Gorres. Wrede hoped by his noisy zeal on behalf of Frederick 
 Augustus to secure the gratitude of Austria, England, and France, 
 and with their help to gain valuable compensation for Salzburg 
 and the Lower Inn region. This was a grave political error even 
 when regarded from the outlook of purely dynastic poUcy. England 
 never concerned herself much about the South German 
 territorial questions; towards the close of the congress France 
 lost all influence, and Austria soon manifested herself to be a 
 faithless friend. 
 
 The great powers came to terms over the Saxon question, 
 and the only result of Wrede's presumptuous importunity was 
 that he incurred general dislike ; even in the circles of the Rhenish 
 
 * Cf. Sack's General Report, March 31, 1816. 
 88 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 Confederate diplomats, the Bavarians were spoken of as " les 
 Prussiens du Midi." Above all, the czar was profoundly 
 embittered, and gladly listened to the reiterated assurances of 
 Baron von Stein that it would be extremely dangerous to permit 
 the aggrandisement of the central state of the Confederation of the 
 Rhine. Frederick WiUiam was astonished to learn from Kiister, 
 the Prussian envoy, that in patriotic circles in Munich there was 
 general talk concerning a war against Prussia " as one of the 
 most natural and easiest things in the world." ^ Was this state 
 to be permitted to hem in the whole of South Germany ? But the 
 chancellor could not now regard in any other light the union of 
 the Badenese Palatinate with Bavaria, since the desired settlement 
 of Austria on the Upper Rhine had not been effected. Was Prussia 
 bound in any way by those ready promises which Mettemich had, 
 on his own initiative and secretly, given to the Bavarians ? If 
 Prussia had been unable to secure the formally promised uninter- 
 rupted continuity of her domains, why should not Bavaria have 
 to make a like renunciation ? Why should Baden and the two 
 Hesses, which could never be a serious danger to Germany, suffer 
 severe robbery in order to effect a quite inequitable aggrandise- 
 ment for the most powerful state of the Confederation of the 
 Rhine ? 
 
 These simple political and legal considerations gradually led 
 the king and the chancellor to determine that the court of Munich ' 
 should be allowed no more than full compensation for the provinces 
 ceded to Austria. It is true that the Bavarian negotiators, after 
 they had chaffered throughout the winter with a commission 
 of the great powers, succeeded, on April 23rd, 1815, in concluding 
 a provisional treaty with the powers of the coaUtion, in accordance 
 with which, for Salzburg and the Lower Inn region, Bavaria was 
 to receive disproportionate compensation, namely, the greater 
 part of the Palatinate on the left bank of the Rhine, Hanau, and 
 a large portion of the eastern Odenwald ; in addition, it was 
 promised that the Wittelsbachs should receive " the reversion of 
 the Badenese Palatinate," as soon as the ruling hne of the House 
 of Baden should become extinct. Since that time the reversi- 
 bilite du Palatinat has run like a red thread through all the trans- 
 formations of recent Bavarian policy. Above all the crown prince 
 Louis was under the dominion of this idea ; he had now to hand 
 over his beautiful and beloved Salzburg, where during recent years 
 he had estabhshed his court, and he desired to regain in return, at 
 
 1 KHster's Report of May 17, 1815. Similarly in several other despatches. 
 
 89 
 
History of Germany 
 
 least the " cradle of his race," although there was absolutely no 
 legal ground for the claim. Years before, Bavaria had ceded the 
 Palatinate on the right bank of the Rhine, in return for exces- 
 sive compensation, and without reserve ; there was no obvious 
 reason why the territory should revert to the Wittelsbachs as soon 
 as the succession in Baden passed to the counts of Hochberg. It 
 was only the disapproval of the great powers for the neglectful 
 regime of the grand-duke Charles of Baden, which favoured for a 
 time these presumptuous Bavarian claims. But the April treaty 
 was still-bom for it was expressly subject to the " assent of the 
 sovereigns concerned," and Wiirtemberg, Baden, and the two Hesses 
 immediately raised loud objections. Prior to this, Marschall, 
 the Badenese plenipotentiary, had written to the chancellor: 
 " Through all the sanguinary wars which disturbed Europe 
 during his reign, Louis XIV did not gain one million inhabitants 
 for the French monarchy, and now Bavaria, by a coup de main, 
 by a simple negotiation, is to enrich herself by 400,000 subjects." ^ 
 He now renewed his protest. Frederick William, too, found it 
 extremely unjust that Hanau should be detached from Electoral 
 Hesse without any legal ground. The consequence was that the 
 April treaty was not ratified, and the final act of the congress 
 left the dispute unsettled. 
 
 It was amid such struggles that the re-establishment of the 
 Prussian monarchy was effected. The outcome of the Viennese 
 negotiations was a partial defeat for Prussian pohcy, for neither 
 upon the Rhine, nor in Saxony, nor yet upon the Polish frontier, 
 had Prussia completely gained her ends. As compared with the 
 status quo of 1805, the country was at least six hundred square 
 miles [German] smaller, and had been increased by barely half 
 a million inhabitants ; the promised rounding-off had not been 
 effected, for Prussia was still separated into two widely detached 
 areas. In addition, a royal house hostile to the Hohenzollern 
 had been reinstated, a nonviable middle-sized state, which could 
 never reacquire healthy political conditions. The four petty kings 
 ruled nearly one-fourth of the domain of the Germanic Federa- 
 tion ; Napoleon's pet creation, the new power of the middle-sized 
 states, had weathered all the storms of the time. Profound dis- 
 satisfaction was felt throughout the Prussian nation at the issue 
 of the diplomatic struggle. Blucher aptly voiced public opinion 
 when he wrote : "We drove a fine bull to Vienna and brought 
 
 1 Marschall to Hardenberg, March 5, 18 15. 
 90 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 away in exchange a mangy old ox." Prussia's enemies made no 
 concealment of their maUcious joy. Not satisfied with the results 
 they had actually attained, they spread abroad the fable that the 
 Prussian state had unwillingly been compelled to burden herself 
 with Rhineland in place of the southern half of Saxony, whereas 
 Hardenberg's desire had from the first been to acquire Rhine- 
 land as well as Saxony. All, however, were agreed in hoping 
 that so artificial a political structure could not possibly endure. 
 
 Yet Prussia's enemies exulted too soon. The artificiality of 
 this state-structure was not found in the fact that it simultaneously 
 ruled the furthest boundaries of the east and of the west, but 
 simply in this, that it was not yet complete, that the territories 
 which constituted the natural coimecting links between these two 
 provinces, had not yet been acquired. Notwithstanding all failures 
 in matters of detail, Prussia had gained through the Viennese 
 negotiations the possibility of healthy and vigorous further develop- 
 ment. The danger of a new Confederation of the Rhine, which in 
 Vienna seemed so threatening, was abohshed for a long time by 
 Napoleon's return and subsequent defeat. The weakness of the 
 Bourbons was plain to all ; the influence of France upon the small 
 courts, an influence which Prussia had so obstinately resisted, 
 remained in fact during subsequent decades extremely trifling. 
 How different now, too, was the position of Germany in relation to 
 the restless neighbour nation, now that the North German great 
 power had undertaken to guard the Rhine in place of those miser- 
 able spiritual princes who were in the pay of the court of VersaiUes. 
 Free from her burdensome Polish possessions, Prussia became more 
 olosely entwined than ever with the life of Germany ; to the young 
 trans-Elbian colonies there were added the old lands of Rhenish 
 civilisation with their mighty towns and their developed 
 manufacturing industry. Henceforward there were no German 
 interests which were not intimately associated with the Prussian 
 state. As Frederick William said, Prussia possessed not a single 
 village except with the assent of the whole of Europe, and thereby 
 acquired the needed security for the permeation of the variegated 
 new domains with the Prussian spirit and the Prussian system. 
 If this unspeakably difficult task should be fulfilled, if the truth 
 should be proved of the fine phrase used at this time by the king, 
 " Germany has gained what Prussia has gained," then the half 
 success of the Viennese negotiations might readily become as full 
 of blessing as had in former days been the diplomatic defeat of 
 the Great Elector at the WestphaUan peace congress. It was not, 
 
 91 
 
History of Germany 
 
 in truth, in arrogance that Hardenberg had asked his opponents 
 whether they really wished to force Prussia to strive for fresh 
 enlargements. Only to the stupidity of the Hofburg and of the 
 petty states was the delusion possible that the new structure of 
 Prussia was one devoid of capacity for endurance, that a great 
 power could not persist in so unnatural a situation. Half of 
 Germany was under the Prussian sceptre. If here the unified state 
 of Germany should first be firmly and securely grounded, sooner 
 or later the hour must come when the sword of Frederick would 
 again be drawn from the scabbard in order to restore to the father- 
 land the other half which still manifested in all its members the 
 after-effects of two hundred years of foreign dominion. 
 
 § 3. THE GERMANIC FEDERATION. 
 
 A generation later, when the representatives of the nation, 
 without the co-operation of the princes, were discussing the recon- 
 stitution of the German unified state, they wasted the fortunate 
 hour in deliberations concerning the fundamental rights of the 
 people. The same obscure impulse towards self-seeking dominated 
 the diplomats who, without the co-operation of the nation, were 
 negotiating in Vienna concerning Germany's future ; at a very 
 early stage, the work of constructing the German constitution 
 became arrested, the dispute concerning the dynastic interests 
 of the House of Wettin continued for months to occupy all the 
 energies of the congress, and it was not until towards the end 
 of the great diet of princes, when affairs had already assumed an 
 altogether hopeless aspect, that in excessive haste the German 
 federal act was drafted. Certainly prospects had never been 
 extremely favourable. It was fer se an impossible task to give 
 a firm political form to a country whose boundaries could be 
 defined by no one, to give such a form to the indefinite idea " Ger- 
 many." The pitiless pressure of necessity, which had formerly 
 compelled the individual states of North America unwilUngly to 
 renounce their sovereignty, was not operative at this moment 
 when all the world hoped for a period of prolonged peace. Conse- 
 quently the political natural law which drives every state to defend 
 its own ego, its independence, to the utmost, was displayed in all 
 its harshness and nakedness. Veneration for the great father- 
 land, gratitude towards its liberators, shame for their own 
 criminality, were not to be expected from the slaves of Napoleon. 
 
 92 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 Moreover a cultured public opinion, a passionate national 
 will, strong enough to carry onward the reluctant, were not 
 anjnvhere to be found. All that this generation possessed in the 
 way of creative pohtical capacity had been wholly exhausted in the 
 colossal struggle for the liberation of the fatherland. The hopes 
 of the patriots were indeed high-pitched, and Amdt said that 
 they were expecting new glories such as had not been seen for 
 centuries. The constitutional ideas of the Revolution had every- 
 where, though quietly, struck roots upon German soil ; " con- 
 stitution " and " representative system " were now regarded as 
 synonymous terms. At the same time, amongst men of very 
 (Afferent degrees of culture, the confident prophecy became audible 
 that, just as the ecclesiastical reformation had in the sixteenth 
 century spread from Germany throughout the world, so now would 
 it be with the political reformation in the nineteenth century. 
 Romantic memories from Germany's earliest history became asso- 
 ciated with these modem ideas ; it seemed as if the never-to-be- 
 forgotten disgrace of the days of Ratisbon had been wiped out, 
 as if with the re-establishment of emperor and empire, the power 
 of the Othos would return to the Germans. Never has a highly- 
 gifted and highly-cultured generation been a prey to such 
 childishly obscure pohtical ideas ; everything which this epoch 
 thought about the state, came from the emotions, from an 
 inward and extravagant yearning which sought for its ideals as 
 individual preferences might dictate, now in the past and now 
 in the future. Unrestrainedly the primevally old was welded 
 together with the fire-new. Whilst the Rheinische Merkur recom- 
 mended Schamhorst's miUtary system and the aboUtion of all 
 internal customs-dues in Germany, the paper at the same time 
 disinterred Dante's De Monarchia from the dust, and expected 
 to heal the afflictions of the new emperorless time with the ideas 
 of the thirteenth century. For the majority of these publicists 
 it was still an imknown idea that the poUtician should stick to his 
 point and consistently advocate his views; mnocently and diffi- 
 dently everyone expressed his opinions and plans in newspapers 
 and pamphlets, ready to adopt simultaneously the most opposing 
 outlooks. Amdt declared apropos : " Such is the nature of our 
 time that an inteUigent man may endeavour to disseminate ideas 
 simply from the love of dissemination, and because he has grasped 
 the necessity for shaking up the Germanic spirits, for in many 
 respects we are still far too inert." But how rightly had Fichte 
 judged his contemporaries when he said that the German could 
 
 93 
 
History of Germany 
 
 never desire one thing alone, but must always simultaneously 
 desire its opposite ! 
 
 What a morbid excess of self-confidence was displayed, 
 too, amid this unsteadiness of public opinion ! The news- 
 papers gave unceasing assurances that, apart from matters of 
 detail, the entire nation was at one, well aware what would be 
 advantageous to it and what it was justified in demanding ; they 
 spoke with unending contempt of the game of hazard played by 
 the politicians and of the sham fights of diplomatists. This 
 generation could with good reason pride itself upon a heroic 
 struggle fought to a successful issue, and now that the constitu- 
 tional upbuilding of the new Germany lagged so lamentably far 
 behind the expectations of the War of Liberation, there arose in 
 the nation an error weighty with consequences, which for two 
 generations was a curse in German hfe. This was the illusion 
 that the disintegration of the fatherland was the fault of the courts 
 alone, and that it was not also the fault of conflicting aims 
 and defective will, of the vacillation of the nation between 
 patriotic aspirations and particularist traditions. The language 
 of publicist literature displayed a peculiar mixture of unction 
 and bitterness. Nowhere was this more plainly manifest than 
 in the columns of the Rheinische Merkur, whose circulation, as 
 early as the summer of 1814, was prohibited in the Rhenish Con- 
 federate states of the south. Let the princes seriously reflect, 
 said Gorres threateningly, how their peoples are likely to receive 
 them if they return home bringing with them a disintegrated 
 fatherland, for then we shall have no choice open between 
 humiliation and revolt ! The image of the German constitu- 
 tion present to the minds of the majority of the patriots, corres- 
 ponded in no small degree to that proposal for the armorial 
 bearings of the future empire which was published by the Rheinische 
 Merkur : " The double eagle tenderly embracing the black 
 eagle, and the Bavarian lion standing peacefully beside them 
 both!" Unquestionably it was not the outcome of mere 
 despondency when Goethe said: "The slumber has '^ been 
 too profound ; this one shaking-up will not suffice." 
 
 So far as it is possible to recognise a clearly conceivable 
 political idea in this medley of good proposals and fantastical 
 desires, the plan for the re-estabhshment of the Hapsburg 
 emperordom outside the old Prussian provinces continued to receive 
 mtjst support. What was known in the petty states about the 
 tragical role which the House of Austria had continued to play 
 
 94 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 even in the very latest war ? Many a fine fellow could see no 
 important difference between Schwarzenberg and Gneisenau, 
 between Gyulay and Biilow. The Rhdnische Merkur admired 
 the genuine and touching character of Emperor Francis. In 
 him there was no guile, no touch of the tyrant. Even though 
 Mettemich was sometimes blamed for his weakly good-nature, 
 there was no doubt about his German sentiments. What 
 seemed more natural than a return to the consecrated forms of a 
 history dating back for a thousand years : only an emperor could 
 awaken the German sleeping beauty. The ancient imperial dream 
 found new expression in prose and in verse : 
 
 " Loudly now the yearning's spoken : 
 ' Emperor, wUl ye choose us never ? 
 Home comes no knight proudly bringing 
 Germany, the deserted bride ? ' " 
 
 The question whether the hopeless conjunction of German 
 and foreign interests was to recommence Wcis evaded with a 
 few fervent patriotic exhortations. Gorres bluntly declared : 
 " German princes upon foreign thrones must never entangle their 
 German territory in foreign affairs ! " Still more movingly did 
 Riickert recall the thought of the Hapsburg eagle : 
 
 " Not the foreign Seville Orange 
 Is it which to thee belongs^: 
 Thine the Apple imperial 
 On German Oaks flourishing ! 
 Wilt not dwell on our oaks 
 Beside the Apple, Staff, and Crown ? " 
 
 Oken, the naturahst, a warm-hearted patriot, inspired by a 
 vigorous but restricted radicahsm, declared in the Jena Nemesis 
 that, with the re-estabhshment of the imperial crown, all the other 
 demands of the nation would be spontaneously fulfilled, and that 
 thereby Germany would reacquire the first rank in Europe. The 
 talented philologian, F. G. Welcker, writing two years later in 
 the Kieler Blatter, referred all the distresses of the fatherland to 
 the fact that " no emperor could be found for fallen Germany." 
 Thus vividly was the thought of the emperordom cherished, but 
 who could endow that thought with any practical form ? The 
 patriots troubled themselves Httle about the hard fact of 
 German dualism. If the Lorrainers, as the Rheinische Merkur 
 
 95 
 
History of Germany 
 
 suggested, were to conclude a mutual agreement of succession 
 with the HohenzoUems, genuine unity would be spontaneously 
 established for an indefinite period. Till then, indeed, Prussia 
 must continue to exist in a state of dependency beside and 
 beneath the Austrian imperial crown. An essay in the Merkur 
 wished to establish Emperor Francis at the head of a bipartite 
 Reichstag, of which Prussia was to lead the North German and 
 Protestant electoral body, and Austria the Rhenish and Catholic. 
 In this duplex empire, the Prussian state was to supply the cre- 
 ative and driving energy ; for since Frederick's state had regained 
 its ancient powers, elsewhere in the empire, as in the eighteenth 
 century, the comfortable view had been cherished, that Prussia 
 was predestined by a kindly fate serviceably to relieve the 
 other Germans from the burden and labour of high policy. To 
 the Austrians, Gorres assigned the more agreeable task of con- 
 stituting " the inner warming and nourishing element " in the 
 German empire, since this corresponded to the Austrian " tribal 
 character." Similar views were advocated by Schmidt, the well- 
 meaning privy-councillor of Hildburghausen, in his book The 
 Renascence of Germany. He regarded the Prussian crown as the 
 vicegerent of the empire of the north, and at the same time as a 
 hortatory counsellor and tribune of the people vis-a-vis the 
 Austrian hereditary emperor. 
 
 Even what Amdt wrote, upon Stein's instigation, "concern- 
 ing the future representative constitution," shows that the excellent 
 man had as yet given no serious consideration to the leading 
 notions of constitutional law. He demanded an emperor, and a 
 Reichstag constituted from the deputies of the provinces, without 
 giving a thought to the rights of the princes ; he demanded the 
 restoration of the provincial diets, though he did not do this 
 ' quite so unconditionally as the romanticist of Coblenz, who pro- 
 1 claimed the trinity of the estates of teaching, arms, and nourish- 
 ; ment. Amdt's ideas were couched in more modern terminology. 
 iThe ministers were to be responsible to these ancient feudal 
 i corporations. The few pohtical propositions found in the 
 writing are isolated, like shells upon the sea-shore, in the thick 
 sand of moral, historical, and ethnographical considerations. The 
 enture culture of the period still remained utterly unpolitical. 
 Among all the German pubUcists of the day, methodical pohtical 
 thought and the art of logical exposition were possessed by two 
 only : Niebuhr, who never expressed any opinion upon the Ger- 
 man constitutional question ; and Gentz, the writing-implement 
 
 96 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 of the Hofburg. How remote even from the best Germans of 
 those days was the cakn and sustained national pride of a great 
 people. On the one hand there was a fanatical hatred of the 
 French, a hatred which even after the war Amdt glorified as the 
 sacred fantasy, the religion of our people ; on the other hand there 
 was an equally blind admiration for England, the only free country, 
 which alone among all the contemporary nations gUttered with 
 many distinguished names — and this in the mouth of the fellow- 
 countr3mien of Goethe, Stein, Blucher, and Gneisenau. When 
 the Guelph plans were disclosed at the congress, it is true that 
 the faithful Amdt's eyes were opened, and in one of his finest 
 writings, the Outlook from the Present into the Future, he utters 
 cordial truths about English pettiness and Hanoverian arrogance. 
 
 Ever3nvhere, even in the writings of the most well-informed 
 publicists, it was preached as an irrefutable truth that particu- 
 larism was the glory of Germany, the vigorous culture-ground of 
 our freedom and of our civiUsation ; the old, unhappy confusion 
 between liberty and polyarchy recurred in the most manifold 
 forms. But since it was desired to mix the water of particularism 
 with the fire of national power, the door was opened for all kinds 
 of political jugglery. The manifest reality of the German indi- 
 vidual states enforced a sober restraint upon the pubUcists ; 
 with regard to the rights of the diets, there already existed a cer- 
 tain harmony of views ; everyone demanded the right of peti- 
 tion and of the presentation of grievances, and also the right of 
 granting supply ; most, too, demanded participation in legisla- 
 tion. On the other hand, the measureless greatness of the German 
 united state offered a convenient field of experiment for dilet- 
 tantist crotchets and sportive arbitrariness ; there was no folly 
 which appeared too absurd for the great fatherland. Thus, Pro- 
 fessor Lips of Erlangen recommended an emperorship which should 
 pass in rotation every five years from one German prince to 
 another. A Hanoverian statesman sent to the congress the draft 
 for a German federal constitution whose seventh article attained 
 to the following brilUant proposition : " The great question upon 
 which ever3^hing else depends is this — ^what is to happen in the 
 future in Germany, and what constitution is to be provided ? Hie 
 nodus Gordius." 
 
 r Side by side with the involved fantasies of the patriots, there 
 became manifest once more the greedy desires of particularism. 
 The talented and laboriously learned Carl Salomo Zacharia, a 
 worthy representative of that subservient old professordom which 
 
 97 H 
 
History of Germany 
 
 was now becoming rarer, had when summoned to Heidelberg 
 immediately undergone transformation from a servile electoral Saxon 
 to a servile Badenese, and now, altogether in the spirit of the 
 Rhenish Confederate sentiment of Carlsruhe, wrote : A Proposal 
 for the Fundamental Treaty of the German Federation of States. 
 We no longer find a word here of the thousand years' history of 
 the German nation ; the sovereign princes of Germany can com- 
 bine solely in order to secure internal peace and to provide for 
 defence against the foreigner ; in all other affairs there prevails the 
 liberum veto, in such a way that the resolves of the Federation are 
 binding only upon those who assent to them. This chaos is to be 
 presided over by a Bundestag in Vienna, led by Austria as pro- 
 tector, and by Prussia as arch-chancellor. Still more plainly 
 did Sartorius, Miinster's assistant, express himself in a pamphlet 
 recommending a separate federation of all the middle-sized and 
 small states. The limit was attained by a pamphlet secretly 
 circulated throughout the diplomatic world, entitled. To the Vienna 
 Congress, probably composed with the aid of La Besnardiere. 
 Here the restoration of the Confederation of the Rhine for the 
 south and for the west, was openly advocated ; the north could 
 hold fast to Prussia. But even in a well-meaning patriotic book. 
 Ideas Concerning the Formation of a Free German Federation of 
 States, we find a proposal for the constitution of a federation of the 
 petty states, under the leadership of Bavaria. This was probably 
 written by the Leipzig bookseller, Baumgartner, the consij-general 
 of the king of Prussia. The incredible confusion of ideas that 
 was to characterise the two succeeding decades was already mani- 
 fested in the significant fact that, immediately after the War 
 of Liberation, a brave and intelHgent German could, in all inno- 
 cence, treat the Prussian state as a semi-foreign power ! 
 
 In this paper war, the Old Prussian provinces took no part. 
 After the convulsive tension of the unequal struggle, nature 
 demanded her rights. Moreover, many far-seeing persons recog- 
 nised that the dream of Prussian emperordom, which had so often 
 been discussed in the circles of the volunteers, remained for the 
 present quite out of the question. Only in the Deutsche Blatter 
 of the Leipzig bookseller F. A. Brockhaus, was the opinion voiced, 
 that the claims of Prussia were to a certain extent justified. An 
 article entitled Tantce molis erit Germanam condere gentem put 
 forward, with a sobriety at that time unexampled, the following 
 considerations. The right moment has not yet arrived for the 
 unified state which must remain our aim ; from a renewal of 
 
 98 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 the old, so-called free, federative constitution, nothing can be 
 expected except the return of those lamentable times when Ger- 
 many was " the general tavern, recruiting groimd, and brothel " 
 of the rest of Europe. At the moment, the only task before 
 Germany must be to ensure the development of internal freedom, 
 and from this point of view there was but one state in which 
 hope could be placed, namely, Prussia. But the writer hardly 
 ventured to make it plain, even between the Unes, that he 
 expected Prussia one day to effect the completion of the national 
 unity. 
 
 Young Thorn, aide-de-camp to Charles Augustus, set to work 
 much more vaUantly upon the question of the future of Ger- 
 many. This man was subsequently to play a part in the history 
 of the customs-union, as head of the finances of Weimar. He had 
 fought with Liitzow's yagers, and even during the congress he had 
 faithfully maintained the proud, patriotic sentiments of the war- 
 time. When now he contemplated the utter failure of the 
 Viennese negotiations, he wrote a brief and incisive essay, Whai has 
 the Future in Store for Us?" ^ He showed that as yet nothing more 
 could be effected than a loose aUiance without a head ; the old 
 empire was for ever dead, and henceforward aU the hopes of the 
 nation must repose upon the internal development of Prussia. , 
 If this state should gain internal energy, it would become strong 
 enough at some future date to drive out of the country the non- 
 German powers of Austria and England, to destroy the middle- 
 sized states, structures manufactured by Napoleon, and to imite 
 the entire nation under its own crown. Such were the ideas of 
 a German soldier in May, 1815. To his contemporaries they 
 remained unknown, as did Fichte's writing of the summer of 1813 ; 
 it is possible that Charles Augustus may have glanced at the essay 
 of his young aide-de-camp, and may have seen there some echo 
 of his own youthful dreams of a league of princes. But how 
 sinister appears the cumbrous slowness of national development 
 when contrasted with the rapid thought-flow of the short-Uved 
 individual human being ! A hundred and fifty years earlier, 
 Puffendorf had prophesied the constitution of the Germanic 
 Federation ; now at length had the seer's words become true. 
 Yet how many more decades, full of sorrow, shame, and toil, were 
 still to pass before the fulfilment of the prophecy of this new and 
 nameless prophet, the only one among all his contemporaries to 
 
 ^ First printed in Weimar in 1867, under the title, Aus den Papieren einer 
 Verslorbenen. 
 
 99 
 
History of Germany 
 
 foresee the detachment from Austria and the unification of 
 Germany under the Prussian crown ! 
 
 So confused a public opinion could not give the cabinets any 
 direction towards definite goals ; the one thing it could effect 
 was that a German federal constitution should come into existence. 
 Even in Teplitz it had been the intention of the Austrian states- 
 men to unite the German sovereigns, hke the Italian, with the 
 Hofburg, simply for the purpose of a defensive alliance. During 
 the war, however, Metternich had come to the conclusion that, 
 in view of the tense expectations of the German nation, it would 
 be necessary to agree to a more firmly established form of federal 
 constitution. For this reason, out of dread of the revolution, 
 in Chaumont he jdelded to Hardenberg's persuasion, and approved 
 the concession of " a federative bond " for the German states. 
 'i Herein also was manifested the strengthening of the new Germany, 
 : that none of the foreign powers in Vienna put forward a claim 
 to intervene directly in the German constitutional negotiations. 
 To this work, which seemed to him the most sacred of earthly 
 opportunities, Stein applied all the energy of his heroic will. It 
 was with horror that the petty princes and ministers saw this 
 untamable man on one occasion, his great eyes sparkling and his 
 nose pale with wrath, shaking his fist in the face of the Bavarian 
 crown prince. But what could passion, what could tenacity, 
 effect in the prosecution of a task which had already been rendered 
 altogether insoluble by the dualism of the great powers, by the 
 ill-will of the Rhenish Confederate courts, and, above all, by the 
 general obscurity of the political vision of the time — an obscurity 
 shared by Stein himself ? 
 
 As soon as the imperial knight had become convinced that 
 Austria obstinately rejected the assumption of the imperial 
 dignity, he relinquished his TepUtz plans, and while still in Chau- 
 mont elaborated, on March lo, 1814, a new proposal for a 
 federation which entrusted the executive authority to the four 
 greatest German states. His aim was now principally to Umit 
 " the sultanism " of the petty despots ; for this reason, funda- 
 mental rights, the " rights of Germanism " were guaranteed to 
 every German by the electoral authority, and there was to be estab- 
 lished a mixed Bundestag composed of delegates from the princes 
 and from the Landtags. Next summer this proposal was redrafted, 
 and in July was thoroughly discussed in Frankfort at a meeting 
 between Stein, the chancellor, and Count Solms-Laubach. 
 Reluctantly did the baron now agree to exclude the delegates of 
 
 100 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 tlie Landtag from the Bundestag, for he bitterly contended that if 
 the Bundestag was to consist of princes alone, the protection 
 of representative institutions would be entrusted precisely to 
 those hands whose interest it was to overthrow them ! But 
 the impossibility of bringing a German parhament into existence 
 in face of the opposition of Austria and the Rhenish Confederate 
 courts, was plainly manifest ; and no less obvious w£is it that an 
 unduly numerous Confederate assembly without a head, would be 
 hopelessly cumbrous ; moreover in view of the power which the 
 sovereign princes possessed, it would in fact be unseemly to have 
 their representatives swamped by a majority of popular repre- 
 sentatives. The obvious idea of constituting a house of states for 
 the princes and a popular assembly for the representatives of the 
 people, had as yet occurred to no one ; no serious attention had 
 hitherto been paid in Germany to the constitution of the United 
 States of North America. 
 
 The proposal thus metamorphosed was on September 2nd 
 at the instigation of Hardenberg, laid by Count Solms before the 
 Austrian minister. How strangely had these well-meaning North 
 German patriots turned about and about, in order to discover 
 how to square the circle, and how to bring Austria, which was 
 hardly half-German, into the same fold with the true Germany. 
 They recognised justly that Austria could not dispose of any effec- 
 tive federal authority ; but since they started from the idea of 
 the complete equality of Austria and Prussia, as if it had been 
 an inviolable article of reHgious faith, not only did they demand 
 for the House of Lorraine the restoration of that privileged and 
 peculiar position which for centuries the hereditary dominions 
 of the emperor had assumed in the ancient empire, but they also 
 proposed that Austria should enter the federation in the narrower 
 sense with no more than the land to the west of the Inn, and 
 Prussia with no more than the provinces leftward of the Elbe, 
 but that both powers should conclude a perpetual alliance with 
 Germany for the whole of their respective domains. Here it was 
 taken as a matter of course that Austria would resume possession 
 of her provinces on the Upper Rhine. It was proposed further 
 to invite Switzerland and the Netherlands to join the perpetual 
 alliance. How tragical was the irony of destiny ! Immediately 
 after the Markers, Pomeranians, Prussians, and Silesians had given 
 the signal to the other Germans for the War of Liberation, our 
 leading statesmen seriously proposed to exclude from the Ger- 
 manic Federation these lands which formed the kernel of the 
 
 lOI 
 
History of Germany 
 
 new Germany. The imperial knight's leading idea was the 
 honourable intention to preserve for the people of the Rhenish 
 Confederate states the rights of their provincial diets, and to 
 furnish for them some security against " the sultanism " of their 
 princes ; but Stein knew that the introduction of a constitution 
 into the Old Prussian provinces was far from simple, and that in 
 Austria it was almost impossible, and he therefore grasped at this 
 desperate proposal regarding the frontiers of the Inn and the Elbe'. 
 The Prussian statesman wished to reintroduce into this Ger- 
 many westward of the Elbe and the Bohemian forest the circle- 
 constitution of the old empire, so that the useless contingents of the 
 smallest states might be welded together to constitute functionally 
 capable masses. Consequently seven circles were to come into 
 existence, and if possible the Netherlands also as an eighth (Bur- 
 gundian) circle. Austria and Prussia in two circles each, Bavaria, 
 Hanover, and Wiirtemberg in one circle each, were to assume the 
 office of circle-governor, to undertake military leadership, and 
 to exercise supervision for the carr37ing out of federal legislation ; 
 the former electors of Baden and Hesse were each to receive in 
 one of the circles the position of deputy circle-governor. Here, 
 however, intruded the distressing problem whether it was per- 
 missible to grant enhanced power to the restless ambition of the 
 courts of Munich and Stuttgart. All the petty neighbours trembled 
 before the outrageous land-hunger of King Frederick ; the govern- 
 ment of Hechingen implored the Prussian statesmen in moving 
 terms" to take steps to preserve the little country from complete 
 enclosure in the domain of Wiirtemberg, and to secure for it the 
 retention of free access to the lake of Constance through Badenese 
 territory. Consequently Stein proposed to allot to the Bavarian 
 and Swabian circle the domains of Bavaria and Wiirtemberg 
 exclusively; the petty states as a whole were to be subjected to the 
 leadership of the three so-called German great powers, Austria, 
 Prussia, and England-Hanover. These seven ancient electors 
 were to constitute, in conjunction, a council of circle-governors 
 which was to exercise executive authority, to control foreign 
 policy, and to deal with military affairs ; no state in the federa- 
 tion was to treat with foreign countries independently. The council 
 of electoral princes of the old empire, which had persisted even 
 under the Rhenish Confederate constitution as the council of the 
 
 ^ This motive is manifest from the letters and memorials of Count Solms 
 recently published by H. Baumgarten (Im neuen Reich, 1879, p. 549). 
 
 * Repeated petitions from the prince of HohenzoUern-Hechingen to the chan- 
 cellor. 
 
 102 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 kings, was thus to be reconstituted with increased powers. Stein, 
 like all the Prussian statesmen, wished to return as far as possible 
 to the legal foundation which had been created by the princes' 
 revolution of 1803. The directorate of the council of circle- 
 governors was to be vested in Austria and Prussia in common ; 
 in this manner Austria, as of old, would lead as president ; but 
 Prussia was to exercise the real directorate, to control the con- 
 duct of business, just as at one time Electoral Mainz had been 
 " mouth and pen " of the Reichstag of Ratisbon. The legislative 
 authority weis to be held, in common with the circle-governors, by a 
 council of the princes and of the estates, which was to include all 
 the less powerful princes, the free towns, and the mediatised. 
 Every estate possessing a domain of more than 50,000 inhabitants 
 received a vote indifferently whether it was still regarded as a 
 sovereign power or not ; all the others, taken together, were to have 
 six curiate votes. 
 
 In this way the imperial knight proposed to do justice to the 
 unhappy victims of the coup d'etat of 1806, without, however, 
 restoring their territorial sovereignty. He repeatedly called the 
 attention of his Prussian friends to the fact that they could 
 not treat on equal terms aU the mediatised, who differed so greatly 
 in their respective importance.^ There was Hohenlohe with 
 106,000 souls, Fiirstenberg with 83,000 souls, and so on, until the 
 list was closed by Aspremont which had ruled a populace of one 
 hundred and ninety-five souls. The best part of the proposal was 
 constituted by the sections upon the rights of the nation. In 
 every federal state there should exist provincial diets with the 
 right of granting supply, of representation, and of co-opera- 
 tion in legislation. For every German, the security of property 
 must be guaranteed, the same with the freedom of the press, 
 the right to petition for redress of grievances, the right to 
 emigrate to other German states, and to secure an education at 
 any German educational institution. 
 
 On September 13th, ui Baden near Vienna, Hardenberg 
 discussed this plan with Mettemich, and it immediately became 
 evident that Austria had no desire for so thoroughgoing a pro- 
 posal. As Gentz declared to Karadja, the Hofburg was inclined 
 to lay down in Vienna no more than the general principles of the 
 federal constitution, and to leave everything else to the Frank- 
 fort Bundestag. They would not expect the sovereigns to do 
 more than what was absolutely essential Then Mettemich 
 
 1 stein to Humboldt, December 29, 1814. 
 103 
 
History of Germany 
 
 demanded that Austria and Prussia should join the federation 
 with all their original " German lands " ; but Austria would on no 
 account resume responsibility for guarding the Upper Rhine. 
 Hardenberg gave way aU the more readily since according to the 
 Austrian proposal the legal basis of 1803 was to be re-established. 
 The Austrian diplomats delighted to proclaim their confidence that 
 henceforward in all warUke needs, with the possible exception 
 of Italian affairs, the imperial state could rely upon German 
 compulsory military service ; there existed somewhere in Galicia 
 two ancient Silesian fiefs, the so-called duchies of Zator and Ausch- 
 witz, in consequence of which the Germanic Federation would 
 be pledged for the defence of Austrian Poland ! In that confusio 
 divinitus ordinata known as the Holy Roman Empire, no one had been 
 able to determine which provinces of the two great powers were 
 to be regarded as German territories, and even now the problem 
 could not be accurately solved. It was not until four years later 
 that the matter was settled — at least on paper. The only certain 
 thing was that with the entrance into the Federation of the main 
 mass of Cisleithania, any serious federal constitution became 
 impossible, and this was precisely what Mettemich desired. 
 
 Finally, the Austrian minister made urgent representations 
 to his Prussian friend regarding the cumbrous nature of the two- 
 headed directorate. How much simpler would it be if Austria, 
 which could not be expected to renounce all her ancient imperial 
 rights, should take over the sole presidency ; all German affairs 
 would of course be harmoniously arranged in advance between 
 the two leading great powers ; the presidency was to be 
 " understood as a mere formal conduct of business." Hardenberg 
 gave way ; he had from the first regarded Stein's plan as no more 
 than an experiment, and not as a fixed programme. Just as 
 blindly as at the outset of his diplomatic career he had beUeved 
 in the friendship of France, so now did he trust in Austria ; he 
 would no longer admit the possibility of a contest between the 
 two powers, and he failed to recognise what an advantage the right 
 of presidency would give should such a contest arise. ^ Since 
 
 ^ It has often been contended that Metternich gave a verbal promise that in 
 the future the presidency should be divided. Not only, however, has no proof ever 
 been brought forward in support of this remarkable view, but documents are forth- 
 coming which compel the acceptance of the opposite conclusion. In the year 
 1 816, immediately before the opening of the Bundestag, the federal deputy von 
 H£lnlein, upon his own initiative, made a belated attempt to secure for Prussia 
 a share in the presidency. There occurred a long exchange of letters between him 
 and Hardenberg, and in this confidential correspondence, in which all the reasons 
 in support of Hanlein's demands are exposed in detail, there is no mention of any 
 Austrian assent. 
 
 104 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 Miinster also showed a decisive opposition to the two-headed 
 directorate, the Prussian proposal was weakened and abbreviated 
 in accordance with Austria's wishes, until the forty-one articles 
 had shrunk to twelve. These twelve articles were, on October 
 14th, laid by the two leading states before the Committee of Five 
 which, in accordance with the determination of the European 
 powers, was to deUberate about the German constitution. 
 Consequently the fate of the Germanic Federation was placed 
 entirely in the hands of Austria, Prussia, England-Hanover, 
 Bavaria, and Wiirtemberg ; for the remaining states nothing 
 but a supplementary assent was reserved. 
 
 Manifestly this attempt to form a German pentarchy was 
 merely an arbitrary resource of embarrassment ; for, as far as 
 historical legal rights were concerned, and in accordance with 
 the ancient prerogative of the council of electors, the electoral 
 houses of Baden and Hesse ought not to have been excluded. 
 In order to gloss over the arbitrary character of this action, 
 Mettemich appealed to that clause of the treaties of accession by 
 which the petty states, from Baden downwards, were pledged 
 to acquiesce in the requirements of the future federal constitu- 
 tion ; but by this assent the right of joint deUberation was by 
 no means excluded. The true motive for the arbitrary procedure 
 of the two great powers was mere diplomatic convenience ; they 
 regarded it as impossible to attain to any result in a negotiation 
 with all the German states. The event showed, however, that, 
 in the extraordinary confusion of German politics, the apparently 
 easy is often difficult, and the improbable is possible. The 
 federal constitution did not come into existence until the variegated 
 masses of all the petty states were summoned to the council. On 
 the other hand, the negotiations of the Committee of Five, which 
 were protracted until November i6th in thirteen stormy sittings, 
 remained utterly without issue, for among the selected five states 
 were the two most virulent enemies of German unity, Bavaria 
 and Wiirtemberg. 
 
 Both of them had retained in security their complete 
 sovereignty, Bavaria unconditionally, Wiirtemberg with an 
 insignificant reservation. Encouraged by the unreasonable 
 indulgence displayed towards them by the great powers, they 
 immediately disclosed, as Stein angrily put it, their system " of 
 isolation against the league, of ambition against the petty states, 
 and of despotism against their own territories." As the 
 Prussian statesmen immediately perceived, their aim was to defer 
 
 105 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the settlement of the German constitutional question until their 
 own territorial demands had been settled to their satisfaction.^ 
 With his accustomed brutal roughness, Wrede immediately 
 declared that Bavaria as a European power had no " personal 
 interest " in the Germanic Federation, for she could by adhesion 
 to France gain far greater advantages, and it was only from a 
 friendly comphance, and against the general wish, that she would 
 join the union of the German sovereigns. Even after the 
 congress, Montgelas declared to the Prussian envoy, von Kiister, 
 his complete indifference towards the Germanic Federation. 
 " Why should not the German states live together like the 
 Italian, in complete independence, bound together only by 
 neighbourly feelings and mutual free accommodation ? " ^ 
 
 Nothing was further from the ideas of the Prussian statesmen 
 than a radically consolidating poUcy. Whilst in the eyes of Stein 
 the unified state always remained the ideal, Hardenberg and 
 Humboldt accepted with full conviction the general belief in the 
 civilising influence of particularism. Knesebeck, in his doctrinaire 
 way, repeatedly uttered the thought that only through the 
 variegated character of its political conditions did Germany 
 become competent to constitute the pivot of Europe ; he desired 
 that " this pivot should be characterised as the palladium for 
 free association and for preservation of the balance of power, by 
 exhibiting both these qualities within its own system."* Yet 
 however modest the desires of the Prussians, their anger was 
 aroused by the frivolous scorn for Germany displayed by Wrede. 
 The Bavarian roundly declared that his king was unwilling " to 
 renounce the practice of any governmental right dependent upon 
 sovereignty " ; and least of all to renounce the privilege of forming 
 alliances with foreign countries. In this right, the Bavarian 
 national pride found satisfaction. Were it to be renounced, 
 Bavaria " would lose prestige and dignity among foreign nations." 
 For the five circle-governors he demanded complete equality, 
 and consequently there was to be an annually changing direc- 
 torate. For this reason also he wished to admit to the league 
 as few Austrian and Prussian provinces as possible. In any case, 
 neither of the two great powers must contribute more troops to 
 the federal army than did Bavaria. 
 
 1 Thus writes Humboldt in the Systematic Description to which reference 
 has already been made. 
 
 " Kuster's Report, Munich, August 28, i8ig. 
 * Knesebeck's Memorial, January 7, 1814. 
 
 106 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 In this way was for the first tune disclosed the intention 
 of the middle-sized states to weaken the German army because 
 of their jealousy of the great powers — a policy of envy which 
 was unparalleled even in the history of Poland, and which for 
 years to come was to make itself felt in the ludicrous military 
 constitution of the Germanic Federation. Even more audaciously 
 than the Bavarians, did the Wiirtemburger plenipotentiaries 
 express themselves ; by their provocative speeches they stirred 
 up once more all the horrible dregs of the old Rhenish Con- 
 federate sentiment. They would not hear a word of the funda- 
 mental rights of the nation if for no other reason than that the 
 comi: of Stuttgart did not recognise the existence of a German 
 nation. By a shameless falsification of history, which was 
 already beginning to disseminate its poison in the schools of the 
 Rhenish Confederate states, everything was roundly denied which 
 had been common to the Germans for centuries, and out of the 
 whole history of our people nothing was regarded as valid beyond the 
 eight years of Napoleonic anarchy. "The aim of the Federation," 
 declared von Linden dryly, " is antagonistic to the idea of 
 building, as one may say, a nation out of its different popula- 
 tions, as, for example, those of Prussia and of Wiirtemberg ! " 
 On the other hand, the court of Stuttgart displayed an extremely 
 suspicious zeal on behalf of miUtary organisation. It desired 
 that only circle-governors should become members of the federa- 
 tion, that all the other princes should be excluded as merely circle- 
 estates subordinate to the five powers, and suggested as eminently 
 desirable the enlargement of the south-western German circle, so 
 that King Frederick might secure the desired new territory by 
 a devious route, and might brandish the sword of the circle- 
 governor over four millions of mediate or immediate subjects. 
 
 The Prussian plenipotentiaries led the struggle against this 
 unworthy intrigue. Even Mettemich was concerned to see 
 how the seed disseminated at Ried and Fulda had sprung up all 
 too luxuriantly ; nor could he restrain himself from occasionally 
 contradicting his South German proteges, especially when they 
 were inclined to infringe the rights of his co-estates, the media- 
 tised. Finally, Miinster greedily seized the opportunity of dis- 
 playing before all the world the light of the celebrated Guelph 
 freedom. The prince regent, in an arrogant circular to the 
 European courts, announced the foundation of the kingdom oi 
 Hanover, and maintained the problematical opinion, " by its union 
 with Great Britain, the House of Guelph has been able to give 
 
 107 
 
History of Germany 
 
 much valuable protection and support to the German fatherland." 
 In a like boastful tone, Miinster wrote a note attacking the 
 doctrines of Wiirtemberg sultanism. He showed that the rights 
 of the provincial diets had by no means been abrogated by the 
 sovereignty of the petty crowns ; and by the uncritical public 
 opinion of the time he was highly esteemed on account of his 
 noble liberal sentiments, whereas he had in reaUty merely broken 
 a lance on behalf of the feudal characteristics of the Hanoverian 
 nobles' regime. Before long, the state of affairs in the Committee 
 of Five seemed so hopeless that Stein, profoundly discontented, 
 appealed to the czar for help. Alexander expressed his cordial 
 approval of the proposals of the German great powers, and referred 
 the German states to the promises contained in the proclamation 
 of KaHsz. The despot of Stuttgart, however, could no longer 
 remain to look on at the criminal attack upon the absolute 
 sovereignty of his Rhenish Confederate crown. He was heard to 
 say : " People will soon be ashamed to declare themselves Wiir- 
 tembergers." On November i6th Wiirtemberg announced her 
 withdrawal from the Council of Five, and before the mocking 
 eyes of Europe the German pentarchy broke up in consequence 
 of its own internal disunion. 
 
 Meanwhile the minor states had also taken action, justly 
 embittered by the high-handed proceedings of the Five. On the 
 day of Wiirteraberg's withdrawal, Baden, which had vainly 
 demanded admission to the Council of Five, entered a formal 
 protest, reserving for the grand-duke all the rights of unrestricted 
 sovereignty. Von Hacke, the Badenese minister, profoundly 
 Bonapartist in sentiment, did not disdain to make use of the ill- 
 natured phrase, that his grand-duke had not thrown off foreign 
 chains in order to wear those forged at home. Gagem gathered 
 round himself the representatives of most of the petty states, from 
 Electoral Hesse downwards, and laid before them the necessity 
 " of making the great ones recognise that we are here, and that 
 we understand our craft," Here there was brought together an 
 extremely mixed society : honourable and intelligent patriots, 
 such as Smidt, and Plessen, the Mecklenburger ; impenitent par- 
 ticularists, like Marschall of Nassau ; and, finally, such visionaries 
 as Gagem himself, who dreaded, not the Rhenish Confederate 
 sentiments of Bavaria and Wiirtemberg, but " the masked 
 duumvirate " of Austria and Prussia. Many of the participators 
 were influenced only by jealousy of the mediatised ; they would 
 not allow themselves to be outbid by these discrowned persons, 
 
 io8 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 who, as consistent legitimists, were enthusiasts for all the treasures 
 from the Imnber-room of the Holy Empire, and who besieged 
 Emperor Francis with petitions to reassume the Carlovingian 
 crown. There was only one thing in which the petty states were 
 unanimous, their desire to break the dominion of the Five. 
 
 On this occasion, however, as so often in the history of the 
 empire, the petty courts showed somewhat more patriotic senti- 
 ment than the middle-sized states ; several among them, con- 
 scious of their own weakness, seriously desired a strong imperial 
 authority which could protect them against the ambition of their 
 greater neighbours. Consequently Stein determined to utiUse 
 this opposition of the petty princes for his own patriotic ends ; 
 he adroitly pushed the busy Gagem on one side, and on 
 November i6th, the same day on which Wiirtemberg withdrew, 
 he induced the union of the nine-and-twenty minor princes and 
 towns to transmit a collective note to the two leading powers. 
 In this document, Austria and Prussia were asked to lay before 
 all the German states a new constitutional plan " upon the basis 
 of equal rights and of a complete representation of all members 
 of the federation " ; but the federation must be headed by an 
 emperor " as the protector of German freedom." However vague 
 and obscure this imperial plan appeared, and however certain it 
 was that several of the signatories utilised the idea of an emperor 
 simply as a frivolous excuse for getting rid of the dominion of the 
 Five, it is equally certain that the declaration of the petty states 
 contained certain honourably designed concessions. In especial, 
 they offered to concede to the Landtags a certain minimum of con- 
 stitutional rights to be determined by the federation. 
 
 The German pentarchy, thus simultaneously attacked from 
 within and from without, fell to pieces. For some months there- 
 after there no longer existed a German constitutional committee. 
 The ground was free for arbitrary plans of all kinds ; Gagem 
 and Plessen were already speaking of a federation of the middle- 
 sized and petty states, without Austria and Prussia, but with 
 Denmark and the inevitable Netherlands. Miinster repUed to 
 the minor states in the name of the great powers, benevolently 
 recognised their patriotic aims, and definitely declared that, in 
 view of Austria's refusal, the reconstitution of the emperordom 
 was altogether impossible. The Rhenish Confederate senti- 
 ment, however, which had been so shamelessly expressed in the 
 notes of Wiirtemberg and Baden, was one which the great powers 
 were unwilling to leave unreproved. Austria and England- 
 
 109 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Hanover still hoped from moment to moment to detach the 
 Prussian court from Russia, and consequently in the German 
 negotiations displayed towards the views of Prussia an accom- 
 modating spirit which did not indeed pledge them to anything 
 serious. Miinster drafted for Prussia and Austria an identical 
 note which was to be handed to the court of Baden. In language 
 of unexampled severity, he displayed to the government of 
 Carlsruhe the register of its sins, enumerated all the acts of 
 oppression performed by that government against its own 
 people, " measures which must be classed with the most arbitrary 
 of those characteristic of the French revolutionary system." 
 Next the important principle was expounded that it was by no 
 means left to the German states to decide whether they would 
 or would not join the federation. The great powers did not 
 appeal to the thousand years' existence of the German empire, 
 which had never been legally aboUshed ; they held fast to that 
 which was immediately under their hands, to the treaties of 
 accession of the previous year. All those who had joined the 
 great alliance were bound by the proclamation of Kalisz, which 
 conceded to the German people the re-estabhshment of its con- 
 stitution " with the necessary modifications." " The guarantee for 
 the sovereignty of Baden which the allied powers have jointly given 
 cannot be interpreted as an agreement to unconditional privileges 
 which have never been conceded to your royal highness, and 
 which would be in direct conflict with the intentions made known 
 to the German nation by the aUied powers as to the aims of the 
 war, to whose fortunate conclusion their love for the fatherland 
 and their courage, based upon this assurance, have so greatly con- 
 tributed." ^ At the last moment Metternich hesitated, for such 
 a tone seemed to him altogether too outspoken. He regarded it 
 as sufficient to communicate to the Badenese minister, by word 
 of mouth, the opinion of the great powers. But to the court of 
 Wiirtemberg, on November 24th, a common answer was handed 
 which, though couched in somewhat milder terms, corresponded to 
 Miinster's draft, and which declared with great definiteness that 
 all the German states were pledged to join the federation. It 
 was as if Stein himself had guided the pen of the great powers ; 
 the only trouble wasjthat neither Metternich nor Miinster had 
 any serious intention of backing up the fine words with action. 
 The dissolution of the Committee of Five was weighty with 
 
 1 Miinster's Proposal for an answer to the Badenese note, November 16 
 1814. 
 
 no 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 consequences for many years, for it gave the stimulus to the 
 estabhshment of constitutional political forms in South Germany. 
 From the meanest motives, from the arrogance of sovereignty, 
 and particularist dread of the intervention of the federal 
 authority, the cabinets of the three middle-sized states of the 
 south determined, upon their own initiative, to do what was 
 necessary, and to grant a representative system to their respective 
 countries. Moreover, it was easier for them to do this than it was 
 for Prussia, for their Napoleonic prefectural administration had 
 already been in existence for ten years, subjecting all portions of 
 the country to an identical ordering, and checking all centri- 
 fugal tendencies. As early as September, Max Joseph had 
 ordered a revision of the paper constitution of 1808 ; in October, 
 as soon as he perceived in Vienna that the great powers wished 
 from the federal side to force the sovereigns to grant a minimmn 
 of constitutional rights, he commanded his committee of revision 
 to bring its labours to a conclusion as speedily as possible. 
 Frederick of Wiirtemberg, in an unmannerly rejoinder dated 
 November 24th, made his minister defend once more the 
 inviolable sovereignty of the Swabian kingly crown. He stormed 
 and raged against the usurpation of the great powers, and at 
 ChristmEis left Vienna in high dudgeon. None the less, he was 
 too prudent not to see that the days of undisturbed autocracy 
 were over. The Swabians could hardly recognise the brutal 
 tyrant any longer, so gentle and gracious did he appear imme- 
 diately after his return, so obviously did he endeavour to keep 
 the peace with bis people ; he would no longer hear a word about 
 Napoleon, but no less did he definitely declare that he would never 
 obey any instructions from Vienna.^ On January 11, 1815, 
 he astonished his unhappy land by a proclamation which 
 announced the speedy summoning of a Landtag. The king granted 
 this long-designed benefit at the present moment in order to show 
 that he "was not forced by any external necessity, or fulfilling 
 any pledge entered into with others." He believed that in this 
 way he would overreach the Germanic Federation ; he did not 
 foresee how soon his ill-used people would itself exact a terrible 
 penalty for the sins of the last decade. Nor did the sick grand- 
 duke Charles of Baden lack understanding. The masterful 
 exhortations of the great powers terrified him out of his dull 
 meditations ; on December ist, in a definite note submitted to 
 
 ^ Report of the charg6 d'affaires Jouffroy, Stuttgart, January 12 and March 7, 
 1815. 
 
 Ill 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the Prussian chancellor, he indicated that he was prepared to 
 concede to his people all the constitutional rights demanded in 
 the Prussian federal plan, and that he had already appointed a 
 constitutional committee. Such were the turbid sources from 
 which sprang the constitutional movement in South Germany ; 
 but since this movement corresponded with the nature of things, 
 it continued to progress even when the petty thrones had no 
 longer anything to fear from the Germanic Federation. 
 
 At that moment, the anxiety of the middle-sized states was 
 by no means devoid of foundation, for the Prussian statesmen, 
 unaffrighted by the breaking up of the Committee of Five, 
 pursued with unabated zeal the work of constructing the German 
 constitution. To them the national political development was a 
 matter in which they put their whole hearts. Again and again 
 had they countered the unpatriotic talk of the Bavarians and 
 Wiirtembergers with the declaration that the king of Prussia 
 " regarded it as his duty as a ruler to bring his subjects once more 
 into such unison that they might combine with Germany to con- 
 stitute a nation." Humboldt at once set to work upon the 
 elaboration of a fresh scheme, but encountered a new and wholly 
 unexpected difficulty. The Austrian minister, who had hitherto 
 expressed himself as in favour of the circle constitution, was now 
 suddenly of another mind. He conjectured, as was certainly 
 extremely probable, that the small North German contingents, 
 subordinated to the Prussian circle-governors, would infalhbly 
 disappear in the Prussian army ; and since in relation to the 
 construction of the German constitution, which, for the rest, left 
 him altogether cold, he pursued one aim alone, the Hmitation of 
 Prussian power, he now declared himself opposed to any sub- 
 division into circles. Miinster, too, agreed with his Austrian 
 friend when the latter evoked the spectre of North German 
 hegemony. 
 
 The consequence was that Humboldt had now simul- 
 taneously to elaborate two proposals for the federal act, one 
 with, and the other without, circles ; in both of these the 
 basic ideas of the twelve articles were retained. On December 
 gth the indefatigable man expounded in a memorial the advan- 
 tages of the circle constitution. It was indispensable to secure 
 for the smallest states orderly stages of procedure for their 
 judicial system, and to enable them to prepare, even in time of 
 peace, for the full utihsation of their military energies in war ; 
 the opposite was practicable only under the " Bonapartist system," 
 
 112 
 
The Congress of Vienna. 
 
 which lived in a continuous state of war and had no scruples^ 
 about the means employed. At the same time he endeavoured 
 to meet the complaints of the petty states regarding oppression, 
 and proposed to accept into the council of the circle-governors, 
 in addition to Baden and Electoral Hesse, three members of 
 the council of princes, subject to annual rotation. ^ Two days 
 later he sent the completed proposals to the chancellor, insisting 
 once more how essential was the circle constitution to Prussia's 
 disintegrated situation ; but recommending, none the less, that 
 too urgent an insistence should not be made on behalf of this 
 demand, because our strength in Germany was always in part a 
 moral one, and because " Prussia must not appear to the petty 
 princes as a danger, but as a protection." Now, at length, after 
 nearly three months of fruitless negotiations, the talented man 
 began to gain an inkUng, although nothing more than an inkling, 
 of Austria's friendly intentions towards the federation. " In 
 this German constitutional affair," he wrote, " others have gladly 
 thrust us into the foreground, and, easily and readily, everything 
 has given way before us, because (since it is known that we always 
 desire a firm and vigorous constitution) there are those who would 
 prefer that we should be made to appear disagreeable and 
 dangerous to the princes to whom alone the fetters of a constitution 
 are burdensome." Not even yet, however, was he able to recog- 
 nise clearly that the Hofburg itself could not desire " a firm and 
 vigorous constitution " ; on the contrary, he hoped to come to a 
 speedy understanding with Austria and Hanover about one of 
 the two proposals, and to be able in about a week to resume 
 negotiations with Bavaria and Wiirtemberg." While the Prussian 
 statesmen, faithfully diligent and devoid of cunning, were thus 
 drawing water in the German sieve of the Danaides, Mettemich 
 was secretly negotiating with Miinster about the design for a 
 Germanic Federation without Prussia ! 
 
 Stein pro\dded Humboldt's work with notes of his own, 
 demanding greater rights for the mediatised and for the imperial 
 knights, but also a larger measure of popular rights, especially 
 the aboUtion of serfdom and of the corvee, as well as the abolition 
 of statutie labour throughout Germany. Serious umbrage was 
 taken by Stein on one account only, because Humboldt, out of 
 regard for Austria, had weakened the provisions regarding the 
 
 1 Humboldt's Memorial upon the two new proposals for the federal act, 
 December 9, 1814. 
 
 * Humboldt to Hardenberg, December 11, 1814 
 
 113 I 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Landtags, and had given the provincial diets no more than a con- 
 sultative voice. " This," declared Stein, " is a very retrograde step. 
 Of all countries Prussia has least cause to take it and to induce 
 others to take it. In this state are united all the elements which 
 guarantee a peaceful and reasonable movement on the part of 
 vigorously organised representative institutions ; nationality, 
 custom, and proved readiness ^to furnish taxes and make sacri- 
 fices, circumspection, sound reasoning, general culture. For many 
 reasons, Austria cannot express like principles, on account oi 
 the diversity of the constituents of the country, on account of 
 the lower level of general culture, the maxims of the government 
 and of the rulers, and for this reason Austria may be an excep- 
 tion. Let us leave this country to declare itself." ^ Thus even 
 this ardent partisan of the Lorrainer emperordom felt himself 
 obliged to demand a position of exception for Austria as soon as 
 the practical consequences of federal Mfe came under discussion. 
 
 The arduous work of these December weeks remained without 
 issue, for meanwhile the dispute concerning the Saxon and 
 Pohsh questions had become aggravated, and the imminence of 
 war engaged all minds, so that during the first half of January the 
 work of constructing the German constitution made no advance. 
 As soon as the air had cleared a Mttle, Humboldt immediately 
 returned to his child of sorrow. Meanwhile he had been asso- 
 ciating a great deal with the well-meaning Weimar minister, von 
 Gersdorff, had become better acquainted with the desires of the 
 petty states, and had acquired the conviction that since the dis- 
 solution of the empire there had come into existence at the 
 German courts a colossal spirit of arrogance which it was neces- 
 sary to take into account. The gradations of rank and .of right 
 which had existed in the old imperial constitution, had b„en 
 forgotten; the new sovereigns regarded one another as equals. 
 If the federal act was to come into existence at all, there must 
 not be imposed upon the petty states too marked a subordination 
 to their greater rivals; for, said Gersdorff, with that childlike 
 innocence which has always been the privilege of the diplomatists 
 of our minor states, " people love the semblance of freedom even 
 if they cannot possess the reality." ^ Humboldt had from the 
 first declared that a federation of states was possible only among 
 a plurality of states. Moreover, . every reason for the formation 
 
 1 stein's Remarks upon the proposal without circles, December 26 and 20 
 1814. . 
 
 1 Gersdorfi to Humboldt, December 6, 1814. 
 
 114 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 of a council of circle-governors feU to the ground if the circle sub- 
 division itself was not to be accepted by the Hofburg. In view 
 of the attitude which the middle-sized states had assiuned in the 
 Committee of Five and in the Saxon negotiations, it seemed ex- 
 tremely doubtful whether a council of five, seven, or ten states 
 would manage the executive authority of the federation more 
 hcurmoniously and more effectively than a Bundestag consisting 
 of all the states. 
 
 For this reason, as early as January, Humboldt discussed 
 with the chancellor the question whether, in view of the ill- 
 himiour of the minor states, it would not be better to drop the 
 idea of the two councils, and instead to constitute a single federal 
 assembly, which should discuss current affairs in committee, and 
 deal with important questions in full assembly. In the fuU 
 assembly every state should have at least one vote, whilst the 
 mediatised should have a certain nmnber of curiate votes. In 
 view of the boundless jealousy of all against aU, absolute parity 
 seemed the only means of securing any kind of federal unity. 
 The two statesmen thereupon composed a note to Mettemich, 
 begging for a definite declaration whether the imperial court finally 
 refused to accept the circle constitution, and whether it would 
 approve the formation of a single Bundestag instead of the two 
 councils. When this had been answered, a new proposal could be 
 elaborated. Prussia was prepared to make any concession. 
 " There are only three points which must be regarded as abso- 
 lutely essential : a powerful mihtary authority, federal jurisdiction, 
 and a representative constitution guaranteed by federal charter. 
 Without federal jurisdiction, the German legal edifice would lack 
 the last and most necessary keystone."^ These were the three 
 cardinal points which Hardenberg had indicated in Paris as the 
 chief tasks of the federal constitution. 
 
 Thus did the faithful patriots worry over the hopeless task. 
 Alone among all the German states did Prussia pursue the work 
 of constructing the German constitution with persistent zeal ; 
 her statesmen now indicated the only way which might lead at 
 least to a certain degree of understanding. In all respects the 
 Prussian poUcy was straightforward and devoid of arriere fensee, 
 especially as regards the mediatised, who frequently expressed 
 
 ^ Hardenberg to Humboldt. Proposal for a note to Prince Mettemich, 
 relating to the new organisation of the Bundestag. The draft is undated, but 
 must have been written in January, since several of the sentences in the document 
 are reproduced Word for word in the Prussian note of February and'ioth. 
 
 "5 
 
History of Germany 
 
 their thanks for the magnanimous protection which was extended 
 to them by the Prussian crown alone, i 
 
 To get matters under way again quickly, on February 2nd 
 \/ the Prussian statesmen determined to send to the Austrian 
 * minister the only thing that was ready, Humboldt's two proposals 
 of December. In a covering note they repeated the considera- 
 \ tions expressed in Humboldt's confidential memorial for and 
 against the circle constitution, and declared themselves prepared 
 to accept any alteration, save only upon the three essential points : 
 military authority, federal jurisdiction, and constitutional rights. 
 By this compliant attitude they hoped all the sooner to secure a 
 speedy understanding with the Hofburg, since Humboldt's two 
 proposals contained merely a more detailed elaboration of the 
 twelve articles which, in October, Metternich himself had laid before 
 " the Committee of Five. It was therefore very welcome to the 
 Prussians that, at the same moment, the league of German princes 
 and towns once more took action. Increased to the number of 
 thirty-two members by the accession of Baden and some of the 
 smaller states, on February 2nd the league invited the two leading 
 powers to open as soon as possible the deliberations of all the states 
 concerned. Hardenberg and Humboldt immediately declared 
 themselves ready, and since Metternich also agreed, they now, 
 on February 19th, despatched their note, with the two memorials, 
 to the Austrian cabinet. 
 
 The Austrian statesman, however, who in the autumn had 
 walked so pleasantly hand in hand with Prussia, now discovered 
 endless scruples. During the Saxon negotiations he had learned 
 to value the middle-sized states as useful allies against the North 
 German rival, and wished to avoid anything which could wound their 
 pride and infringe their sovereignty. The attitude towards the 
 Germanic Federation taken by the Hofburg had been disclosed, 
 as long ago as December, by Baron von Wessenberg, in a new 
 federal scheme. This was the fifth proposal mooted in the 
 weary affair. It was a senseless botch, wherein the German states 
 were invited at their discretion to join a federation which was to 
 preserve the common external and internal security ; whoever 
 joined was not to secede without the assent of the other 
 members. All the states of the federation were to have equal 
 rights as members. A permanent Bundesrat was to be con- 
 stituted out of the envoys of all the states, Austria holding the 
 
 1 Count Solms-Laubach to Hardenberg, April 4, 1815 ; and several other 
 similar memorials. 
 
 116 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 presidency. There was no trace of a genuine federal military 
 authority. The only function of the Bimdesrat was " to take 
 care " that every state should adequately maintain its own con- 
 tingent. The expenditure was to be met by proportionate con- 
 tributions. In foreign affairs, the rights of the individual states 
 of the federation were to remain unimpaired, except that their 
 aUiances with foreign powers were not to be directed against the 
 federation itself. Diets were to be summoned within a year and 
 a day, but their organisation was to be left to the suzerain lords. 
 Tljere was also an article about the mediatised, and about a few 
 exceedingly modest liberties of the subjects, among which freedom 
 of the press was not numbered. Finally came a promise that 
 the federation would " care " for the freedom of commerce and 
 navigation. 1 Now, at length, the Hofburg showed its colours. 
 In October it had accepted the twelve articles, only because at 
 that time it wished to keep Prussia in a good humour. Metter- 
 nich's real opinion was still, as it had been in Teplitz, that the 
 sovereignty of the German states must be Umited only so far as 
 was necessary to safeguard the European possessions of the House 
 of Austria. Of the three points which Prussia regarded as 
 essential to the federal constitution, one, federal jurisdiction, 
 was entirely disregarded in Wessenberg's plan ; as for the other 
 two, military authority and constitutional rights, Mettemich's 
 confidant eluded the issue with a few rhetorical artifices. So 
 utterly divergent were the aims of the two powers, whose 
 interests Hardenberg held to be harmonious. 
 
 The work of Wessenberg could quietly abide its hour, 
 precisely because it was the emptiest and most colourless of all 
 the proposals hitherto put forward. This became the basis of 
 the German federal constitution, the egg out of which the cuckoo 
 of the Frankfort Bundestag was hatched. For the moment, 
 Mettemich sagely refrained from presenting the work of his privy- 
 councillor as a formal proposal of the Austrian government ; he 
 contented himself with declaring that Humboldt's plans were 
 impracticable. Since the two leading powers could not agree 
 upon a proposal, the promised deUberations of all the states 
 concerned could not be begun. 
 
 To complete the confusion. Stein now threw a new apple of 
 discord among the disputants. The imperial knight could not 
 
 1 The view of A. Schmidt [Gesch. d.d. Verfassungsfrage, p. 373) that Metternich 
 desired to make use of this proposal in order to exclude Prussia from Germany, 
 is unproved, and to me seems quite unprovable. 
 
 117 
 
History of Germany 
 
 so speedily abandon his fine imperial dreams ; too profoundly 
 had he taken to heart the grandiose images of the days of the 
 Hohenstaufen. As soon as he was assured that the petty states, 
 in words at least, demanded the re-establishment of the imperial 
 crown, he resumed his Teplitz plans, and on this occasion he even 
 succeeded in convincing the czar. From the untoward experi- 
 ences of the last weeks, Alexander had learned how readily an 
 Austro-French alliance against Russia and Prussia could be formed, 
 and he indulged the hope that the possession of the German 
 imperial crown would, as of old, render difficult an approximation 
 between the Hofburg and the Tuileries. But even now, as always 
 during the congress of Vienna, he acted as a trustworthy friend 
 of Frederick William, and would not support the imperial plan 
 unless Prussia freely agreed. Consequently, from February 9th 
 onwards there went on a lively exchange of notes between Stein 
 and Capodistrias on the one side, and Humboldt on the other — 
 to Hardenberg's profound annoyance. At first, as formerly in 
 Tephtz, Stein put forward the confused idea that because Austria 
 was not a purely German state the imperial state must be hnked 
 to Germany by an artificially constituted bond. The imperial 
 knight and his Russian assistant marshalled incontestable grounds 
 for the view that a monarch would be a more vigorous head than 
 a council. No less incontrovertibly did Humboldt show the inca- 
 pacity of Austria to utiUse this monarchical power for the good 
 of the nation. "Germany refuses to succumb to that Austrian 
 immobility to which experience is nothing, and over which cen- 
 turies pass without leaving a trace." The necessity of the 
 Prussian emperordom, which seemed to be an obvious deduction 
 from these pros and cons, could not be recognised in the then 
 situation ; the Lorrainers were once more so firmly estabhshed 
 in the saddle that they sometimes even thought they 
 would be able to unseat Prussia altogether from the back of the 
 German steed ! The result was that the imperial plan came to 
 nought. Frederick Wilham did not allow himself to be per- 
 suaded by Stein, although even his confidants Wittgenstein and 
 Knesebeck did not conceal their longing for the re-establishment 
 of the Hapsburg emperordom. Humboldt was right in his dry 
 declaration that nothing but a federation now remained possible. 
 I In these fruitless interludes four additional weeks were lost, 
 
 i and hardly had this period elapsed when, on March 7th, came 
 the news of Napoleon's return. For many weeks, the European 
 war-aUiance and the question of preparations for war pressed all 
 
 118 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 other problems into the background The German constitution 
 seemed lost beyond the possibihty of rescue. Even the German 
 mihtary committee, established at Prussia's instigation, and 
 presided over by the crown prince of Wiirtemberg, broke up with 
 nothing effected. With angry shame did Riihle von Lilienstem 
 leave this assembly from which he had expected the introduc- 
 tion of universal military service for the whole of Germany. The 
 conferences regarding German river navigation, which had 
 also been summoned at Prussia's suggestion, proved a similar 
 failure, for the Guelphs found it altogether unprecedented that 
 purely German rivers should enjoy the same freedom as did 
 those which belonged to several European powers in common. 
 Miinster wrote disdainfully to the prince-regent that Hanover 
 would certainly not make financial sacrifices " in order to favour 
 a vague idea of freedom of commerce." Honourable men 
 among the German diplomats were overcome by an overwhelming 
 sense of shame. What a spectacle had this Germany offered for 
 six long months, Germany which had so recently filled the world 
 with her warlike renown ! Nothing but quarrels and disputes, 
 nothing but envy against the saviours of the nation, and still no 
 issue ! Gersdorff, in distress of mind, informed the Prussians 
 that, after all, nothing effective could be made out of Germany, 
 that the hostile sentiments of Bavaria and her friends could not 
 be mistaken ; it was better therefore that Prussia should con- 
 clude no more than an alUance with the south, but a firm federa- 
 tion with the smaller North German states, for this would offer 
 a better future for the whole fatherland. ^ 
 
 Most of the territorial questions in dispute had been settled, 
 the monarchs were preparing to depart, all looked impatiently 
 for the close of the congress and tensely awaited news from the 
 west ; the Rhenish Confederates once more impudently Ufted 
 their heads, and several of the middle-sized states hardly con- 
 cealed their hope for a new victory of the Imperator. This was 
 not the mood in which to look for the erection of a permanent 
 national structure. Hardenberg, who as a rule had a secure sense 
 of the favour of the moment, wished now to postpone the con- 
 stitutional deliberations, until, after a new defeat of Napoleon, 
 the arrogance of the Rhenish Confederates should have been 
 broken, and the general sentiment should have once more 
 become calm and collected. But how would the nation, from 
 which new and severe sacrifices were once again demanded, receive 
 - Gersdorff to Humboldt, April 7, 1815. 
 119 
 
History of Germany 
 
 its princes and ministers who, from this pomp of endless festivals, 
 brought nothing, absolutely nothing, home ? It seemed alto- 
 gether too disgraceful ; even Gentz issued warnings against the 
 anger of public opinion. Moreover, Metternich was urgently 
 desirous that the German federal act, which in his eyes was 
 indeed no more than a European affair, should be included in the 
 great final act of the congress, and should thus be effected under 
 the guarantee of the whole of Europe. At a later date he 
 regarded this point as of the highest value, and was glad to express 
 the characteristic opinion that the Germanic Federation was a 
 permanent league precisely for the reason that " its institution 
 was the joint work of the European powers and of the German 
 princes."' Strangely enough, this view was shared by all the 
 Prussian statesmen, even by Humboldt. They hoped by the 
 common guarantee of Europe to render a new felony more diffi- 
 cult for the middle-sized states, and they did not reflect how 
 horribly the old empire had formerly suffered under the officious 
 intervention of its foreign guarantors. The upshot was that 
 Prussia was determined to resume the negotiations at this most 
 unfavourable time conceivable. 
 
 For a long time, indeed, Humboldt had ceased to hope for 
 the attainment of a tolerable ordering of German affairs. Of 
 what use was dialectic skill against the ill-will of the middle- 
 sized states and the calculated reserve of Austria ? In his own 
 words, nothing now remained but to bring the federation into 
 existence in whatever way it might be possible. But he once 
 more put his shoulder to the wheel, and in the beginning of April 
 brought forward a new and notably abbreviated proposal. This 
 was the sixth. But the negotiations were gain postponed ; the 
 middle-sized states displayed no inclination to discusss anything. 
 During the latter half of the month, the general sentiment seemed 
 once more somewhat more favourable. Immediately, Humboldt set 
 to work with renewed courage," and on May ist brought forward 
 a seventh and somewhat more detailed plan. 
 
 The Hofburg, however, declared both these proposals impos- 
 sible. The House of Austria itself, was, of course, in accord- 
 ance with its often displayed fidelity to the empire, prepared for 
 every sacrifice ; no one could possibly doubt this who listened 
 to the ardent asseverations of the Austrian statesmen. It was 
 only on account of the insuperable resistance of the minor kingly 
 
 ' Metternich to Hruby, December ii, 1817. 
 
 * So he himself reports, in liis Systematic Description, 
 
 120 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 courts, that the minister found himself compelled, to his profound 
 regret, once more to reject the Prussian proposals. Mettemich's 
 rich diplomatic experience had taught him that long and weari- 
 some disputes are ultimately decided through general exhaus- 
 tion. Such a feeling now began to master everyone. All agreed 
 with the Austrian when he declared, what had been his opinion 
 as long ago as the previous September, that it was not yet a 
 suitable time to think of a federal constitution, and that it would 
 suffice if the " elements " of such a constitution could be 
 established. He then produced once more Wessenberg's plan of 
 December, which could indeed hardly be regarded as the element 
 of an element, had this botch somewhat enlarged, and on May 
 7th handed the new elaboration to the Prussian statesmen as an 
 eighth proposal. Regarding this proposal detailed negotiations 
 were now at length entered upon between Mettemich and 
 Hardenberg. At the desire of Prussia, the Austrian incorporated 
 a few strengthening clauses ; the chancellor, upon his own 
 initiative, added an article about the mediatised, and thus there 
 came into existence the ninth and last federal scheme, which, on 
 May 23rd, in the name of Austria and Prussia, Mettemich cir- 
 culated among the plenipotentiaries of all the German states for 
 their approval. Notwithstanding the twofold remodeUing, the 
 main articles of the Austrian proposal of December ist remained 
 unaltered, so that Wessenberg must be regarded as the true 
 author of the German federal act. The amiable and highly 
 cultured baron was regarded as one of the most open-minded 
 politicians of Austria ; like his brother, the coadjutor, detested 
 by the Catholics, he even cherished a certain enthusiasm for the 
 German fatherland. But in matters of German poUcy, there could 
 not exist any difference of opinion among Austrian states- 
 men ; whoever served the House of Austria must endeavour to 
 give the German united state the character of a loose international 
 alliance, because otherwise the imperial state could find no place 
 in it. 
 
 On the previous day. May 22nd, Frederick WiUiam had signed 
 the momentous ordinance regarding the representation of the 
 people. The Prussian statesmen, as Humboldt often said, 
 regarded it as an honour to them that no one in Vienna had been 
 warmer than they in advocating the rights of the German diets. 
 How, therefore, could Prussia lag behind the South German courts 
 which had already instituted constitutional commissions ? Who 
 could then have regarded it as even conceivable that the 
 
 121 
 
History of Germany 
 
 introduction of the representative system was in Prussia to encounter 
 the most formidable obstacles, and was here to be longest delayed ? 
 At least a formal pledge seemed inevitable ; Hardenberg had 
 long been accustomed to compromise with the difficult duties of 
 the legislator by means of high-sounding promises. Since 1808 
 the king himself had also been won over to the idea of constitu- 
 tional reform, and at the same time he desired to give his faithful 
 people a sign of grateful confidence. But with what criminal 
 carelessness did the chancellor once more set to work ! He made 
 the king promise that the provincial diets should be re-established, 
 and where they were no longer in existence that they should be 
 reintroduced, and that from them the general representation of the 
 country should be derived by indirect election. In this way he tied 
 in advance the hands of the absolute ruler, and this at a moment 
 in which he himself had not even a superficial knowledge con- 
 cerning the constitutional rights of those variegated territories 
 which were newly entering the Prussian state ! Public opinion, 
 thankful for everything which was regarded as open-minded, 
 accepted the royal promise with delight ; and especial pleasure 
 was exhibited at the promise of a written constitution, such as 
 was now in fashion. All too soon was it to appear that Hardenberg 
 had made a grave political mistake, that he had promised the 
 impossible. 
 
 Humour was not to be lacking to the tragical failure of the 
 hopes of our fatherland. The work of the German constitution 
 which had been proceeding almost without result for seven 
 months, must now at last be carried out with breathless and 
 inconsiderate haste. When the oft-promised dehberations of all 
 the states concerned were at length opened, Gentz had already 
 almost completed the editing of the final act of the congress ; it 
 was necessary to be speedy if the German federal act was still 
 to find a place therein. 
 
 The result was that between May 23rd and June loth, in 
 eleven brief conferences, of which two were no more than opening 
 and closing ceremonies, the most difficult of all European questions 
 was settled. Never had the destiny of a great nation been played 
 with in a more frivolous manner. Wiirtemberg was absent at 
 the opening. Baron von Linden, writing in French, excused his 
 absence upon a country visit. His colleague Wintzingerode 
 pleaded indisposition, and the Wiirtembergers remained absent 
 from all the subsequent sittings as well. A substitute was indeed 
 
 122 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 present for the Badenese minister, who had already left Vienna, 
 but the substitute had no credentials, and after a few days took 
 his departure. All the others put in an appearance. At first 
 the petty states were represented by five plenipotentiaries only, 
 but from the third sitting onwards it was arranged that each state 
 should have its own representative. 
 
 The real discussion began on May 26th. Bavaria imme- 
 diately demanded, against the Uvely opposition of the Prussians, 
 that the expression " sovereign " princes should be adopted in 
 the introduction to the federal act. When the proposal was then 
 discussed in detail, there arose in connection with every article 
 so hopeless a confusion of fundamentally diverse demands, and 
 such a mountain of notes, reservations, and considerations accu- 
 mulated upon the president's table, that all possibihty of an 
 understanding came to an end. The session ended in ill- 
 hmnour. The next day, Hardenberg and Humboldt wrote 
 despairingly to Mettemich and Miinster a note,^ in which they 
 declared that in view of the brief time available, and of the 
 experiences of the last sitting, the continuation of a genuine dis- 
 cussion seemed impossible ; views were too divergent ; more- 
 over, Austria, Prussia, and Hanover — ^which in the eyes of the 
 Prussian statesmen stiU seemed faithfully allied in sentiment — 
 must not put themselves in a false position, must not for the sake 
 of peace allow themselves to be forced to vote for the weakening 
 of the federal authority. " The undersigned have in all the 
 preUminary deliberations been throughout of the opinion of his 
 grace Prince Mettemich that what the previous proposals con- 
 tained upon this matter can be sacrificed only to the necessity 
 that the federation shall here and now be brought into existence ; 
 and they freely admit that it is solely upon this ground, solely 
 in order to avoid hindering or postponing any union of the princes 
 of Germany, and in addition with very painful sentiments, that 
 they have joined in bringing forward a proposal of which they 
 feel only too keenly how Uttle it corresponds to the important 
 aims which had been entertained immediately after the liberation 
 of Germany and even at the opening of the congress ; and what 
 an unfavourable impression this will make upon the public. 
 Should this proposal be yet further weakened by a discussion 
 for which the present moment (in which speedy general agree- 
 ment is the dominant need) remains extremely unfavourable, 
 hardly any good result can be expected from the proceedings in 
 
 * Hardenberg and Humboldt to Mettemich and Munster, May 27, 1813. 
 
 123 
 
 /-- 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Frankfort." For this reason, Prussia demanded that the three 
 great powers should present an ultimatum to the German states ; 
 the three courts should accept the alterations which seemed 
 unavoidable after the proceedings of the last conference, and they 
 should declare in the next sitting that any further alterations 
 were inadmissible ; the federation should be formed with all 
 the princes prepared to accept this proposal ; the Bundestag of 
 Frankfort could decide about matters of detail. The note con- 
 cluded by saying that if this procedure were adopted, the majority 
 of the states would immediately agree to the proposal, whilst 
 some would not adhere till later, as soon as they became con- 
 vinced that the federation would come into existence whether 
 they adhered or not. 
 
 Here at length was a rapid and bold seizing of opportunity, 
 after the old and proud Frederician manner ! If Austria and 
 England-Hanover had accepted the Prussian proposal, success 
 would have been assured ; federal jurisdiction, more incisive 
 formulation of the article about the diets, and all the improve- 
 ments which Prussia had effected in the Austrian proposal, 
 would have been secured for the Germanic Federation, for not 
 three weeks later the battle of Waterloo was fought, and after 
 that battle how would the middle-sized states have dared to 
 remain aloof from the Germanic Federation ? Moreover, the 
 Prussian proposal was in perfect harmony with the well-grounded 
 legal position which in November the three allied courts had 
 maintained against the cabinets of Stuttgart and Carlsruhe — the 
 position that the petty states were by the treaties of accession 
 pledged to join the federation. It now, however, became manifest 
 that the vigorous notes of the previous November had, for 
 Austria and Hanover, been mere moves in the diplomatic game. 
 Metternich would no longer recognise this secure legal aspect of 
 the question. Just as Wessenberg's proposal had merely con- 
 tained a modest " invitation " to the German princes to enter 
 the federation at their pleasure, so now the Austrian minister 
 declared that no kind of pressure, not even indirect pressure, 
 should be exercised upon the German sovereigns to induce them 
 to join the federation ! What did he care about federal juris- 
 diction and diets, these two fixed ideas of Prussian politics 
 towards which the Hofburg was half indifferent and half sus- 
 picious ? Was Austria to forfeit the friendship of the middle- 
 sized states for such things as these ? 
 
 Metternich rejected the Prussian proposal, and on May 29th 
 
 124 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 the conference was continued in the former chaotic style. The 
 prospect became ever gloomier, for, at this sitting. Councillor von 
 Globig, envoy of the finally reinstated king of Saxony, was intro- 
 duced into the assembly ; by his presence the centrifugal 
 tendencies were notably reinforced. Globig naturally opened 
 confidential deHberations with his old well-wisher Mettemich. 
 It was secretly discussed whether Saxony should not enter into 
 a South German federation under the leadership of Austria, but 
 the idea was speedUy abandoned, for the Austrian was of opinion 
 that in existing circumstances a united GermEinic Federation was, 
 after all, the most suitable means for effectively checking Prussian 
 ambition ! On May 30th the conference discussed the article 
 about the Landtags. Since Austria had ruled out aU the consti- 
 tutional rights introduced into the Prussian proposals, this article 
 now ran quite briefly, to the effect that a representative consti- 
 tution must exist in all German states. Gagem, who was always 
 an enthusiastic advocate of constitutional ideas, found this word- 
 ing far too bald and unsatisfsdng. To others it appeared too strict 
 and commanding; who could venture to issue an order to 
 a sovereign prince ? The majority decided : " In aU German 
 states a representative constitution will come into existence " — 
 a prophecy instead of a command ! Many of the voters hoped 
 in their secret hearts that the prophecy woiold never be fulfilled. 
 
 On June 2nd came the catastrophe, the triumph of particu- 
 larism. The German world was to learn what the restoration of 
 the Albertine kingship signified for our national policy. There 
 was no longer any dispute about the fact that the elements of 
 the future federal constitution were being discussed. The federal 
 act expressly declared that the first business of the Frankfort 
 Bmidestag would be : " The drafting of the fundamental laws 
 of the federation and its organic institution." There thus still 
 remained a faint hope that in Frankfort, after Napoleon's over- 
 throw, a reasonable-minded majority might come into existence, 
 and that some of the sins of Vienna might be atoned. But now 
 Saxony demanded the liberum veto, unanimity for all resolutions 
 of the plenum of the federal assembly. An ultimate vestige of 
 shame prevented the conference from accepting this proposal in 
 air its naked impudence. But the majority next day passed a 
 resolution which amounted to the same thing, deciding that all 
 decisions about fundamental laws, about organic federal institu^ 
 tions, concerning jura singulorum, and concerning the affairs of 
 religion, could be passed only by a unanimous vote. In this way 
 
 I2S 
 
History of Germany 
 
 a new Polish Reichstag was founded, a permanent obstacle was 
 imposed against the legislative development of the future German 
 united state. The party of reform was forced into the paths of 
 revolution. This was the first sign of life of the re-established 
 Saxon kingdom. The fundamental laws of a federal constitution 
 which had not yet come into existence, whose elements were only 
 now being established, were to be subordinated to unanimous 
 resolutions. This was merely to declare at the outset that the 
 new Germany could be created only with the aid of the sword. 
 And what was the meaning of the phrase " organic institu- 
 tion " ? Here also there was no general understanding, and all 
 explanation was shunned. 
 
 This decision spoiled the little there was still left to spoil. 
 Throughout, particularism and the arbitrary disputes of the petty 
 thrones had retained the upper hand. It was natural for them 
 to assert their right to independent diplomatic relations, and to 
 independent alliances ; the only reservation in the latter case 
 was that they might not enter into alliance with foreigners against 
 the federation or its members. But this did not unconditionally 
 exclude the possibility that Germans might take the field against 
 Germans as accessory troops of foreign powers. And this danger 
 was still imminent. The old and debased traf&c in soldiers was 
 resumed. Even during the congress, a Nassau regiment was 
 sold to Holland, or, to use the official expression, was " lent." 
 " Should a federal war be declared " no member of the federa- 
 tion might undertake individual negotiations with the enemy. 
 But what a federal war might be, and whether the federation 
 was pledged to take action in case of an attack upon the foreign 
 possessions of any of its members — concerning these vital questions 
 no agreement could be reached. The only thing that was certain 
 was that the federation, in a more paltry position than a third- 
 rank state, might not itself wage a war of offence, for the federal 
 act spoke only of defence against the aggressor. When the rights 
 of the diets had been dealt with in a phrase, the arrogance of the 
 Napoleonic kings was diverted against the mediatised. Vainly 
 did Prussia endeavour to secure a few curiate votes for the 
 dethroned ; the middle-sized states carried the proposal that 
 this question should be referred to the Bundestag and, after 
 all that had passed here under everyone's eyes, the value of 
 this consolation was obvious. Still worse was the case of 
 the Jews. The original proposal had secured for them " the right 
 which they already enjoyed in the individual states of the federa- 
 
 126 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 tion." This significant in, was now replaced by a von, so that 
 they were guaranteed the rights they enjoyed from the individual 
 states of the federation. The change gave Hanover and Electoral 
 Hesse a free hand to repeal the laws of the kingdom of Westphalia, 
 and to reintroduce the Jewish poll-tax ; the Jews of Frankfort 
 forfeited the emancipation which they had recently acquired 
 from the prince-primate Dalberg after purchcising the Juden- 
 schloss. 
 
 The hopes for a national reconstruction of the Catholic church 
 of Germany also vanished little by little. How greatly had 
 the German hierarchy been ill-used by the secularisation and the 
 irmimierable other arbitrary acts of the Napoleonic epoch. How 
 profoundly had its pohtical power declined. Instead of a crowd 
 of spiritual princes, there now sat in the high coimcil of the Ger- 
 manic Federation only six CathoHc sovereigns, Austria, Bavaria, 
 and Saxony, two Hohenzollems, and Liechtenstein. Both parties 
 of the German clergy besieged the statesmen with petitions. 
 Cardinal Consalvi and the Oratorians demanded the restoration 
 of their ancient possessions, and wherever possible the restora- 
 tion also of the ancient pohtical power of the Church ; they 
 demsinded in any case the participation of ecclesiastical represen- 
 tatives in the negotiations concemiag the Federation, and the 
 restoration of the bereaved bishoprics by the pope. Heinrich 
 Wessenberg, on the other hand, advocated the plan of a German 
 national Church, imder the leadership of a prince-primate ; he 
 repeatedly brought forward the scheme in verbose memorials, 
 and yet, in priestly fashion, remeiined ultramontane towards the 
 Protestants ; it seemed to him hardly desirable that the Federa- 
 tion should recognise the rights of the Protestants. The two 
 parties fought one another vigorously. To the Oratorians, 
 Wessenberg was hardly better than a heretic. Count Spiegel, how- 
 ever, also a distinguished and highly-cultured prince of the Church, 
 and a man of the old school, urgently warned the Prussian states- 
 men against the memorials of the Oratorians ; " They are," he 
 said, " permeated by a purely ultramontane spirit, and contrast 
 strongly with the ever- venerable sense of truth which animated 
 the fathers at the Councils of Constance and of Basle." It is true 
 that he desired the re-establishment of the Cathohc church, but he 
 desired also its further development through the influence of 
 " liberal govenmients." ^ 
 
 Bavaria and Wiirtemberg were equally hostile to both 
 
 1 Spiegel to Humboldt, December 2, 1815. 
 127 
 
History of Germany 
 
 parties; each of them separately hoped to found provincial 
 bishoprics in virtue of a concordat with Rome, and in this, as in 
 everything else, to leave the Germanic Federation altogether 
 out of account. The Prussians, finally, in this question, as 
 throughout the federal negotiations at Vienna, showed themselves 
 to be just, enlightened, and national-minded ; they demanded 
 that the Federation should give the Catholic church a common 
 constitution for the whole of Germany, but that it should also 
 guarantee the Protestant churches in the possession of their 
 ancient rights. Such were the divergencies of view. Only in one 
 respect were all in agreement, in the opinion that Austria must 
 be left to herself, must remain outside the new ordering of our 
 ecclesiastical life. As soon as any practical question came up 
 for discussion, it always appeared that Austria lived apart from 
 Germany. It was for this reason that Heinrich Wessenberg, 
 admired by the liberal world, could live in Vienna with his 
 brother the Austrian privy-councillor, and could even enjoy a 
 certain favour in the circles of the Hofburg ; what he was aiming 
 at related to countries elsewhere in the empire and left the imperial 
 hereditary dominions unaffected. Numerous conferences had 
 been devoted to these ecclesiastical questions, the petitions and 
 proposals relating to this matter had made a mountainous mass 
 of writings ; at length, presumably at the instigation of Wes- 
 senberg's elder brother, in the last Austrian federal proposal an 
 article had been included, providing the Catholic church with a 
 common constitution, and promising the Protestants the main- 
 tenance of their ancient rights. The majority agreed. Bavaria, 
 however, was adverse, and maintained her position with such 
 tenacity that Heinrich Wessenbei^ abandoned hope. On June 3rd 
 he wrote to the chancellor' that since ecclesiastical affairs in Ger- 
 many were still in a condition of unparalleled neglect, and since 
 the congress had not been able to concern itself about matters 
 of detail he would venture to propose that, within two months, 
 the sovereigns concerned, the princes with Catholic subjects, 
 should send representatives to Frankfort. There, in Frankfort, 
 in free conferences, which to Bavarian pride might seem intoler- 
 ably dangerous, the indefatigable man still hoped to bring his 
 national church into being. 
 
 Meanwhile, Austria herself had attained to the view that 
 matters must be brought to a conclusion. If the negotiations 
 were to continue, there might be nothing left even of the Austrian 
 
 1 Wessenberg's Memorial to Hardenberg, June 3, 1815. 
 128 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 proposal. Mettemich therefore, on June 5th, declared to the 
 conference — what he had already more than once hinted, but had 
 not yet carried into effect out of regard for the feelings of the 
 Rhenish Confederate courts — that the federal act had acquired 
 a form which appeared to correspond to the views of most of the 
 courts ; he then announced Austria's adhesion to the Germanic 
 Federat'on on the basis of the constitutional principles which had 
 now been established, and begged the other states to follow this 
 examp'e. Yet he gave no intimation that the Federation would, 
 as Prussia had demanded, come into existence without the ^ 
 adhesion of all the states, but left it open to each to join or not 
 at pleasure. Thereupon Prussia, Hanover, Denmark, Luxemburg, 
 and some of the petty states, announced their adhesion. Most 
 of them subsequently appended doleful written explanations. 
 Prussia merely added that it was better, after all, " to form an 
 imperfect federation than none at all " ; Hanover's explanation 
 was to the same effect ; Luxemburg concluded a bond " which 
 time, experience, and increasing confidence must improve " — and 
 so on. But what an uproar there was in the assembly when Count 
 Rechberg now dryly declared that he found it necessary for 
 the present to withhold the adhesion of Bavaria ! He added 
 some solemn and cryptic obervations from which everyone was 
 forced to conclude that the court of Munich renounced the Federa- 
 tion. The dismay was general ; and, most unfortunately, the 
 good Gagem now committed a folly weighty with consequences. 
 He never could do anything without the accompaniment of 
 imperial patriotic phrases, and therefore, whilst announcing the 
 adhesion of Luxemburg, he added as a condition that the Federa- 
 tion must embrace the whole of Germany. Nassau, as always, 
 took the same line eis the Orange cousins. Gagem's proviso was 
 unquestionably in part due to a federalistic whim, for the Luxem- 
 burg envoy remarked in an elucidatory note that his king could 
 not admit that anjrthing but the totality of the German states 
 could constitute a Germanic Federation, and that therefore the 
 garrisoning of the federal fortress of Luxemburg could only be 
 effected by the Federation, that is to say, by all the states in rota- 
 tion. The declaration of the garrulous visionary was certainly 
 not made with malicious intent. He had no idea of how bad an 
 example he was setting. What confusion would arise if some of 
 the other states were to declare that they would join the Federa- ^ 
 tion only if all the rest did ! And this in effect was what hap- 
 pened. The future of Germany was put up to tender, and was 
 
 129 K 
 
History of Germany 
 
 ultimately left to the decision of those who desired to do least for 
 the fatherland. 
 
 It was decided that at the conference of June 8th the still 
 remaining declarations of adhesion should be read, and the work 
 should be concluded. The two intervening days passed in anxious 
 excitement, in painful suspense. Count Rechberg gave no sign ; 
 it was the general conviction that Bavaria would not join. Even 
 the phlegmatic Humboldt was overwhelmed with all that he had 
 had to endure in this environment. Profoundly discouraged, he 
 was already drawing up the plan for a provisional federation 
 without Bavaria.^ Meanwhile, Gagern's mistake brought its 
 fruit. Saxony, Darmstadt, and others, even Denmark and Meck- 
 lenburg, which had adhered on June 5th without reservation, now 
 declared that they could only join a federation which embraced 
 the whole of Germany. Several of these states expressly begged 
 that the princes who stiU wished to remain outside should have 
 adhesion made possible for them by new concessions. It was 
 an endless screw. If Bavaria should refuse to join, everything 
 would fly to pieces. 
 
 Thereupon, on the morning of June 8th, Count Rechberg 
 announced that his new instructions had come to hand. Such 
 was his assertion, but it seems by no means impossible that the 
 Bavarian had in his creative imagination arranged the whole 
 ridiculous climax of the unworthy intrigue, simply in order to 
 secure thereby more effectively the granting of the ultimate wishes 
 of the Wittelsbachs. However, everyone breathed more freely. 
 Austria and Prussia immediately entered into confidential con- 
 versation with Rechberg. In addition to a few matters of trifling 
 importance, he demanded the abolition of federal jurisdiction 
 and of the article concerning the CathoHc church. Thus was 
 fulfilled Hardenberg's warning of May 27th. The two great 
 powers were actually placed in the unpleasant position of having 
 to secure peace by agreeing to the weakening of the federal 
 authority — ^though this, indeed, was no sacrifice for Mettemich. 
 ^.Federal jurisdiction was abandoned, although, as Humboldt had 
 often said, this was the keystone of the German legal structure ; 
 while of the enormous mass of paper which represented the 
 ecclesiastical negotiations, nothing remained beyond an exiguous 
 article decreeing what had long already been the law almost all 
 over Germany, namely, that the differences between the Christian 
 
 ^ Humboldt's ProposaHor a provisional treaty between the acceding German 
 states. 
 
 130 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 sects shoTild not involve any difference in the enlargement of civic 
 and political rights. Then the conference was opened, and 
 Metternich announced " with pleasure " that Bavaria wished only 
 a few trifling alterations to be effected. These few trifling 
 alterations were approved, £ind now the matter was really settled, 
 for what more was there to excise from this act ? On June loth 
 one more sitting was held in order to sign the federal act, and in 
 order to celebrate with all diplomatic honours the interment of 
 the corpse of German unity. When could its resurrection be 
 expected ? 
 
 The first eleven articles of the charter dated June 8th were 
 further incorporated into the final act of the congress, just 
 before its dissolution ; henceforward victorious Germany had 
 to revere all the princes of Europe, with the exception of 
 the pope and the sultan, as the guarantors of her fundamental 
 law. Nor were there lacking the protests which traditionally 
 belong to every great German action of state. All the mediatised 
 proclaimed their rights. Even more boldly did the princes of 
 Isenbtirg and Kn3rphausen lift their heads ; they regarded them- 
 selves as sovereigns, and as such declared their accession to the 
 Germanic Federation. It was superfluous ; eight-and-thirty 
 German powers sufficed for the needs of German civilisation, which 
 indeed, according to the general view, was rooted in the motley 
 complexity of our national life. It suddenly appeared, however, 
 that there was yet a thirty-ninth sovereign, the landgrave of 
 Hesse-Homburg. He had been altogether forgotten ; but since 
 the. patriotic old gentleman and his valiant son enjoyed the 
 special favour of the two great powers, the Germans might hope 
 that the Bundestag would still have pity on him. The loudest 
 complEiints of all came from the Roman see. In an energetic 
 Latin note. Cardinal Consalvi appealed as a precedent to the 
 action of the nuncio Chigi, who had once protested against the 
 Peace of Westphalia, and entered a protest because neither the 
 Holy Roman Empire, the centre of political unity consecrated 
 by the holiness of faith, nor yet the power of the spiritual princes, 
 had been re-established. 
 
 It was only in order that the Federation might certainly 
 comprise the whole of Germany, that the better disposed cabinets^ 
 had jdelded to the last extravagant demands of Bavaria ; and 
 yet, notwithstanding all the chaffering and haggling, a federa- 
 tion of all the powers had not come into existence. Just as 
 formerly North Carolina and Rhode Island had failed to participate 
 
 131 
 
History of Germany 
 
 in the establishment of the second federal union of North 
 America, so Baden and Wiirtemberg remained apart from the 
 foundation of the Germanic Federation, and did not join until 
 
 [ Napoleon's overthrow had for the second time been decided. 
 
 ' Baden adhered on July 26th, and Wiirtemberg on September ist. 
 
 Thus came into existence the federal act, the most unworthy 
 constitution which was ever imposed upon a great civilised nation 
 by rulers of its own blood, a work which was in many respects 
 even more lamentable than the structure of the old empire in the 
 century of its extinction. It lacked that majesty of historical 
 greatness which formed an atmosphere around the empire of the 
 Othos even in its decay. This political artifact stood up in all its 
 bareness and nudity, the work of a short-lived and self-centred 
 diplomacy which had forgotten all the memories of its own 
 nation ; there was here no rust of centuries to conceal the scanty 
 hideousness of the forms. People sang and talked about 
 emperor and empire ; but never has a German heart beat higher 
 at the name of the Germanic Federation. Of the states of the 
 federation, there were six only, and these among the smallest, 
 whose territorial area had not undergone changes during the last 
 twenty years ; even the most tolerant of nations could no longer 
 believe in the legitimacy of a territorial distribution which was 
 at once so new and so arbitrary. The same foreign dominion 
 which had brought the old empire to destruction pressed now upon 
 the new federation. Since the days of Frederick, the power of 
 Austria had undergone a notable increase, and was now all the 
 harder to break because Austria exercised her influence directly, 
 without the masterful forms of the emperordom. The foreign 
 diplomats smiled maliciously, saying that it was an excellent thing 
 to have coupled Austria and Prussia in this way and thus to have 
 weakened both ! The old imperial law had at least continued to 
 speak of a German nation ; the idea that all Germans were loyal, 
 attached to the emperor, and ready to serve him, had never com- 
 pletely disappeared. The new federal act knew nothing of a 
 German nation ; it recognised only Bavarians, Waldeckers, 
 Schwarzburg-Sondershauseners, subjects of those German princes 
 who of their own free will had joined a legal union. The nation 
 had to drain the cup of humiliation to the dregs ; the Wiirtem- 
 berger's saying that a nation, after all, is not to be constructed 
 out of different peoples, had proved perfectly true. The Germans 
 stood altogether out of relationship to the federal authority, and 
 
 132 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 were not pledged in any way to obey it ; only when a 
 sovereign deigned to recognise a federal decree as a law of the 
 land, were his subjects compelled to obey this law. The nation 
 was mediatised by a league of princes. Like the revolution of 
 1803, this new constitution of Germany was created exclusively 
 by the dynasts. 
 
 The new Bundestag was the Reichstag of Ratisbon in a some- 
 what more modem form, just as cumbrous and just as impracti- 
 cable ; it was a mere formality that it sometimes sat in committee 
 and sometimes in plenum, for even in committee all the nine-and- 
 thirty voted. The contrast between formal rights and living 
 power was even more crudely conspicuous in the Germanic 
 Federation than it had been in the Holy Empire. The arrogance 
 of the petty crowns, stimulated by the enjoyment of sovereignty, 
 effected in Vienna a distribution of votes which greatly exceeded 
 all the enormities of the ancient imperial law, and which now 
 in its turn helped this arrogance to rise to the degree of insanity. 
 A certain preference for the smaller members of the federation 
 lies in the nature of any federal constitution. But it went far 
 beyond the measure of permissible injustice that in the full 
 assembly of the Bundestag, seven great states, Austria, the five 
 kingdoms, and Baden, which together contained more than five- 
 sixths of the whole German people, should possess a minority of 
 twenty-seven votes, as against forty-two votes possessed by the 
 remaining sixth. This amoimted to an open invitation to the 
 great states to circumvent the federal decrees, or else to browbeat 
 their smaller comrades. And then, in addition, came that gift 
 of the crown of Saxony, the unanimity requisite for all important 
 decisions — a prescription which in the Holy Empire had appUed 
 only to reUgious questions and to jura singulorum. Now Reuss 
 of the younger line could prohibit all development of the Federa- 
 tion. But further such development would be made altogether 
 impossible by the general adoption of a representative system. 
 For if the Federation were to have £Hiy kind of effective hfe it 
 must first attempt to limit the military authority and to control 
 the foreign policy of the individual states ; but these were the only 
 sovereign rights which, after the introduction of the diets, would 
 still remain undiminished to the petty princes, and a voluntary 
 renimciation on their part of these rights was altogether 
 impossible to expect. 
 
 This many-headed federal assembly, without a leader, 
 possessed neither legal nor moral responsibility. It consisted 
 
 133 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of delegates, bound strictly to their instructions, and therefore 
 able to shuffle off all blame from themselves upon their principals ; 
 whilst, on the other hand, the petty crowns learned all too soon 
 how to take refuge behind the Bundestag against the anger of 
 public opinion. Germany's internal pohtics became a struggle 
 in the air ; no one knew any longer where he was to seek his true 
 opponent. The demoraUsing influence of such inveracity showed 
 itself very speedily alike at the courts and among the people ; 
 cowardly anxiety on the one side ; cuckoo-cloudland dreams 
 of obscure bitterness upon the other. The hopeless confusion 
 became all the more intolerable because a severe struggle between 
 the federation and its members was impossible to avoid, for the 
 central authority of the Federation was autocratic, was simply an 
 organ of the princes, whereas in the individual states the power 
 of the Landtags soon became operative. 
 
 The nation accepted the unhappy piece of work with sinister 
 coldness. Whoever expressed any opinion at all about the matter 
 showed savage anger. The few articles concerning popular 
 rights, for which public opinion was for the most part prepared, 
 contained such empty and windy promises, that even this good- 
 natured nation was forced to begin to believe in the ill-will of its 
 rulers. How strangely, beside the indefinite phrases about free- 
 dom of the press, freedom of trade, and diets, reads the precise 
 enumeration of the privileges of the mediatised and of the post- 
 office monopohes of Thum and Taxis. Most lamentable of all, 
 the federal act was not a constitution, but contained merely the 
 elements so far formulated of a future federal law. Four years 
 later, the honourable-minded Gagern wrote, not without repent- 
 ance, to a conservative friend : " You speak of the maintenance 
 of what exists. Vainly do I seek durability. I see a federal act 
 which we first undertook to develop at Vienna." 
 
 In the territorial negotiations, the Prussian statesmen, thanks 
 to the king's firmness, had attained at least a half-measure of 
 success. In the federal negotiations, they were completely van- 
 quished ; they had not carried into effect a single part of their 
 intentions. But the escutcheon of Prussian honour had remained 
 untarnished. The attitude of the state which had saved us from 
 the foreigner, served also in Vienna to shame all other Germans— 
 if there was indeed any place for shame amid so savage a struggle 
 of interests. Tenaciously and straightforwardly, and more con- 
 sistently than Stein, had Hardenberg and Humboldt held fast 
 to a definite plan, yielding only step by step in face of the united 
 
 134 
 
The Congress of Vienna 
 
 resistance of almost the whole of Germany. This plan of theirs 
 was certainly affected by the general poUtical obscurity of the 
 epoch, but was at any rate more honourable and reasonable than 
 were all the other proposals put forward in Vienna. It was not 
 their fault that the form of their proposals underwent continual 
 changes, for this was the inevitable outcome of the pressure of a 
 hopeless struggle against opponents who could never be con- 
 vinced by a word, but only by a blow. The one fault of both 
 was their unsuspecting confidence in the false friends Austria and 
 Hanover. But even a perfect statesman, who could have remained 
 absolutely free from such weaknesses, would not have been able 
 to conquer in this struggle. The whole course of German destiny 
 during recent years had led inevitably to the tragical and yet 
 necessary consequence that after the faU of Napoleon the con- 
 figuration of the German state came to be decided, not by 
 Napoleon's valiant enemy Prussia, but by his hesitating opponent 
 Austria, and by his allies the Rhenish Confederates. 
 
 The czar manifested discontent at the lamentable issue, and 
 not even Gentz had expected so ridiculous a botch. None the 
 less, the new order of German affairs possessed three momentous 
 advantages. The historical effects of the princes' revolution 
 of 1803 remained undisturbed, the grotesque theocratic system 
 was not restored. New Germany breathed the healthy air of a 
 temporal state. Again, although the federal constitution did not 
 impose an absolute barrier to the origination of a new Confedera- 
 tion of the Rhine, it rendered this far more difficult ; for this 
 reason alone, as Hardenberg and Humboldt frequently declared, 
 did Prussia's statesmen adopt a work as to whose defects they 
 were under no illusion. Prussia joined the Federation in order to 
 prevent the middle-sized states from repeating their treasons, 
 whereas these states regarded the federal constitution merely as a 
 bulwark against Prussian ambition. Finally, the Germanic Federa- 
 tion was so loosely organised and so feeble that neither in its 
 internal nor in its external development could it appreciably 
 disturb the state of Frederick. As soon as Prussia had thought 
 the matter over, the shadowy federal constitution would be seen 
 to offer a thousand ways and means of attaching the petty states 
 to herself by separate alliances, and of showing them that in 
 actual practice Austria did nothing for Germany, while Prussia 
 alone was in a position to do justice to the longings of the nation 
 and to the rightly understood interests of the petty courts. As 
 we look back upon the life-history of the Germanic Federation we 
 
 1.35 
 
History of Germany 
 
 see that it is upon this that depends its historic renown : it did 
 not possess power to prevent the increase in strength of the 
 one really living German state, of the state that was destined 
 at a later date to destroy that Federation, and to bestow upon our 
 unhappy nation a new and worthy order. 
 
 136 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 BELLE ALLIANCE (WATERLOO). 
 
 [ § I. THE BELGIAN CAMPAIGN. 
 
 Although it is a matter of daily experience that coming events 
 cast their shadows before, it very rarely happens that the heroes 
 of a closed chapter in history resume their places upon the 
 transformed stage of time. In such a return of past greatness 
 there always inheres a wonderful and dream-like magic, because 
 there is involved a contradiction with the necessary and eternal 
 process of historic life. Never has destiny assumed a more 
 fantastic form than during the Hundred Days, when the 
 men and the passions of an age of war emerged like a train of 
 spectres in clear noonday to trouble the life of a new and peace- 
 loving generation, and in which the grandiose adventure of the 
 Napoleonic emperordom found its appropriate and stormy 
 epilogue. On March ist Napoleon with his nine hundred faithful 
 followers landed on the coast near Cannes ; on the evening of 
 March 20th, the birthday of the king of Rome, his dusty carriage 
 drove to the Tuileries through the silent capital, and a crowd 
 of veterans drunk with joy greeted the returning hero on the 
 portals of the abandoned royal palace. " The emperor has 
 appeared and the royal government no longer exists," he wrote 
 proudly to the foreign envoys. Never before had the elemental 
 forces of genius and of reputation secured so brilliant a triumph ; 
 the bloodless victorious progress really seemed, as the Imperator 
 assured the princes of Europe, " the work of an irresistible force, 
 the unanimous will of a great nation aware of its duties and of its 
 rights." 
 
 Yet this miracle-hke revolution proceeded almost exclusively 
 from the army. The old corporals and sergeants who here, as in 
 all professional armies, controlled the spirit of the troops, regarded 
 with idolatrous worship the image of the democratic hero ; they 
 were the apostles of that Napoleonic reUgion whose titanic legends 
 
 137 
 
History of Germany 
 
 had consoled the proud nation during its defeats. How would 
 it have been possible for the fourth regiment of artillery in whose 
 ranks Bonaparte had once served as heutenant to resist the fiery 
 appeal of the gros papa, who restored the glorious tricolor and 
 the world-subduing eagles, and who dismissed the detested new 
 officers belonging to the emigre nobility ? Carried away by the 
 delirium of enthusiasm, overwhelmed by the power of wonderful 
 memories, one regiment after another followed the alluring 
 example : the times were to return in which the praetorian was 
 everything, the civilian nothing. The old guard decorated their 
 eagles with flowers, which were not to be removed until the honour 
 of the empire had been avenged by brilliant victories over the 
 Prussians and other foreigners. But no longer, as once in the 
 days of the i8th Brumaire, was the army France. While even 
 a portion of the officers, and among them some of the most capable 
 of the marshals, like Oudinot and Macdonald, scorned to partici- 
 pate in the great perjury, the peaceful middle classes were 
 utterly perplexed by the re-emergence of this democratic tyrant, 
 whose remarkable and ambiguous character made him at once 
 welcome and ominous. The restoration had not effected any 
 notable changes in the Napoleonic constitution ; it was 
 nourished, as the Bonapartists insisted, upon the " capital of 
 authority" which the First Consul had left for his successors. 
 The effective machine of the prefectoral administration con- 
 tinually extended its operations. The well-meaning king, on the 
 other hand, who had been placed in the saddle by the favour of 
 the tories, remained altogether estranged from the sentiments 
 and customs of the new democratic society. He was surrounded 
 by the Artois, the Blacas, the covetous pack of emigres who were 
 impatient for the re-establishment of the old nobles' regime. The 
 hatred of the people for the Bourbons was dependent not only 
 upon the mistakes of the crown, but also, and still more, upon 
 the sinister intentions attributed to its supporters. 
 
 Beside those who now crowded roimd the banner of the 
 lilies, the returning Napoleon seemed even to the bourgeois classes 
 a national hero, a representative of the idolised ideas of '89. But 
 at the same time his name signified war. The instinct of the 
 business world immediately recognised that this man would never 
 keep the peace, and that the neighbouring powers could never 
 allow him to remain at peace. Immediately after his return, 
 the advantageous position which Talleyrand's cunning had secured 
 for the Bourbon crown in the society of states was once more 
 
 138 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 lost ; France stood completely isolated, and before the eyes of a 
 world which urgently needed peace there opened the gloomy 
 prospect of new and interminable warlike storms. Moreover, 
 the parUamentary institutions of the Charte constitutionnelle de 
 France had quickly taken root. Hardly had the epoch of mili- 
 tary glory passed away when, with admirable vitality, the nation 
 one more threw itself into the party struggles of political and 
 literary hfe. The country took pleasure in the oratorical arts 
 displayed in the representative chamber, in the noisy criticisms 
 of the free press. The constitutional doctrine again found 
 honourable and convinced advocates. Thousands of persons 
 honestly believed that it was the destiny of this Hberated nation 
 to vitalise parliamentary govemnent after the English model with 
 the incomparable Napoleonic administrative despotism, and in 
 this way to found an exemplary constitutional state ; but the 
 reahsation of these ideals seemed far more readily possible under 
 the weak rule of the Bourbons than under the iron dominion of 
 the soldier emperor. Consequently the cultured and possessing 
 classes held suspiciously aloof from the Imperator ; in a few 
 days the national securities fell to fifty-three. It is true that only 
 a few regiments of the south and of the west held firmly to the 
 side of the royal house ; even the legitimist rising which broke 
 out in La Vendue was devoid of danger, since it proceeded from 
 the nobles rather than from the peasants. Napoleon's return 
 was premature ; a few years later, when the memory of the 
 horrors of the war-time had begun to fade, and when the hatred 
 felt for the emigres had become more powerful, the Imperator 
 might perhaps have succeeded. In the existing situation of 
 affairs, the majority of the nation remained sceptical, anxious, 
 perplexed. It was only to the peasants in the eastern provinces, 
 who have always been of a warlike disposition, and to the work- 
 men of some of the larger towns, that the crowned plebeian was 
 welcome. In the suburbs of Paris a Jacobin federation was 
 formed, but the memories which were revived in this body 
 had Uttle in common with the Caesarism of which the army 
 made a cult. 
 
 Napoleon speedily noticed how greatly the country had 
 changed. "The Bourbons," he said savagely, "have spoiled 
 France for me." In order to win over the middle classes he had 
 to coquet with liberal ideas. In cleverly composed manifestos 
 he represented himself as the chosen of the people, laying stress 
 upon the popular character of the empire, which had disciplined 
 
 139 
 
History of Germany 
 
 democracy, perfected equality, and paved the way for liberty. 
 But promises no longer sufficed. He found himself compelled to 
 constitute a cabinet out of men of the Revolution and to enlarge 
 the constitution of the empire by a supplementary act, which 
 guaranteed to the nation an electoral popular assembly, freedom of 
 the press, the right of petition, and even the restriction of military 
 jurisdiction. In this way he was forced to tie his own hands at 
 a moment when nothing but an absolute dictatorship could compel 
 the nation, greatly desirous of peace, to make a strong military 
 effort. He appeared upon the Champ de Mars to gratify the 
 Parisian love of spectacles by a great popular miUtary display, 
 and to make public profession of his democratic faith. " As 
 Emperor, as First Consul, and as soldier, I owe everything to the 
 people ! " His favourite daughter Hortense and her little son 
 Louis attended the display ; but Marie Louise did not return to 
 the Tuileries, for the loyalty of the Austrian woman was given to 
 the child of fortune, not to the spouse. 
 
 The Imperator gradually came to realise that he was now only 
 the leader of a great gang of military mutineers, and no longer 
 the universally dreaded chief of the state. He was overwhelmed 
 with shame and rage when he was forced to show himself at 
 the window in response to the homage of the working-class 
 Jacobins. From time to time he even asked himself whether 
 he should not straightway don the red cap, take over the leadership 
 of the revolutionary parties, dissolve the National Guard of the 
 Parisian bourgeoisie, and constitute in place thereof a popular 
 army composed of the federated manual workers. But his 
 detestation of the Jacobins prevailed. Napoleon could not lay 
 aside his old despotic habits ; he issued lists of proscribed 
 persons ; and he re-established a twofold secret poUce, whose 
 agents mutually watched one another. Notwithstanding the 
 supplementary act, notwithstanding his liberal asseverations, 
 notwithstanding his coldness towards the Jacobins, he did not 
 succeed in acquiring the confidence of the bourgeoisie. The 
 credulous doctrinaire Benjamin Constant did, indeed, take the 
 side of the returned despot, and the organ of the constitutionalists, 
 the Censeur of Dunoyer, extolled the supplementary act as the 
 perfection of French liberty — a wonderful self-deception which 
 for decades to come was to be the watchword of the opposition. 
 But the mass of the constitutionalists remained obstinately mis- 
 trustful. In secret, they put their hopes on the cunning Louis 
 Philippe of Orleans, who had for long been busily though quietly 
 
 140 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 weaving nets to secure the citizen crown of France. When the 
 deputies assembled in June, one of Napoleon's opponents, 
 Lanjuinais, former president of the Convention, Wcis elected presi- 
 dent ; the revolutionary leaders opposed the emperor with 
 relentless violence. 
 
 The worst of all was that Napoleon, in order to allay the 
 bourgeois fear of war, had to display a hypocritical confidence in 
 the maintenance of peace. At the moment, he said, nothing was 
 further from his mind than the desire for war. It was not until 
 the grande armie of the empire had been re-established, that the 
 struggle for the inaUenable ancient boundaries was to recommence. 
 He repeatedly assured the European courts that nothing had been 
 changed in France, that he renounced all designs of warlike 
 aggrandisement, and that he now recognised one struggle only, 
 the sacred struggle for the happiness of the nations. No one 
 beUeved him. Unceasingly Old Europe pursued preparations 
 for the annihilation of the usurper, and yet for a time he had to 
 maintain the semblance that his empire was a realm of peace. 
 Not for three weeks did he dare to command an increase in the 
 army. On his arrival this had consisted of 115,000 men, 
 and by the beginning of June it had enlarged only to 
 198,000 men. The same sense of insecurity also forced him to 
 adopt an extremely venturesome plan of campaign. According 
 to the experiences of the previous year, a vigorous defensive war 
 in the interior of France might perhaps have been not altogether 
 impossible ; but since the usurper could neither count upon a mass 
 rising in his favour, nor yet dared to expose himself to the danger 
 of a defeat upon French soil, he was constrained to undertake 
 an attack upon his neighbours, and for this desperate venture had 
 at his disposal only 128,000 men. The rest of the forces were 
 distributed along the frontiers, this being a completely useless 
 dispersal of military power, but the suspicions of the public would 
 now allow the Imperator to leave any portion of French soil 
 entirely undefended. Not until war was unavoidable did Napoleon 
 drop the peaceful mask, displaying once more the ambitious ideas 
 of the old imperial poUcy. His war minister Davoust had to 
 summon to the colours all the old soldiers from the left bank of 
 the Rhine. In his address to the army, the Imperator spoke as 
 of old, as the protector of German particularism, exhorting to 
 the struggle against the insatiable coaUtion which was already 
 engaged in swallowing the petty German states. A proclama- 
 tion discovered in Napoleon's carriage on the battle-field of Belle 
 
 141 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Alliance announced to the Belgians and to the Rhinelanders the 
 joyful tidings that they were worthy to be Frenchmen ! 
 
 Since this Caesar was once more at the head of his praetorians, 
 it was inevitable that the old struggle between world dominion 
 and national freedom should break out once more. In accordance 
 with the letter of international law, Napoleon's taking up of arms 
 was indeed nothing more than a legitimate war of conquest of the 
 sovereign prince of Elba against the most Christian king. Vainly 
 did Gentz, in the columns of the Oesterreichischer Beohachter, 
 endeavour by the use of artificial sophisms to interpret away this 
 incontestable legal right. But of what use to the despot were 
 forms of international law, to the man who all his life had played 
 with loyalty and faith, who had trodden under foot every sacred 
 right of the society of nations ? To the millions in Germany, 
 Russia, and England, the returning tyrant did not appear to be 
 a prince making war, but simply a blood-stained criminal whose 
 reckless breach of his word imperilled all the blessings of 
 peace, so recently and so laboriously won. A cry of anger rang 
 through Prussia. The old enemy was once more upon the 
 spot ; like a hungry wolf he had broken into the peaceful 
 fold of the liberated nations ; who could doubt that the German 
 sword must once more hurl him down from his usurped throne ? 
 This vahant nation which had suffered such unspeakable woes 
 from the blows of the tyrant neither could, nor would, see any- 
 thing of the moving and elevating incidents which embellished 
 the Imperator's return, nor could it make allowances for the 
 political confusion which explained the hopeless embarrassment 
 of the French nation. To the Prussians, the French were simply 
 a mob of traitors, the French army was composed of soldiers 
 false to their oaths, who were conspiring with their old robber- 
 chieftain to undertake fresh campaigns of plunder. On this 
 occasion, too, a sense of happy pride was joined to a deadly 
 hatred. Old Blucher spoke once more from the heart to his 
 Prussians, when at the first news he joyfully exclaimed : " That 
 is the best luck of all for us ; now the army can clear up the 
 mess made by the diplomats." It was only in the course of 
 the congress, and through Talleyrand's hostile machinations, 
 that the mass of the patriots of the north had come clearly to 
 understand what a flabby and feeble thing had been the peace 
 of Paris, and how little was our western frontier secured. As 
 soon as the prospect of a new war opened, the press, headed by 
 the Rheinische Merkur, immediately declared that the time had at 
 
 142 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 length arrived to draw the teeth of the GaUic beast of prey. In 
 a thousand tones, far more loudly and more definitely than the 
 year before, was the demand voiced : " Restore the plunder, 
 restore Alsace and Lorraine ! " 
 
 At the coiuts, too, there was not a moment's hesitation 
 in recognising that the destruction of the peace of Paris could not 
 be tolerated. Already on March 8th Stein resolved upon the 
 outlawry of the distiurber of the peace. On March 13th the eight 
 powers which had signed the treaty of peace assembled and deter- 
 mined upon a public declaration announcing to the nations of 
 Europe that Napoleon Bonaparte had placed himself outside 
 civil and pohtical rights and must be outlawed as an enemy and 
 disturber of the peace of the world. The Bonapartists raised 
 an outcry regarding this imprecedented, this cannibal resolution ; 
 yet it merely expressed what was imperiously demanded by the 
 aroused feelings of all Germans and Russians, and by the great 
 majority of the EngUsh nation. On March 25th the four allies 
 of Chaumont renewed their former league, offered their support to 
 the king of France and to any other land which might be attacked 
 by Bonaparte, invited all the powers of Europe to join them, 
 and pledged themselves not to lay down arms imtil Bonaparte 
 was no longer in a position to excite new disturbances and again 
 to seize the reins of power in France. The declaration of the 
 eight did not directly exclude the possibility of a change in the 
 French frontiers, for it expressly reserved for the powers the 
 right to complete and strengthen the decisions of the treaty of 
 Paris. But, like the war alliance of March 25th, it rested upon a 
 momentous error of fact, upon the assumption that the Bourbons 
 were maintaining themselves at least in some part of France, 
 and that the aUied armies would act as accessory troops coming 
 to the assistance of the royal army. 
 
 A few days later, information reached Vienna that King Louis 
 had had to evacuate his country down to the last village. The 
 legitimate ruler was domiciled in Ghent as a prince without 
 country, and was now almost entirely under the influence of the 
 vengeance-breathing emigres ; while the outlawed disturber of 
 the pubUc peace, writing peaceful letters to his crowned 
 brothers, informed them of the bloodless subdual of France, and 
 offered to recognise the treaty of Paris immediately. The 
 situation was altered in a moment, and the rancorous whigs in 
 parHament did not hesitate to take advantage of the fact. 
 Whitbread and Burdett enquired in thunderous speeches whether 
 
 H3 
 
History of Germany 
 
 England was to bleed again in order to force upon a free people 
 a government, a dynasty, whose hopeless weakness had been so 
 painfully displayed. 
 
 The tory government felt it necessary to appease the opposi- 
 tion, and therefore announced in Vienna that although the 
 prince regent did indeed approve the treaty of March 25th, and 
 would do all in his power to fight against Bonaparte, still he could 
 not pledge himself to impose upon the French any definite 
 government. On May 9th, Austria, Prussia, and Russia recognised 
 that this interpretation of the treaty was well grounded, and also 
 reserved a free hand for themselves in respect of the future govern- 
 ment of France. There followed in the committee of the eight 
 powers a tedious dehberation upon the question whether, in view 
 of the actual success of Bonaparte and of his peaceful despatches, 
 a new declaration were not desirable. Talleyrand had the audacity 
 to lay before the allies a proposal for a manifesto in which they 
 should modestly declare that Europe was fighting just as much 
 for France as for her own safety, and would lay down arms 
 immediately after the dethronement of Bonaparte. ' But no one 
 would any longer accede to such suggestions. The commission 
 appointed to consider the question decided that the usurper's 
 assurances were not worthy of belief ; in extremely moderate 
 language it maintained that the right of a nation to 
 change its government was not unrestricted, but that it was 
 within the competence of neighbouring states to take steps to 
 prevent a misuse of this right which might involve danger to 
 them all ; it recalled the universally known fact that the 
 alUes had granted conquered France mild terms of peace only 
 upon the express condition that the Corsican disturber of the 
 peace should be dethroned ; and it declared aptly and incisively 
 that the formal assent of the French nation to Bonaparte's 
 reaccession to the throne would be equivalent to a declaration 
 of war against Europe. This formal assent to the usurper's coup 
 d'etat had in fact occurred almost at the same moment in which 
 the commission's report was, on May 12th, laid before the 
 Committee of Eight. The Napoleonic supplementary act was 
 submitted to the nation for general approval ; more than one 
 and a quarter miUion voters expressed this approval, barely five 
 thousand dared to vote against Napoleon's reinstatement the 
 great majority held aloof, letting matters take their own course. 
 Thus the French nation had unquestionably recognised the 
 
 * Correspondance inedite de Talleyrand et de Louis XVIII, Paris, 1881 n ^8^ 
 
 144 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 dynastic revolution, and for the eight powers the necessity was 
 obvious, in accordance with the words of their commission, to 
 drop the earher declaration which had been directed against the 
 person of Bonaparte alone, and to declare war against the state 
 of France, as it had now actually undergone transformation. 
 But this conclusion, the only logical one, was not drawn, for the 
 intentions of the aUied powers were extremely divergent. 
 
 The unctuous assurance of the tories that England did not 
 desire to force any particular government upon France, was not 
 honourably meant, but was simply a move in the parUamentary 
 game. There had been no change in the obstinately legitimist 
 sentiments of the tory cabinet ; in the eyes of that cabinet, the 
 landless king was, and remained, the legitimate ruler of France, 
 and it was the obvious duty of Europe to restore the king to the 
 throne of his fathers by means of a royalist crusade, so that 
 England, as the high-minded protector of the grateful Bourbon, 
 coidd secure the dominant influence in the Tuileries. In this 
 sense Wellington continually repeated : " France has no enemies ; 
 this war is a war of Europe, including France, against Bonaparte 
 and his army." Consequently no one could make any claims 
 for territory against France. Filled with moral indignation, com- 
 fortably patting their well-filled pockets, the tories spoke about 
 Prussian poverty and greed ; their envy of Germany was so 
 detestably plain that even the good-natured Prussian patriots 
 at length came clearly to imderstand the true character of 
 British commercial poUcy, and many of those who for years had 
 been ardent admirers of English magnanimity now expressed 
 an adverse judgment. But however restricted, hypocritical, and 
 narrow-minded the policy of the tories might appear, they alone 
 among all the allies knew precisely what they wanted and followed 
 their aims with tenacious obstiuacy. 
 
 In the Hofburg there was no lack of fanatical legitimists to 
 blow the corno inglese. To Adam Miiller it seemed absolutely 
 incontestable that Louis XVIII had been reigning for four-and- 
 twenty years, and that Bonaparte was only a rebel ; if this were 
 not so, the divine tight of kings would be denied and " the 
 ridiculous claim of the nations to have a will of their own would 
 receive recognition ! " Mettemich's views were more sober. 
 He cherished no preference for the Bourbons, and was prepared 
 to act as circumstances might dictate ; but since his peace- 
 loving nature recoiled from every dubious innovation, and since 
 the treaties of Paris and Vienna seemed to him an inviolable 
 
 145 I' 
 
History of Germany 
 
 structure of exquisite diplomatic wisdom, the tones might hope 
 that they would be able gradually to bring over their Austrian 
 friend to their own point of view. Alexander, on the other hand, 
 and Frederick William, could not forgive the Bourbons the war 
 alliance of January 3rd. Among the Prussian generals the view 
 was widely diffused that this ungrateful French royal house, 
 which was at once weak and faithless, ought not to be restored ; 
 the czar spoke with warmth in favour of the liberal-minded duke 
 of Orleans. But neither the court of St. Petersburg nor yet that 
 of Berlin had hitherto conceived any definite plan for the re-estab- 
 lishment of the French throne ; moreover, the two powers were 
 by no means in agreement. Whilst the Prussian statesmen were 
 from the first working to safeguard the western frontier 
 of Germany, the czar had relapsed into a mood of extravagant 
 generosity. The true ground of his magnanimity was betrayed 
 by him on one occasion when he exclaimed : " Either I shall 
 have a share in this cake, or the cake shall not be baked at all ! " 
 Russia could gain nothing from this war, and what did he care 
 about Germany when he could hope by Uberal-mindedness and 
 delicacy of feeUng to overpower English influence in France ? 
 On May 25th he directed his ambassador to write that there 
 existed " a French nation whose justified interests must not be 
 sacrificed without punishqient ; consequently there must neither 
 be effected the re-establishment of the untenable old order nor 
 yet a humiliation of France, a country indispensable to the well- 
 being of Europe." 
 
 Owing to the existence of this far-reaching divergency of 
 views, an unambiguous declaration of war against France, such 
 as was desired by Hardenberg and Humboldt, could not be 
 carried through. The coalition determined to make no further 
 public declaration, and was all the more content with the adop- 
 tion of this half-measure because the opportunity for more 
 definite resolves might well be offered in the vicissitudes of the 
 campaign. All the world anticipated a long and wearisome war ; 
 the leadership of the European army had been once more 
 entrusted to Schwarzenberg and Langenau. Thus the powers 
 opened the struggle in a situation which was extremely obscure 
 from the point of view of international law. They had announced 
 the struggle against " Buonaparte " (for so they continued to 
 name the Imperator), and had subsequently declared that they 
 did not 'pursue the aim of re-establishing the Bourbons. Unques- 
 tionably they were in a state of war against France, since inter- 
 
 146 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 national law recognises war only as between states ; whether 
 they regarded themselves as enemies of France was extremely 
 doubtful, in face of their own contradictory declarations. More- 
 over, the proclamation to the French which Schwarzenberg 
 issued when the army invaded France Wcis extremely indefinite. 
 With considerable difficulty Gagem had secured that from the 
 sentence, " Europe desires peace," at least the dangerous con- 
 clusion, " and nothing but peace," should be excised. 
 
 This legal obscurity at the opening of the war was not, 
 indeed, solely responsible for the unfortunate issue of the peace 
 negotiations, for the decision in this matter was determined by 
 the muted resistance opposed by the rest of Europe to the 
 German demands ; but it unquestionably rendered the position of 
 the German negotiators at the peace congress far more difficult. 
 Suf&ce it to say that gradually all the powers of the second rank 
 joined this ambiguous aUiance against Bonaparte ; a foolish and 
 premature taking up of arms on the part of Murat in Italy, which 
 was speedily quelled, strengthened the courts in the conviction 
 that any negotiation with Bonapartism was impossible. Ger- 
 many appeared, even at the beginning of the great war, com- 
 pletely united, an experience which had been unknown for three 
 centuries. No one any longer ventured upon open treason, 
 although the hostile sentiments of the courts of Munich and 
 Stuttgart were manifested once again in a thousand disputes 
 about commissariat. The nation was to learn painfully enough that 
 harmony of views is not true unity. Since at the moment when 
 war had been declared the Germanic Federation was not yet in 
 existence, the German states could join the coalition only as 
 isolated individuals ; they did not receive any voice in the 
 councils of the great powers, and immediately perceived how 
 valueless was that right of independent diplomatic representa- 
 tion which they had regarded as the finest ornament of their 
 crowns. 
 
 In view of the enormous superiority of the fighting forces 
 of the allies, the prompt opening of the campaign offered a sure 
 prospect of success ; almost aU the well-known generals of the 
 coaUtion, Blucher and Gniesenau, Wellington, Toll, and 
 Diebitsch, were here fully agreed. " Hesitation," declared 
 Blucher, " will serve merely to provide Napoleon with armies 
 which we must fight at the cost ^^^of our own blood." In 
 Gneisenau's opinion, on May ist^three great armies, each com- 
 prising 200,000 men, could be ready, on the Upper, the Middle, 
 
 •47 
 
History of Germany 
 
 and the Lower Rhine respectively, for the invasion of France. 
 His statesmanlike vision enabled him to foresee what almost all 
 the others regarded as impossible, that the Imperator would 
 assume the offensive. All the more urgently did he advise the 
 allies to take the offensive on their side. If the three armies 
 should advance simultaneously on Paris, and if in the meanwhile 
 the fourth army, that from Russia, should assemble in their rear. 
 Napoleon would not be able to put into the field a force greater 
 than that of any one of these armies ; should one of the invading 
 armies suffer a mishap through the skill of its opponent, it could 
 withdraw to the great reserve army, whilst the other two could 
 continue the advance on Paris. Now, as in the previous year, 
 Gneisenau indicated the hostile capital as the only possible goal 
 of the campaign, whereas even men of courage like Humboldt 
 held the timid view that history never repeated itself. Now, 
 as before, Gneisenau issued warnings against any dispersal of 
 forces. If Napoleon were overthrown, everything else would be 
 thereby settled, including the fate of Italy. 
 
 In the Hofburg, on the other hand, the Italian theatre of 
 war was regarded as so extremely important that even Radetzky 
 declared that Austria must choose Switzerland for the central 
 field of her operations in order to remain in communication with 
 the Italian army. In the ItaUan peninsula things began to 
 ferment. The Milanese were already repenting of the premature 
 revolution of the previous year ; they were inclined to murmur 
 against the rule of the bastone tedesco. Murat's fantastical 
 manifesto, in which he spoke of Italian unity, made a certain 
 impression ; moreover, the natural enthusiasm on behalf of their 
 great countryman, who had once more manifested the miraculous 
 power of the antico senno of Italy, was reawakened. Emperor 
 Francis regarded it as necessary to send his brother John to the 
 new Lombardo-Venetian kingdom which, six years earlier, had 
 first summoned the Italians to freedom. The archduke was not 
 lacking in integrity, or in good words, but upon the experienced 
 southerners he made an extremely unfavourable impression. 
 The court of Vienna felt by no means secure in its Adriatic 
 possessions. In addition there was the old preference of the 
 Austrian generals, a preference shared also by Knesebeck, for far- 
 fetched and roundabout methods; finally, and above all, there 
 was an urgent desire to leave to the allies the dangers of the war 
 so that Austria might stand forth with unbroken forces when 
 peace should with difficulty be attained. 
 
 148 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 As a result of these considerations an astonishing plan of 
 campaign was drawn up, in complexity excelling even that 
 of 1814. In the Netherlands were to be 210,000 men under 
 Blucher and Wellington ; on the Middle Rhine, Barclay de Tolly 
 with 150,000 Russians ; on the Upper Rhine and in Switzerland, 
 200,000 Austrians ; finally, in Piedmont, an army of 60,000 men. 
 Here was a mass of troops which in the end of July was reinforced 
 by supports of 170,000 men to reach a total of 800,000, the 
 strength of the allies being thus three times as great as that of 
 the enemy. Schwarzenberg regarded not Paris but Lyons as the 
 immediate aim of operations. Of Napoleon, however, it might 
 be anticipated with certainty that he would hurl himself upon 
 the nearest foe, either upon the Netherlands army or upon 
 that on the Middle Rhine ; thus the Austrian troops were saved 
 from the blows of the dreaded enemy. Since according to the 
 Austrian plan the Russians were to take their place at once in 
 the first rank of the fighters, Schwarzenberg demanded the post- 
 ponement of the invasion tUl June i6th, then till June 27th, and 
 finally even till July ist. Although to all the other powers it 
 seemed an extremely dubious policy to give their restless enemy 
 three months' respite, in a coalition army the procrastinator always 
 has the right of it. Austria obstinately maintained that her 
 equipments could not be completed earUer, and consequently, 
 on April 19th, the great war council of the coalition in Vienna 
 adopted in essentials the proposals of the Hofburg, and agreed 
 to a postponement of operations. The diplomatic world, and 
 Hardenberg as well, beheved that the decisive issue would be 
 fought out in the centre of the aUied army. It was thought that 
 the army in the Netherlands would, like the Silesian army two 
 years earlier, play the modest role of an accessory corps ; and 
 now, just as then, the course of events was to mock all pro- 
 phecies. 
 
 With the dehberations about the plan of campaign was 
 associated a lively struggle concerning the distribution of the 
 smaller German contingents. The courts of the mid-German 
 states all made it a point of honour as petty kings to place their 
 troops under foreign command, if it were possible to do so, in 
 preference to Prussian command. Count Miinster considered 
 that the hour had come for the realisation of his ancient ideal, 
 an English-Hanoverian hegemony in North Germany, and he 
 warned his smaller neighbours against joining Prussia. In fact, 
 not only the Netherlanders, but also the Hanoverians, the Saxons, 
 
 149 
 
Plistory of Germany 
 
 the Nassauers, and the Branswickers, were assigned to Welling- 
 ton's English army ; only a small North German Federal army- 
 corps, consisting chiefly of men from Electoral Hesse, was placed 
 under Prussian command. The South German troops went with 
 the Austrians and Russians to the Upper and Middle Rhine, so 
 that on this occasion, too, it was impossible for any sentiment 
 of national comradeship-in-arms to be generated. 
 
 Napoleon's army was the best that he had ever led into the 
 field. The backbone of his regiments consisted of the veterans 
 who had returned from the military prisons and fortresses in 
 Germany. The common man looked up with idolatrous respect 
 to the petit caporal ; never before had the rank and file 
 been so thoroughly permeated with praetorian pride and pas- 
 sionate lust for battle. But they had little confidence in their 
 generals, for a portion of the marshals had remained loyal to the 
 Bourbons ; and if fortune should turn her back upon the 
 Imperator, little moral power of resistance was to be expected 
 from these vaUant grey-beards, who had all been false to their 
 oath to the flag and who had the worst to fear from the Bourbons. 
 
 How different was the feehng in the Prussian army ! When 
 in a vigorous appeal to his Prussians the king said : " Europe 
 cannot tolerate the man who now occupies the French throne, 
 the man who plainly announces that world-dominion is the aim 
 of his ever-renewed wars," he obtained everywhere a ready 
 response from his loyal people. Now, as two years before, the 
 young men hastened to take up arms. The Landsturm and the 
 detachment of the volunteer yagers were re-established ; and now, 
 as formerly, the fighters were inspired with the confident resolve 
 that this holy war should not end in any other way than that 
 of a complete victory. Prussia, still altogether exhausted by 
 the colossal efforts of recent years, again placed 250,000 men 
 with the colours ; even the smaller North German neighbours 
 showed, on this occasion, a lively zeal, sending 70,000 men. It 
 is true that the national army could not be compared with the 
 enemy in warlike experience and steadiness. At the moment 
 when the unexpected call to arms was sounded, the army was in 
 a dangerous state of transition. The Army Law and the acquire- 
 ments of new territory had made it necessary to remodel a 
 considerable [proportion of the forces ; even in the Netherlands 
 theatre of war individual battalions had to be separated from 
 their old regiments. The whole of the cavalry was reconstructed, 
 and the artillery was in need of men ; for his 304 guns, Blucher 
 
 150 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 had only 5,303 men ; in one army-corps there were only eleven 
 men per gun, whereas according to the regulations, there should 
 have been thirty. The majority of the troops of the 1 ne, which 
 until the end of the previous year had still remained on the 
 Rhine, had shortly before been sent back by the minister of war 
 to the eastern provinces, partly because he wished to disburden 
 the heavily pressed Rhinelanders of the cost of billeting, and 
 partly because he was afraid of a war with Austria. When now 
 the storm suddenly broke out in the west, and the king of the 
 Netherlands urgently begged for immediate aidj it was necessary 
 to despatch to the theatre of war whatever came first to hand. 
 Half of the 116,000 m^i who were got together in Belgium 
 belonged to the Landwehr, and of these a considerable propor- 
 tion, the Landwehr from the Elbe, was composed of troops from 
 the new province which had formerly belonged to Westphalia ; 
 these were men who had to get accustomed to Prussian service, 
 and many of them had quite recently fought in Napoleon's army. 
 
 In March, the king bestowed the supreme command of the 
 field army upon his grey-headed field-marshal ; and Gneisenau, 
 too, resumed the diflftcidt confidential position at Blucher's side. 
 In order to obviate the recurrence of disputes between the leaders, 
 the command of the first three army-corps which were to open 
 the Belgian campaign was entrusted to the generals Zieten, 
 Borstell, and Thiehnann, respectively, all three of them ranking 
 in the service as junior to Gneisenau. Biilow commanded the 
 fourth corps, which was to serve as a reserve, so that the head- 
 strong man did not come too frequently in contact with his 
 opponent Gneisenau. The North German Federal array-corps, 
 which assembled on the German Lower Rhine, in the rear of 
 Blucher's army, was placed under the command of Kleist, whose 
 gentle and restrained nature rendered him especially suitable for 
 the diplomatic tasks of a federal military commander. Finally, 
 York and Tauentzien received the command of the two army- 
 corps in the eastern provinces. General Grolman entered Blucher's 
 headquarters staff as quartermaster-general, and appointed four 
 of the most capable ofiicers, Reiche, Aster, Clausewitz, and 
 Valentini, as chiefs of staff in the Belgian army. The hero of 
 Wartenberg was profoundly vexed ; he several times demanded 
 his dismissal, and in this distribution of roles could see nothing 
 more than the partisan hatred of the " Tugendbund." All the 
 military opponents of the reform party shared the views of York, 
 complaining that with the appointment of Boyen and Grolman 
 
History of Germany 
 
 visionaries and demagogues gained control of the army. 
 At court there recommenced mahcious intrigues of secret sus- 
 picion against the Silesian headquarters staff. In the officers' 
 circles definite assurances were exchanged to the effect that Duke 
 Charies of Mecklenburg, who had once more greeted the field- 
 marshal upon his departure— greeted him in the name of the 
 BerUn garrison— had vainly begged for the command of a brigade 
 in Blucher's army ; the king's brother-in-law must be shielded 
 from the dangerous influence of Gneisenau. General Knesebeck 
 even undertook to advise the field-marshal that he should 
 voluntarily renounce the supreme command ; but hardly had 
 Knesebeck begun to speak cautiously about Blucher's advanced 
 age, when the old man burst out into loud laughter, and said, 
 " What nonsense you are talking ! " 
 
 This was all that could be done ; who could venture to drive 
 the hero of the nation from the position which belonged to him ? 
 During the last inactive months he had, indeed, become an infirm 
 old man, and at this moment the affectionate father received a 
 cruel blow ; his favourite son Francis, a bold and talented cavalry 
 officer, who in the last campaign had been severely wounded in 
 the head, became hopelessly insane. But as soon as war was 
 determined on, the magnificent old man speedily pulled himself 
 together, like a noble charger at the sound of the trumpets, and 
 no longer felt the burden of years and sorrow. Once more he had 
 foreseen it all : why would not the accursed diplomats beheve 
 him when he had prophesied to them a year ago that the rascal 
 would certainly break out of his cage ? Ever3rwhere on the 
 journey the masses thronged round the popular hero. Fresh and 
 youthful looking, radiating confidence, he appeared amongst his 
 rejoicing troops. How much good it did him to see the new East 
 Frisian regiment, composed of the fellow-countrymen of his 
 beloved wife, under his command. To the embittered Saxon 
 officers he delivered a mighty speech, straight from the fullness 
 of his German heart, sa3dng that he knew nothing here of Prussians 
 or Saxons, that he knew only of Germans who would and must 
 fight for their great fatherland. With such an army, he said, 
 he could conquer Tunis, TripoU, and Algiers, if only the sea were 
 not in the way. He could hardly await the hour of battle, and, 
 certain of victory, he wrote to Heinen, the manager of his estate : 
 " The French are before me, glory behind, and an explosion will 
 come soon ! " ^ 
 
 ' Blucher to Heinen, Lifege, May 6, 1815. 
 152 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 He found the army administration in a painful quandary. 
 The king of the Netherlands, who had so urgently begged for 
 speedy help from the Prussians, now that he knew himself to be in 
 safety did nothing whatever for the care of the allied armies in the 
 rich country; he knew the contempt which the Prussian office s 
 had cherished towards him since the Thuringian campaign ; he 
 responded to it by unconcealed dishke, and displayed so much 
 ill-will that Gneisenau blamed him, certainly with injustice, on 
 accovmt of his French sympathies. Hard cash, of which Well- 
 ington had a superfluity, was altogether lacking to the Prussians; 
 for a month and a half the army had received no pay. Ribben- 
 trop, the admirable commissary-general, was at his wits' end. 
 Blucher wrote angrily to the chancellor : " The king of the 
 Netherlands is the most disobUging, secretive, and avaricious of 
 men." ^ To meet the most urgent needs, he issued on his own 
 authority bills of exchange, which were Ccished by the merchants 
 of Elberfeld on the strength of his great name. Meanwhile he had 
 to have his troops provisioned by the peasants, and for this 
 reason was compelled to disperse his forces between Fleurus, 
 Namur, Cinay, and Hannut, farther north of the Meuse and the 
 Sambre than was advisable. These troubles did not disturb his 
 confidence of victory. At the first glance he recognised the 
 internal weakness of the new empire, sa5^ng : " The French 
 nation is by no means so devoted to Bonaparte as the French news- 
 papers declare." With prophetic certainty he declared that the 
 decision would be effected upon the Belgian theatre of war. " If we 
 bring the war to a happy conclusion," he wrote to the chancellor, 
 " all the great lords will be in my debt ; and everything will in fact 
 turn out well, for the great power which the over-cautious fellows 
 on our side assign to Napoleon in their dreams, is a cobweb of the 
 brain. He lacks everything and, above all, he has lost confidence 
 in himself and his followers." ^ 
 
 Blucher was from the first clear as to the demands which, 
 after the victory, Germany ought to impose upon France. As 
 early as the beginning of May he wrote : "I hope that this war 
 will be concluded in such a way that in the future France will no 
 longer be so dangerous to Germany. Alsace and Lorraine must 
 be surrendered to us." Yet it is a remarkable fact that this same 
 man, in whom were embodied the national pride and ardour of the 
 North German people, was at the same time a cosmopoHtan in the 
 
 ' Blucher to Hardenberg, Namur, May 27, 1815. 
 ^ Blucher to Hardenberg, Namur, June z, 1815. 
 
 153 
 
History of Germany 
 
 noblest sense of the word. It will for all time remain a proud 
 memory for our nation that the magnanimous German cosmopolitan 
 sentiment which had hitherto profited our culture alone, and fo: 
 our political hfe had been merely a curse, was now at length, in 
 the most extraordinary circumstances, to prove fruitful also in the 
 political sphere, and was to enable Germany's commander-in-chief 
 to enter into European politics in the grand style. In Blucher's 
 eyes this was a holy war of the fraternal nations of Europe on 
 behalf of their common freedom, and nothing seemed to him more 
 self-evident than that brother must stand for brother to the last 
 drop of blood. With a reckless self-forgetfulness which was 
 possible only to German idealism, he declared himself ready to 
 devote all the forces of his army to the cause of Europe. Full 
 of confidence he came to meet his EngUsh comrade-in arms, and 
 loyally assumed that the EngUshman would be animated by like 
 sentiments. The blunt and trustworthy soldierly character of the 
 English commander pleased him well. " Wellington is obliging- 
 ness itself," he wrote with satisfaction ; " he is an extremely 
 resolute man, we shaU get along very well together." Since, 
 notwithstanding his angry demands and proposals, the opening 
 of the war was continually postponed by the Viennese strategists, 
 he wrote menacingly to the chancellor : "If the command to 
 advance is not given, if the disturbances in France increase, I shall 
 do what I did in Silesia, and take the matter into my own hands. 
 Wellington will certainly join me in this." Gneisenau, prepared, 
 like his old friend, for every sacrifice on behalf of the common 
 cause, took another view of the Enghshman's character ; he con- 
 sidered that from Wellington might be expected the most 
 tenacious and valiant resistance to the enemy, but not any bold 
 act of insubordination, nor yet any kind of sacrij&ce on behalf 
 of the alUes. Gneisenau's judgment was right, for while in 
 Blucher's headquarters staff there prevailed a magnanimous 
 enthusiasm on behalf of European freedom, Wellington was an 
 Englishman from top to toe, in good things as in bad. 
 
 The six brief days of the Belgian campaign do not merely 
 awaken the highest political and human sympathy through the 
 restless, powerfully cumulative, and dramatic course of events, 
 through the excess of magnificent struggles, passions, and 
 changes of fortune which were pressed together within a few hours; 
 they afford also a profound insight into the wonderfully multiform 
 and unequal development of the western nations — for in the plains 
 of Brabant there were simultaneously in the battle-field three 
 
 IS4 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 fundamentally different epochs of European military history. 
 Here was the eighteenth century, the mercenary army of old 
 England ; there was the epoch of the Revolution, the professional 
 soldiery of the democratic tyrant ; there again, finally, was the 
 newest age, the Prussian nation in arms. Each one of the three 
 armies developed its most characteristic art in a titanic struggle, 
 and each was led by a commander appropriate to its character. 
 Here were Blucher and Gneisenau, the heroes of the stormy 
 national anger ; there was the crowned plebeian ; there again, 
 finally, was Wellington, who was at that time extolled by 
 Miinster and the high tories as the greatest mihtary commander 
 of the century, but who to us of a later age seems the last great 
 representative of a completely obsolete art of war. 
 
 Wellington is numbered among those rare men who, without 
 creative genius, almost without talent, simply by force of 
 character, by the power of will and of self-command, climb to 
 the heights of historic fame. Who would ever have prophesied 
 a world-wide reputation for this boy who was far from quick of 
 comprehension, who was never really young, and who was greatly 
 excelled in talent by his brothers Richard and Henry ? Son of 
 a high-church tory family which had settled in Ireland as a member 
 of the conquering race, and which amid the hostile Celts had 
 preserved all the more obstinately the pride of race and caste, 
 the good quaUties and the bad of the English motherland, he 
 had, in accordance with the old-established custom of EngUsh 
 young men of family, rapidly passed through the subordinate 
 ranks in the army with the help of money and favour, so that 
 when he was only twenty-five years old, he commanded a regi- 
 ment in the Revolutionary war. Subsequently in the East 
 Indies he learned the art of military leadership under the eyes of 
 his brother Richard Wellesley, the brilliant founder of British 
 power in the East. Severe to himself and others, unswervingly 
 obedient and faithful to duty, just and honourable, cold, trust- 
 worthy, and reasonable in all things, he showed himself completely 
 competent for the difficult military and political tasks which 
 Indian Ufe imposed upon the military commander. How boldly 
 the cautious man, who painfully weighed all possibilities before- 
 hand, could at the right moment seize the favour of fortvme, was 
 shown by the brilliant victory of Assaye, over the sixfold superior 
 force of the Hindus, and by the bold cavalry campaign in the 
 Mahratta mountains. Having returned to Europe, he took part 
 in the celebrated pillaging excursion to Copenhagen, brave and 
 
 155 
 
History of Germany 
 
 efficient as ever, but at the same time utterly indifferent about 
 the tragical fate of the little power thus nefariously attacked— 
 for never was son of Britain so completely permeated by the 
 English national view : "My country, right or wrong ! " Sub- 
 sequently, having received the supreme command in Portugal, 
 always full of a quiet confidence of victory, he dryly declared : 
 " I shall hold my ground." Upon this sober head the theatrical 
 display of the neo-French military glories made no impression 
 whatever ; he never doubted in the overthrow of Napoleon. 
 Through the six years of the Peninsular War he trained his mer- 
 cenaries to become virtuosi in all the methods of the traditional 
 art of war. 
 
 He had no use for innovations or comprehensive improve- 
 ments ; he never gave favour for any service, never proposed any 
 promotion out of order. Independent generals, men who thought 
 for themselves, were inconvenient to him, whereas his more liberal- 
 minded brother Richard eillowed talented subordinates to do as 
 they pleased ; what Wellington needed was trustworthy and 
 able tools, and he found these for himself with a secure knowledge 
 of men. His aides-de-camp were for the most part young peers, 
 who, mounted upon the best horses in the world, punctually carried 
 the commander's orders and obediently avoided having any 
 opinions of their own. He knew his own worth and said straight 
 out to his friends in the tory cabinet, " You have no one except 
 me " ; had himself provided with extraordinary powers, which 
 he never misused, but which enabled him to suspend and send 
 home any officer at his own discretion. His generals, occupying 
 the position assigned to them, could do whatever they thought 
 fit during the battle, but the nearest obstacle in front of them was 
 a barrier which they must not attempt to pass under pain of court- 
 martial. His officers had little love for the severe man who never 
 thawed into comradely cordiaUty, who never displayed any sign 
 of benevolence or magnanimity, not even when the service would 
 in no way have suffered had he done so. The piercing glance of 
 the cold eyes, the proud features with the aquiline nose and the 
 tightly closed, immobile mouth, the sharply commanding tones 
 of the voice, forbade any confidential approach. But all obeyed 
 him, all were proud if they could satisfy this man who was so 
 hard to please; not even in private conversation did the officers 
 venture to criticise or discuss the commander's measures. 
 They followed Wellington's commands blindly, as if these com- 
 mands had been unsearchable decrees of fate ; seldom did he 
 
 156 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 speak to them, and when he did so he communicated his inten- 
 tions in slow, cumbrous, and inelegant language, but definitely 
 and clearly. 
 
 So absolute a dependence was possible only in the small 
 armies of the old time. In fact, Wellington found himself most 
 at his ease when, Hke the lansquenet leaders of the sixteenth 
 century, such as Fnmdsberg, Emser, and Leyva, he was himself 
 the personal centre of the army, when his regiments were 
 assembled round him in close array, and when he could practically 
 see them all at once. Far beneath the officers of rank who had 
 gained their commissions by purchase, separated from them by 
 an impassable gulf, were the rude masses of the rank and file, 
 " the scum of the English nation" as Wellington himself phrased 
 it. These hirelings were held together by abundant pay and 
 good diet, with the aid of a suitable use of the cat. It was 
 wonderful what these athletic bodies could effect with the courage 
 of the old English boxers ; it was wonderful what muscular 
 energy and staying-power they could display when the drill- 
 sergeant had had them under his thumb for a few years ; 
 irresistible was the bayonet attack of the giants of the guard, 
 irresistible the mighty charge of the heavy dragoons upon their 
 grey chargers. But woe to the town which was taken by storm 
 by these troops, as was the unhappy Badajoz ; in the delirium 
 of victory, the cat-o'-nine-tails lost its terrors, the bonds of 
 discipline were rent asunder, and lust of murder, greed for 
 plunder, all bestial passions, were unchained. Thus the army 
 resembled a great piece of clockwork, operating with the utmost 
 precision, and yet it was something more than a machine, for 
 in the officers' corps there persisted the knightly breeding and 
 the national pride of the EngUsh nobility ; and the brutal rankers, 
 after so many brilliant successes on the part of their uncon- 
 quered commander, were wholly devoted to him, and followed 
 his glorious banner with absolute confidence. 
 
 In Spain, Wellington economised his troops with extreme 
 circumspection, venturing a bold attack only at considerable 
 intervals when there was every prospect of success, but never 
 staking the existence of his army. He had never encountered 
 the Imperator upon the field of battle ; Napoleon's grandiose 
 manner of making war, forcing victory by the use of colossal, 
 massive blows, remained unknown to him. Quite unmoved, 
 he continued the traditional cautious art of warfare which had 
 proved so successful in the unusual circumstances of the Spanish 
 
 157 
 
History of Germany 
 
 theatre of war, regarding it as the only right method. He looked 
 down upon the national army with all the contempt of the pro- 
 fessional soldier ; to him such armies were no better than the 
 Spanish guerrillas which had so often proved useless upon the 
 battle-field, and never would he admit that the success of the 
 peninsular campaign would after all have been impossible 
 without the fanaticism of these undisciplined bands, which, 
 operating in the rear of their enemies, wearied and weakened 
 these by the terrors of petty warfare. " Enthusiasm," he 
 wrote, in his clumsy manner, to Castlereagh, "is in fact no help 
 in bringing anything to pass, and is only an excuse for the 
 disorder with which everything is done, and for the lack of 
 discipline and obedience in armies." These military views were 
 inspired simultaneously by the anti-revolutionary sentiment 
 of the high tory. In later years, as soon as his secure soldier's 
 glance enabled him to recognise the absolute necessity for reform, 
 Wellington ventured on several occasions to separate himself 
 from his political friends, and, undisturbed by the anger of his 
 party, to complete with a high hand what he had himself 
 hitherto resisted as a dangerous innovation. In old age, 
 crowned with fame, he stood high enough to live only for wider 
 issues, to follow only the voice of serene patriotism. He said 
 once : "I would willingly give my life if thereby I could save 
 my country from a month's civU war." In the year 1815, he 
 was still a conservative partisan through and through ; the 
 world of war of those days appeared to him simply a struggle of 
 legitimate authority against the Revolution. 
 
 He regarded half with suspicion and half with contempt 
 the national passions which were surging through the nations 
 of the Continent. He had passed the greater part of his life 
 among the Irish, the Hindus, the Spaniards, and the Portuguese ; 
 his experiences had convinced him that no other nation could be 
 compared even distantly with the EngUsh. The old EngUsh 
 sin of under-estimation of foreigners was, in this dry and 
 unamiable hero, displayed in so injurious and coldly arrogant 
 a form that even the Spaniards, who owed him so much, 
 detested him cordially. Like his friend Castlereagh, he remained 
 of the opinion that parliamentary freedom must be an exclusive 
 possession of the favoured English stock, and that it was unsuit- 
 able for the immaturity of the continentals. Just as previously 
 in India and in Spain he had combined the activities of the 
 statesman with those of the soldier, so in Paris and Vienna after 
 
 158 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 the peace he acted as envoy, and was taken by the ministers so 
 deeply into their confidence that he was regarded as practically 
 a member of the cabinet. He shared the mistrust of the tories 
 for the rising powers of Prussia and Russia ; he was far more 
 intimately acquainted with the secrets of the cabinets than was 
 Blucher's headquarters staff, emd from the first took over his 
 command with a fixed, clear, and carefully thought-out political 
 design, with the intention, that is to say, of restoring the legiti- 
 mate king to the palace of his ancestors. 
 
 Among the 94,000 men of his army, 32,000, approximately 
 one-third, were EngUsh ; 37,000 were Germans ; and 25,000 
 were Netherlanders. Of the Germans, it was only the famous 
 regiments of the German legion, numbering about 7,000 men, 
 which were as experienced in war as the well-drilled English 
 veterans, the rank and file, in their case, being less rough than 
 the English, whilst the officers, after the German maimer, were 
 more highly cultured ; the black troop of the duke of Brunswick 
 also consisted for the most part of well-trained soldiers. On the 
 other hand, among the Hanoverians and Nassauers the troops 
 were for the most part raw, and the same was the case in the 
 newly-formed Netherland regiments ; no trust at all could be 
 placed in the Belgieuis, whose sentiments were French. Wellington 
 had Httle confidence in this motley army, and endeavoured to 
 give it a greater moral force by stiffening the young troops with 
 detachments from the veteran forces. Nor had he much esteem for 
 the warlike value of the Prussian army. From time to time, indeed, 
 Blucher's powerful personaUty, the lofty spiritual impulses which 
 were expressed by the words and glances of the old German, 
 charmed even the sober Englishman ; on one occasion, looking 
 after Blucher riding away, Wellington said, with unwonted 
 warmth : " What a fine old boy he is." But the " republican 
 spirit " of this national army seemed to him sinister. The 
 passionate national pride and the impulse to activity of the 
 Prussian army had now become a matter for suspicion to all 
 the courts ; at this time even the czar was of opinion that he 
 would some day find it necessary to protect his Prussian friend 
 against the latter's own army. 
 
 Although Welhngton, like most of his countr3mien, was 
 secretly of opinion that the overthrow of the world-empire had 
 really been effected by the Spanish war, he was not without 
 anxiety at the prospect of his first personal encounter with 
 Napoleon. He would not and dared not expose himself to the 
 
 159 
 
History of Germany- 
 
 danger of a defeat ; for how could England effect the restoration 
 of the Bourbons, undesired by the other courts, if his Uttle army 
 were beaten. Consequently he went to work with extreme 
 caution. Since the council of war in Vienna had resolved to 
 postpone the struggle, the English commander, in accordance 
 with his custom, 3delded unquestioning obedience, and prepared 
 for a cautious defence. Whilst Blucher was compelled by com- 
 missariat diflftculties to distribute his army through a wide 
 region north-west of the Sambre (though still near enough to 
 be able, in case of need, to collect his army with extreme 
 punctuality within four-and-twenty hours), Wellington need- 
 lessly and intentionally distributed his forces throughout an 
 even wider area. Being ignorant of Napoleon's character and 
 methods of warfare, he assumed that the French would simul- 
 taneously enter Belgium at different places and in several 
 columns ; instead of massing his army near the Prussians, he 
 distributed it upon the wide line from Quatre Bras westward to 
 the vicinity of Ghent ; whilst, after his strictly methodical 
 manner, he retained his reserves at Brussels, so that he could 
 send support to any threatened point, as circumstances might 
 dictate. He beUeved that in this way he was prepared for any 
 possible attack, that he could safeguard communications witl^ 
 England by way of Antwerp and Ostend, and that at the same 
 time he could secure against surprise his proteges, the court of 
 the fugitive king in Ghent and the Uttle force of the Bourbon 
 household troops at Alost. This widely extended distribution 
 of his forces, however, hindered rapid co-operation with Blucher ; 
 it remained possible that Napoleon, being superior in strength 
 to each individual section of the allies, might suddenly advance 
 between the two armies, and might defeat the Prussians, who 
 stood nearest to him, before Wellington could hasten to their 
 assistance. 
 
 Shortly before the swords were actually drawn from the 
 scabbards the German army suffered a new disaster. Not even 
 this war, the first which the Germans had undertaken in com- 
 plete harmony, was to begin without the flames of the old, fierce 
 fratricidal hatred again springing to life. The unhappy Saxon 
 negotiations had a tragic sequel in Belgium. As soon as the great 
 powers had come to an agreement about the fate of Saxony, they 
 determined to allow the imprisoned king to approach near to 
 Vienna, so that he might accept the arrangement that had been 
 
 i6o 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 made. The Prussian government learned from Dresden that 
 the Saxon high nobility desired to take advantage of the passage 
 of their tribal prince to make a noisy demonstration ; it was 
 informed also by the minister in Berlin that Frederick Augustus 
 was determined to do everjrthing he could in Vienna to secure a 
 simple repudiation of the arrangement, and to begin the negotia- 
 tions all over again. * Hardenberg immediately took his 
 measures. The prisoner, who started on February 22nd upon the 
 journey to Pressburg, had on his way to pass through Silesia. On 
 the Austrian frontier he was received with the chiming of 
 bells and with all the pomp due to a prince. More than such 
 honours as this Emperor Francis was imable to offer to his protege, 
 for in view of the need to repel the new attack of the French, the 
 contest about Saxony appeared in edl its petty triviality as a 
 nuisance which must be got rid of at all costs. Prussia now had 
 the satisfaction to learn that all the principles of international 
 law which Hardenberg had hitherto had to defend alone, amid 
 the outcries of an outraged " Europe," were now formally recog- 
 nised by Austria, England, and France. Unanimously the 
 powers declared that inasmuch as a conquest of the entire 
 country, a debellatio, had been effected, there was no legal ground 
 for making peace with the dethroned prince ; it was only as an 
 act of grace that the conqueror was prepared to restore half 
 of his land to Frederick Augustus, if he would first discharge the 
 inhabitants of the other half from their oath, and accept the 
 Viennese decision ; until then the administration of the whole 
 country must remain in Prussia's hands. It was with such 
 proposals that, on March 12th, Mettemich, Wellington, and 
 Talleyrand met Frederick Augustus. 
 
 When he defiantly demanded the resumption of the negotia- 
 tions, they answered in a sharply couched note that he completely 
 misunderstood his position. Talle5n:and gave an imposing assur- 
 ance that Frederick Augustus had served " the most cruel enemy 
 of Germany," and therefore deserved no consideration ! The 
 vacillations that followed (negotiations they can hardly be termed) 
 aroused no more than a pathological interest. For two months 
 the blinded old man put the powers off with demands for com- 
 pensation by Warsaw or Lusatia, with appeals to law, with formal 
 considerations, and a thousand petty shifts. Not till May i8th 
 was peace restored between Prussia and Saxony, precisely in the 
 
 1 Reports of the Saxon general government and of minister Geltz to the chan- 
 eellor, dated January 2 and February 19, 1815. 
 
 161 M 
 
History of Germany 
 
 terms arranged by the Committee of Five. At the courts the 
 suspicion was aroused that Frederick Augustus was intentionally 
 protracting the negotiations until a new victory of Napoleon 
 might restore their old power to the Albertines. This view was 
 not unreasonable. The Dresden mob, that of the nobles and that 
 of the common people alike, hailed with delight the prospect of 
 the great ally's return ! Then, as in the year 1866, the honour- 
 able feelings of these circles found faithful expression in the 
 couplet : 
 
 " Preussischer Kuckuck, warte ! 
 Uns hilft Bonaparte !" 
 
 The court in Pressburg was inspired by different sentiments ; at 
 that moment the return of the Napoleonic dominion would have 
 been unwelcome to the old king, because it would have deprived 
 him of the support of his powerful protector. The protracted 
 and wearisome course of the final negotiations found sufficient 
 explanation in the Albertine's legitimist obstinacy and pedantic 
 adhesion to form ; to his petty royal pride what did it matter 
 that the intolerable provisional conditions in his unfortunate 
 country, which for a year and a half had known no rest, should 
 be protracted for a few months more ? 
 
 The Prussian general government encountered similar senti- 
 ments in the Saxon officials. The supreme authorities offered 
 obstinate opposition when the order was issued for the inevitable 
 partition of the archives and registers ; the general government 
 was even asked to furnish accounts. The privy council of 
 Dresden, in a lengthy and ridiculous memorial, went so far as to 
 maintain that it was " impossible for the partition to be effected 
 by a general mutual understanding," and appealed to the par- 
 liamentary speeches "of Lord Castlereagh, who had personally 
 co-operated in the composition of the Viennese protocols." All 
 was in vain ; even the name of the English lord made no 
 impression upon the chancellor. Hardenberg ordered that strict 
 measures should be taken; the partition had been irrevocably 
 decided by the powers, and "there could be absolutely no ques- 
 tion" of rendering an account for the administration of con- 
 quered territory. 1 Thus the country remained temporarily in 
 Prussia's possession; all the preparations necessary for the 
 definitive partition were completed; the hesitation of the old 
 
 * Instructions to the general government, March 24 and 27, 1815. 
 
 162 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 king led merely to fruitless disputes. Not even a glimmer of 
 understanding, however, penetrated the minds of the Saxon 
 legitimists when they finally saw the fruit of their conduct under 
 their very eyes ; they never recognised that it was their own 
 enmity to Prussia which had notably co-operated in bringing about 
 the much-lamented partition of the country. 
 
 Frederick Augustus's obstinacy was to have momentous 
 consequences for the little Saxon army. For a year and a half 
 the war-lord had been a prisoner in Prussia's hands, whilst his 
 soldiers had been auxUiary associates in the allied camp ; such 
 was the perplexing and unnatural situation of the unfortunate 
 Saxon regiments. It was their misfortune that they had enjoyed 
 almost no share in the mihtary glories of the aUies ; the sentiments 
 of the Prussian army were utterly strange to these long-service 
 professional soldiers, and to them the name Landwehr was a term 
 of abuse. After the peace, they remained for a long time in 
 western Germany, far from their homes, but subject to continual 
 influence from Dresden by letters and envoys. In the officers' 
 corps the persistent uncertainty about the future of their country 
 led to the formation of factions. An address in favour of the 
 imprisoned king was drawn up, notwithstanding the vigorous 
 opposition of the Prussian commanding officer. The legitimists 
 could no longer endure to see upon the breast of their comrades 
 the green cross, a distinction awarded by the Russian govern- 
 ment ; in Coblentz there were actual affrays between Gorres and 
 the Saxon officers. The rank and file began to distrust their leaders, 
 they felt that they had been betrayed and sold, for even the 
 common soldier could not fail to perceive that the sudden removal 
 of the army-corps to the neighbourhood of Prussian garrisons 
 was dictated by poUtical considerations. The troops suffered 
 from all the evils of party strife. Anyone who takes an unbiassed 
 view of the matter can merely wonder that under such unhappy 
 conditions the bonds of German discipline had not been earUer 
 dissolved. 
 
 Throughout the winter the discipline of the regiments 
 remained beyond reproach, although old Rhenish Confederate 
 memories were naturally revived, and here and there in the 
 quarters of the Saxon soldiers the cry vive I'empereur might be 
 heard. The two generals who rightly enjoyed the highest repute 
 with the army, Zeschau and Le Coq, were strict legitimists, and 
 therefore could not be left with the troops. By a disastrous error, 
 the command of the corps was entrusted to General Theilmann, 
 
 163 
 
History of Germany 
 
 who was regarded with suspicion by his old comrades as a 
 deserter ; and he strengthened the ill-feeling towards him by 
 endeavouring, after his theatrical manner and with unsoldierly 
 loquacity, to win over the oli&cers to the Prussian side by toasts 
 and speeches. When the news came from Vienna of the partition 
 of Saxony, he at once, on his own initiative, demanded of his 
 comrades that they should choose between the Prussian and the 
 Saxon service ; thereupon ensued fresh dissensions among the 
 officers and increasing disaffection among the troops. In this way 
 the general, by his tactless and officious behaviour, was partially 
 responsible for the failure of discipline in the little army. 
 
 It was the unavoidable duty of the king of Prussia to put 
 an end to this hopeless confusion. As early as March, Boyen 
 foresaw the risk of disturbances among the Saxon troops. Could 
 affairs be left in their present condition until the Albertine 
 was pleased to make up his mind to abandon his foolish resist- 
 ance ? On March 14th the king ordered General Gneisenau that he 
 should immediately constitute new regiments out of the portion 
 of the troops belonging to the Prussian subdivision of Saxony, 
 and added : "It will be my pleasure henceforward to make no 
 distinction between them and my other regiments." ' The choice 
 of service was left free to the officers. The king's conscientious- 
 ness led him to avoid entering into the painful question whether 
 the earlier oath of the Saxons to their colours had not been dis- 
 solved by their desertion to the side of the allies. He merely 
 ordered a reconstruction of the Saxon regiments, which was 
 unquestionably within his rights, and wished to postpone the 
 swearing-in of the troops that were to form part of the Prussian 
 army until Frederick Augustus had discharged them from their 
 old oath. On April ist Hardenberg issued further strict injunc- 
 tions to General Gneisenau to act on the royal order, since there 
 could be no doubt, from the course of the negotiations, that 
 Frederick Augustus would ultimately give way. The powers 
 in Vienna were in harmony with the chancellor's procedure ; they 
 resolved to send the regiments that remained with the Saxon 
 crown to join Wellington's army. The Prussian generals indul- 
 gently postponed the carrying out of the order for some additional 
 weeks. To show his confidence in the Saxons, Blucher took up 
 his headquarters among them in Lidge. But his cordial addF^s 
 fell upon deaf ears ; the discontent of the troops increased from 
 day to day; and the billet-hosts of the Li^ge region, who were 
 
 1 Cabinet Order to Gneisenau, March 14, 1815. 
 164 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 all Bonapartist in sentiment, still further increased the hostiUty 
 of the blinded men. 
 
 When at length, by a new royal order, the division of the 
 army was decreed, there was a terrible outbreak of the discon- 
 tent which had so long been smouldering among the troops — 
 discontent stimulated by emissaries from Dresden, and unques- 
 tionably fostered by a few unscrupulous officers. A crowd of 
 drunken soldiers invaded the commanding officer's house, crying 
 out, " We will not suffer ourselves to be divided." The old 
 hero had to take to flight from his own soldiers ; he escaped death 
 only through the bravery of his Saxon sentries. In such out- 
 breaks everything depends upon the force of will and the moral 
 prestige of the officers. The Saxon sentries in front of Blucher's 
 door honourably fulfilled their mihtary duty ; the cavalry and 
 the artillery remained altogether aloof from the disorder. Even 
 among the infantry the men were quiet wherever the leaders knew 
 how to control them ; those officers who had already reported 
 for Prussian service maintained their authority whenever they 
 were efficient men. That battalion, however, which at the time 
 of the battle of Dennewitz had gone over to the Prussians earlier 
 than the other Saxons, now in Liege distinguished itself by a 
 tragical lack of discipline. ^ 
 
 Lenity in face of this mutiny almost in sight of the enemy 
 would have been disgraceful weakness. Military law took its 
 course. The ringleaders were shot ; the colours of the Saxon 
 guard were pubhcly burned. General Borstell, who out of 
 sympathy with the unhappy men had refused to undertake the 
 burning of the colours, had to pay for his disobedience by con- 
 finement in a fortress ; the command of the second army-corps 
 was taken over by General Pirch. The Saxon corps had then 
 to start upon the march home, for the Prussian soldiers, raging 
 at the insult offered to "Marshal Forwards," would not fight beside 
 the Saxons, and Wellington refused to accept the mutinous troops 
 into his army. Guilty and innocent alike lost the glory of Ligny 
 and Belle Alliance. Upon the return march the Saxons had what 
 was perhaps the most horrible experience which has ever befallen 
 German soldiers. EverjTwhere on the Rhine and in West- 
 phaha there was displayed a fierce hatred and loathing of the 
 mutineers ; in Aix-la-Chapelle armed citizens suspiciously occupied 
 
 ^ I avail myself here, among other sources, of the description given by my 
 father who, as a very young officer, was attached to a Saxon regiment in the vicinity 
 of Li4ge, and who was able to ke ep his men in order. 
 
 165 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the guard-posts and the gates when the Saxon regiments were 
 marching by. Everywhere the nation was rejoicing over the 
 briUiant victory of Blucher and Gneisenau. The Prussian 
 volunteers, on their way to join the victorious army, could not 
 control their contempt for the " Saxon dogs " ; after repeated 
 sanguinary brawls had occurred, it was necessary on several 
 occasions for the men to avoid the high-roads in order to escape 
 ignominious encounters. For the oiificers, too, there was the 
 bitter reflection that they might have taken part in the battle 
 of Belle Alliance, and that there they would unquestionably 
 have done their duty ; but of course all the blame was cast upon 
 the Prussian generals who, after all, had only carried out their 
 king's command and who had not asked the Saxons to swear any 
 new oath. Whilst the whole of Germany was uplifted in heart 
 at the new glory of Prussian arms, in Saxony a profound gloom 
 prevailed. After the division had finally been carried out, the 
 little army had to suffer for decades from the consequences of 
 this evil day ; it was overloaded with officers, and promotion 
 was completely arrested. The Napoleonic veterans gave the 
 tone ; it was from these circles that a deadly hatred against 
 Prussia was handed down as a sacred inheritance to the younger 
 generation. 
 
 The distress of the old field-marshal verged upon despair. 
 For five-and-fifty years he had worn the sword and had never spilt 
 any blood but that of the enemy. Now came this disgrace ! Now 
 was it necessary for him, the father of his soldiers, to undertake 
 executions in his own army, and he had subsequently to exercise 
 all his authority to protect the mutineers from the rage of the 
 Prussians. The great man was shaken as if by an ague, and 
 hstened in a state of terrible distress for the roll of the musketry 
 when the sentence of the court-martial was being carried out. 
 To the king of Saxony, however, he wrote with his characteristic 
 frankness, using such language as a military commander had 
 never before ventured to use to a crowned head : "By your 
 earlier proceedings your majesty has brought the profoundest 
 disaster upon your subjects, a respected branch of the German 
 nation. It may result from your subsequent conduct that 
 this branch will be overwhelmed with shame. The blood that 
 has been spilt will one day at God's judgment seat be visited upon 
 him who was responsible ; and before the throne of the Almighty 
 to have given commands and to have allowed commands to be 
 given, will be regarded as identical. Your majesty is well aware 
 
 i66 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 that an old man of seventy-three can no longer have any other earthly 
 desire than to make the voice of truth audible, and to make the 
 right prevail. For this reason your majesty will have to receive 
 this letter" ! ' In his anger, Blucher may have said a word too 
 much, for there is no proof that the mutiny was deliberately 
 planned. But on the whole the old man was right ; had it not 
 been for the blind hesitation of Frederick Augustus, and for 
 the scandalous incitements which for months past had been 
 made by his aiders and abettors, the blood of the Saxon soldiers 
 would not have flowed at Lidge. 
 
 In the second week of June, skilfully concealing his march. 
 Napoleon led his field army towards the Belgian frontier in 
 order to cross the Sambre at Charleroi. From that town a road 
 runs northward through Quatre Bras to Brussels, and thence 
 passes eastward in a wide curve through Sombreffe to Namur. 
 The Imperator had approximate knowledge regarding the posi- 
 tion of the allies, being aware that Wellington's army was in the 
 neighbourhood of Brussels, and that of the Prussians at Namur. 
 Consequently the triangle between Charleroi, Quatre Bras, and 
 Sombreffe was the natural place for the junction of the allied 
 armies ; should this junction be effected in good time, the victory 
 of the 210,000 men of the two commanders over the 128,000 
 Frenchmen would be assured. Consequently Napoleon resolved 
 to break in here between the two armies in order to defeat them 
 separately. Although he was profoundly disturbed by the fer- 
 ment in France, and by the almost hopeless difficulty of his 
 mihtary situation, and although on his own admission he could not 
 during this campaign always maintain his customary calm sense 
 of security, he still possessed his ancient arrogant contempt for 
 his opponent. He hoped that his sudden appearance would suffice 
 to press Blucher back towards the east, and to force Wellington 
 to retreat northward, so that the interval between the two would 
 be increased. He did not expect that the Prussians would 
 immediately give battle, close to the frontier. But the unex- 
 pected happened. As soon as Gneisenau learned that the enemy 
 was approaching Charleroi, he immediately, on the night of June 
 I4-I5th, ordered the concentration of the entire army at Som- 
 breffe, to be completed on the i6th. The advance of the French 
 began at dawn on June 15th. Their right wing attacked Zieten's 
 
 ^ Blucher to King Frederick Augustus, May 6, 1815. See Appendix II. 
 
 167 
 
History of Germany 
 
 army-corps, which, after a bloody skirmish, withdrew along the 
 road to Sombreffe. 
 
 Already in these opening struggles the terrible embitter- 
 ment of the two nations was manifest. How often in the previous 
 year had the Napoleonic veterans returning from the German 
 fortresses begun brawls in blind anger when they met Prussian 
 regiments on the road ; now they wanted to take revenge on 
 these " Prussian dogs " who, on their side, responded with a 
 no less cordial hatred. Simultaneously Napoleon's left wing 
 marched northward upon the road to Quatre Bras, and since the 
 outposts of the English army stood far further back than those 
 of the Prussians, the French forces easily reached Frasnes. Thus 
 the position of the Prussian army at Sombreffe was threatened 
 on the right flank. Moreover, it was already doubtful whether 
 on the next day Billow's corps could reach the army in time. To 
 spare the susceptibilities of the older general, Gneisenau had 
 issued marching orders to Biilow in so polite a phraseology, that 
 the command sounded almost like a mere suggestion. Biilow, 
 always inclined to act on his own initiative, and still without 
 information regarding the real outbreak of hostilities, stayed 
 quietly in LiSge, and postponed the ordered junction of his corps 
 at Hannut until June i6th. Consequently a second urgent order to 
 advance sent to him at Hannut failed to find him there ; at a time 
 when every minute was valuable, the fourth corps lost an entire 
 day, and was unable to join the army on the i6th. Extremely 
 serious, therefore, was the situation of the three Prussian corps 
 which formed a junction in the neighbourhood of Sombreffe, 
 and although the members of Blucher's headquarters staff 
 impetuously demanded that decisive action should be taken at 
 once, on the morning of June i6th the question was earnestly 
 debated whether it would be better to move the army farther to 
 the north, nearer to the English forces to the right and to the 
 rear ; there the junction of the alhes could be completed undis- 
 turbed. 
 
 Whereas Gneisenau immediately saw through Napoleon's 
 designs, Welhngton held fast to his previous opinion that the 
 enemy's advance would be effected in several columns, and 
 dreaded an attack upon his right flank, upon the road from Mons. 
 He disregarded the first news of the skirmish near Charleroi, for 
 he believed that only a portion of Napoleon's army was there ; 
 and even when, on the afternoon of June 15th, a whole day later 
 than Blucher, he issued from Brussels orders for the concentration 
 
 168 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 of his army, he did not simply command that the whole army 
 should march to the left, to the important nodal point of 
 Quatre Bras where the roads from Charleroi and Namur to 
 Brussels meet and where a junction with the Prussians was 
 possible, but he directed his corps to the Une five miles in length 
 from Enghien in the west through Nivelles to Genappe in the 
 east, so that the Enghsh army touched the Charleroi road only by 
 its extreme left. All the orders of the Enghsh commander were 
 dictated by the utterly groundless anxiety of being outflanked to 
 the west ; his reserves, which should have been sent to Genappe 
 upon the Charleroi road, were kept by him on the i6th for five 
 hours at Waterloo, because he doubted whether he ought not to 
 employ them farther to the west. Fortunately Prince Bernard 
 of Weimar with the Nassau brigade, acting on his own initiative, 
 occupied the cross-roads of Quatre Bras on the afternoon of 
 June 15th ; but even this weak advance-post of the left wing of 
 the Enghsh was still several miles behind and to the right of the 
 Prussian position, and would with difficulty be able to prevent 
 Blucher's right flank from being turned. 
 
 Yet more disastrous was it that WeUington was himself com- 
 pletely deceived, and that he deceived the Prussian commander, 
 regarding the position which the Enghsh army could assume on 
 the i6th. At midnight on the 15th he wrote to Blucher that 
 next day, at ten o'clock, 20,000 men of the English army would 
 be at Quatre Bras, and this was simply impossible in view of the 
 actual disposition of the forces. On June i6th, before the break 
 of day, he left the brilliant ball which the duchess of Richmond 
 was giving to the English officers, mounted his horse, and 
 hastened on the Charleroi road, southward beyond Quatre Bras, to 
 the heights of Frasnes, just opposite the French left wing. Thence 
 at about half-past ten he wrote to Blucher saying that at noon 
 his reserves would be at Genappe, about two miles behind Quatre 
 Bras, and that at the same hour the Enghsh cavalry would reach 
 Nivelles, six miles to the west of Quatre Bras. If this was 
 accurate, Blucher could count with certainty upon the support 
 of the English in the afternoon. At one o'clock the two com- 
 manders met upon the windmill MU of Bussy, in the rear of the 
 Prussian position, and here WelUngton promised that he would 
 take part in the battle in the afternoon, attacking the French 
 in the rear or in the flank, as circumstances might dictate, by 
 way of Marbais or Frasnes. The duke parted from the Prussian 
 commander with the words, " I shall he here at four o'clock." 
 
 169 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Trusting in this promisCi Blucher and Gneisenau resolved 
 to offer battle. The two army-corps of Zieten and Pirch were 
 facing southward upon the hills of Brye ; and farther forward, in 
 the low-lying and damp meadow-land of the Ligne brook, which 
 extends along the foot of this gentle elevation, on the stream, 
 were, to the right, the village of St. Amand, and to the left the 
 village of Ligny, both occupied in force. Thielmann, with the 
 third army-corps, did not reach the battle-field till noon, after 
 an exhausting march, and placed his troops between Sombreffe 
 and Tongrinelle, as a left wing "facing westward, so that the hnes 
 of the centre and of the left wing met almost at a right angle, 
 and the Kne of battle formed an angle, opening towards the south. 
 The extreme right wing at Wagnelee was completely unprotected 
 should an attack be made upon it from the west, from the neigh- 
 bourhood of Frasnes. It was only the confident expectation that 
 WelKngton would arrive at the right moment to support the right 
 wing that determined the Prussian commanders to give battle in 
 so disadvantageous a position ; they hoped to be able to main- 
 tain the fight through the afternoon, until, towards evening, the 
 40,000 men of the English army would arrive to determine the 
 issue. 
 
 But the English commander was unable to keep his word. 
 He was himself attacked at Quatre Bras by a superior force, and 
 even at three o'clock in the afternoon he had only 7,000 men on 
 the spot ; then reinforcements began to arrive, but it was not 
 until late in the evening that more than 30,000 men were 
 assembled at Quatre Bras, just enough to repel the attack, so that 
 there could no longer be any question of giving the promised 
 support. Wellington had promised the impossible, unquestion- 
 ably in good faith, and through an error ; but, after all, what 
 did it matter to him that he could not keep his word and that 
 through his fault his allies suffered a reverse ? They were only 
 Germans, and never had Wellington had any regard for the 
 foreign nations with whom his life as a warrior brought him in 
 contact, whether they were called Hindus, Portuguese, or Prus- 
 sians. His immediate task was to preserve the English army — 
 such was his view of his duties. If his allies undertook to deliver 
 the main assault upon the enemy, he would all the more cer- 
 tainly secure time to get his own troops together. It was the 
 fault of the duke alone, it was due to the belated and defective 
 assembling of his forces, and subsequently to his giving a promise 
 it was impossible for him to keep, that instead of a battle with 
 
 170 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 united forces there took place two simultaneous battles, 
 separated from one another by fully five miles, both fought 
 under extremely unfavourable conditions.^ 
 
 Even as late as the morning of June i6th the Imperator 
 remained under the delusion that the two armies of the coaUtion 
 had withdrawn respectively to Brussels and Namur, and for this 
 reason he did not grudge a long rest to his troops, which had 
 been wearied by the fighting of the day before and by the pro- 
 longed marches of the previous days. Not until noon was he 
 assured that the Prussians still "maintained their position at Ligny 
 and St. Amand la Haye, and he then determined upon an attack 
 with the main body of his army, the right wing, and the 
 reserves. Ney, however, who was at Frasnes upon the Brussels 
 road, with the left wing, received orders to march away to the 
 right, and to attack the Prussians upon the right flank ; in this 
 way, on the evening of the long summer day, Blucher's army might 
 be annihilated. This plan of battle presupposed that upon the 
 Brussels road Ney would encounter no more than a weak hostile 
 force, that the English had really withdrawn to Brussels. 
 
 Upon the battle-field of Ligny, Napoleon had about 75,000 
 men, and Blucher from 78,000 to 80,000. The unfortunate dis- 
 " position of the Prussian forces enabled the Imperator to employ 
 almost the whole of his forces against La Haye and Ligny, where 
 the two army-corps of Zeiten and Pirch, numbering 56,000 men, 
 had unaided to sustain the attack of a superior force. Thielmann, 
 separated from Ligny by the winding stream of the Ligne, was 
 occupied in repeUing some feint attacks of the French ; he was 
 indeed able to send a portion of his troops to the aid of the other 
 two corps, but he could not take part in the principal struggle 
 with the mass of his own corps. The main battle took place for the 
 possession of La Haye and Ligny ; here, within this narrow area, 
 was the issue to be decided, and here the Prussian left wing could 
 take no part. Both armies fought with desperate valour, the 
 hatred of years finding terrible expression. On neither side was 
 quarter given ; one French general threatened to shoot any of his 
 men who brought in Prussian prisoners. On the whole the French 
 troops exhibited more self-command and steadiness ; the officers 
 held their people more firmly in hand, whereas the passion of an 
 
 * Such are the essentiak of the matter as presented by Clausewitz ; and the 
 duke, in his well-known rejoinder to Clausewitz's book, does not attempt a con- 
 tradiction. What Clausewitz merely indicated has now been proved in detail 
 by the investigations of M. Lehmann (Historische Zeitschrift, Neue Folge II. p. 
 274), and H. Delbruck {Zeitschrift f. Pr. Geschichte 1877, p. 645). 
 
 171 
 
History of Germany 
 
 impetuous lust of battle which flamed through the German national 
 army often led the Prussian commanders to premature expendi- 
 ture of their forces. This region of the fertile plain of Brabant, 
 whose undulating surface made it resemble a sea in which the 
 waves had undergone sohdification, covered with crops standing 
 as high as a man and interspersed with potato fields, gave oppor- 
 tunities for numerous surprises which the young Prussian troops, 
 and above all the Landwehr, were not always prepared to meet 
 with calmness. The day was oppressively hot ; under a fierce 
 sun and in a sultry atmosphere, the Prussian infantry, part of 
 which had been in action on the previous day, whilst another part 
 had been marching all night, had for six hours to sustain without 
 intermission a hand to hand fight for the villages. Many of them 
 were foaming at the mouth from the fury of the struggle and the 
 incredible exertion ; here one would be seen lapping up the foul 
 effluent from a manure heap, whilst another, unwounded, would 
 drop dead close by from sheer exhaustion. 
 
 Shortly before three o'clock, Vandamme began the attack 
 upon the Prussian right wing at La Haye, and occupied the 
 village after a bloody struggle lasting two hours. Then Blucher 
 himself led fresh troops to the assault ; the village was recon- 
 quered, but was lost once more when an attack, made by the 
 Prussian cavalry near by, miscarried. Here the fight now came 
 to a stand-still ; the French progress was arrested in the 
 village, beyond which they could not advance a foot. In vain 
 towards evening did Napoleon send a portion of the guard to sup- 
 port Vandamme ; Zieten's corps maintained its position immov- 
 ably for six hours. Had the English now arrived to reinforce 
 the right wing, victory would have been decided. Meanwhile 
 Gerard, with the right wing of the French, had advanced against 
 the village of Ligny. There the Prussians had utilised the chateau 
 and the houses for defence ; their batteries effectively com- 
 manded the plain in front. Four times were the assailants repelled, 
 and when at length they made their way into the houses, they 
 gained only half the village. In the other half, across the stream, 
 the Prussians maintained their position ; and now within the 
 village there developed a fight of unprecedented obstinacy, for both 
 parties received extensive reinforcements from the thick masses 
 of infantry in the rear. Soon the chateau and a considerable 
 proportion of the village were in flames ; in the village street 
 the bodies were heaped up ; every house and every stable became 
 a little fortress, and men fought with bayonets on the stairs and 
 
 172 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 in the rooms. In this way the struggle continued indecisively 
 for five terrible hours. But the Prussians were using up all their 
 strength ; 14,000 men, more than nineteen battalions, were 
 gradually thrown into this single village, and finally there remained 
 no more than one fresh regiment of infantry available for the 
 decisive issue. As yet nothing was lost ; the appearance of the 
 English would have turned the scale. In the afternoon, Wellington 
 had once more sent a message to the field-marshal by Lieutenant 
 Wussow, to the effect that with the reinforcements just received 
 he would attempt a vigorous offensive action in favour of the 
 Prussian army ; his representative upon Blucher's headquarters 
 staff. Colonel Hardinge, still declared positively at seven o'clock 
 that in half an hour at latest his countr5rmen would arrive. An 
 hour later, Gneisenau sent a message to General Krafft, sajdng 
 that the latter need only maintain his position in Ligny for a 
 little while longer, for the help of the Enghsh could not then fail 
 to arrive. 
 
 The sun was at the point of setting. Then Napoleon per- 
 sonally led against Ligny, in order to break through the Prussian 
 centre, his well-spared reserves, consisting of the Old Guard and 
 a powerful force of cavalry. Whilst the grenadiers pressed into 
 the village street with fierce cries of, " Long live the emperor ! 
 No quarter ! " and now at length compelled the wearied defenders 
 to withdraw, several battalions of the guard, favoured by the 
 fading Hght, surrounded the village from the east. Following 
 them, riding through the stream, came seven regiments of heavy 
 dragoons, the nucleus of the imperial cavalry, numbering 5,000 
 horse. They rode past Ligny towards the windmill hiU of Bussy, 
 attacking the second line of the Prussian position. Blucher 
 recognised the danger, and endeavoured to repel the attack with 
 his favourite arm. Just before, the old man had seemed exhausted 
 by his exertions, and by the terrible doubts with which he was 
 assailed so that he had the appearance of a broken man ; but now 
 he flamed up once more with youthful fire, sending to the attack 
 a cavalry brigade which was stationed on the flank behind Ligny. 
 The cavalrymen shouted with deUght when the old hero, bran- 
 dishing his sabre, mounted on his magnificent white charger, placed 
 himself at their head. Near him rode Lieutenant-colonel Ltitzow, 
 the leader of volunteers of 1813, commanding the sixth regi- 
 ment of Uhlans ; next came the West Prussian dragoons, those 
 of the Electoral Mark, and the Landwehr cavalry of the Elbe ; 
 in an extended fine, the horses rode through the standing com. 
 
 173 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Then the animals were suddenly taken aback by a deep sunken 
 lane which cut through the fields, and whilst the Uhlans were 
 endeavouring to get across the unexpected obstacle, two well- 
 aimed salvos of artillery struck their disordered ranks, Milhaud's 
 cuirassiers advanced to the charge, and the Prussians withdrew. 
 The cuirassiers in turn had to retire before the fire of a Prussian 
 battalion ; the laughing Westphalians could see how the heavy 
 dragoons disengaged themselves from their fallen horses and holding 
 their cuirasses with both hands, fled on foot. The Uhlans and 
 the Landwehr cavalry re-formed their ranks and advanced once 
 more; the masses of the contestants flowed hither and thither, 
 Gneisenau was riding amid the wild confusion ; drawing his sabre, 
 he said cheerfully to Major Bardeleben, who, weaponless, his arm 
 in a sling, was riding beside him : " Keep close to me ; I will cut 
 a way out for you ! " Simultaneously the regiments driven 
 out of Ligny withdrew towards Brye, retreating slowly, firing 
 unceasingly, but in disorder. The centre of the line of battle 
 had now been almost broken through. 
 
 St. Amand la Haye was also at length evacuated ; unceas- 
 ingly the enemy pressed forward towards the height of Bussy. 
 Just before nightfall a thunder-storm broke over the battle-field ; 
 for half an hour the rolling of the thunder and the howUng of the 
 storm completely drowned the noise of battle. Yet amid the 
 obscurity the struggle continued ; the exhausted soldiers breathed 
 more freely in the fresher air. The beaten forces made a fresh 
 stand at Brye and the hill of Bussy, so that here the advance of 
 the enemy was checked. Meanwhile the field-marshal had dis- 
 appeared. In the first attack of the Uhlans, his horse had been 
 shot, and he now was lying almost unconscious beneath the heavy 
 beast ; several times friends and foes passed close by him in 
 conflict without noticing him, only his faithful aide-de-camp. 
 Count Nostitz, remaining with him, until at length. Major von dem 
 Busche of the Landwehr cavalry of the Elbe came by, and brought 
 away the stunned man upon a soldier's horse. In the confusion 
 of the night several hours elapsed before the rescue of the com- 
 mander became known. 
 
 Now, for the time being, the leadership of the army was 
 entirely in the hands of Gneisenau, who remained for a while in 
 deep reflection in the neighbourhood of Brye. Those who saw 
 him in his majestic calm, had no suspicion of the difficult thoughts 
 which were raging through his mind. Like Blucher and Grohnan, 
 he had trusted implicitly in Wellington's assurance, had counted 
 
 »74 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 securely upon victory an hour before, and thought with anger 
 of the English commander who had kept his word so badly. What 
 could seem more natural than to follow the Englishman's example, 
 to care only for the security of his own army, and to direct its 
 course in safety towards the German frontier ? The old Roman 
 road, which in the rear of the battle-field leads north-eastward into 
 the valley of the Meuse, offered the defeated army the most con- 
 venient line of retreat ; here a junction could soon be effected 
 with Billow, who was advancing from the east, whilst subsequently 
 reinforcements could be secured from Germany. Instinctively 
 a portion of the troops had already taken this route, which 
 seemed at the first glance to be the only one open ; but if the 
 army went towards the Meuse it would withdraw from its ally, 
 and it might be expected with certainty that the cautious EngUsh 
 commander would then retreat to Antwerp, and perhaps to his 
 ships. In this way the Belgian campaign would be ended at a 
 single blow, and who could tell whether the coaUtion, with its evil 
 memories of the congress and its laboriously maintained dissen- 
 sions, with its pusillanimous headquarters staff under the com- 
 mand of Schwarzenberg, would continue to find courage to carry 
 on the war against France after the two best commanders had 
 given up the game ? There was still another way out. If Wel- 
 lington had not been willing to advance to join the Prussians, 
 these could themselves withdraw in order to effect a junction 
 with the English army. Should the army surrender its communi- 
 cation with the Rhine, and, disregarding all dangers, take the 
 difficult path to the north in the direction of Wavre, the allies 
 would draw nearer together, and it was possible that in two or 
 three days, somewhere in the vicinity of Brussels, the battle could 
 be resumed with renewed energy, that battle which had now proved 
 a failure through the fault of Wellington. The momentous 
 decision had to be made within a few minutes ; the fate of the next 
 months of European history rested upon it. Gneisenau deter- 
 mined, as he was forced to determine, as Blucher alone of all 
 military commanders of that day would have determined. After 
 a glance at the map, he ordered a northward march through Tilly 
 and Mellery to Wavre. 
 
 The aides-de-camp hastened to give the troops the right 
 direction in the darkness. General Jagow covered the retreat, 
 remaining upon the battle-field until two in the morning. The 
 French were not confident of their own victory, and the guard 
 stood under arms throughout the night. They neither ventured 
 
 175 
 
History of Germany 
 
 to pursue, nor yet even to ascertain the direction of the beaten 
 army's retreat, and they completely lost touch with their oppo- 
 nents. The Prussian army had lost 12,000 men, somewhat more 
 than the enemy. Zieten's corps had lost an entire fourth of its 
 strength. So invincible, however, was the moral energy of this 
 army, that after a few hours' rest during the night the regiments 
 were at daybreak already once more in good order. There was 
 not a trace of that feeling of depression which is apt after a defeat 
 to overcome even the most valiant ; the rank and file and the 
 leaders all looked for a new battle which should wipe out the dis- 
 grace. A few thousand men of the newly-formed Westphalian 
 regiment had, indeed, been dispersed, and strayed along the 
 Roman road to the Meuse and to the Rhine. But of the tried 
 troops from the old provinces hardly anyone was missing ; the 
 few among the veterans of 1813 who in the darkness of night had 
 been separated from their regiments through going to the east, 
 determined, as soon as they encountered Biilow's corps, to join this 
 force, and were able to take part in the battle of Waterloo. 
 
 The English army had passed the hot day more successfully. 
 When, towards two o'clock, Ney, with the left wing of the French 
 army, advanced northward, as ordered, upon the Brussels road 
 against Quatre Bras, he was soon to learn that the English force 
 that opposed him was far stronger than Napoleon had assumed. 
 The Netherland general Perponcher, recognising the significance 
 of the situation, had, on his own initiative, and against Welling- 
 ton's orders, remained with his division at Quatre Bras, ^ and had 
 to repel the first attack. At the outset the force at Ney's disposal 
 was more than twice cis strong as that of the 7,000 Nassauers and 
 Netherlanders who were placed here ; and since in addition Ney 
 was able unnoticed to advance his infantry through the wood 
 of Bossu which lay upon his left, the allied forces were for some 
 time hard pressed, and were already on the point of evacuating 
 the important position at the cross-roads. Then, between three 
 and four o'clock (several hours later than Wellington had calcu- 
 lated), came the first regiments of the reserve from Brussels ; 
 an English division, under General Pieton, and Duke William with 
 his Black Brunswickers. They were able to reinforce the position 
 upon the left wing, and were already advancing beyond Quatre 
 Bras, when a powerful onslaught of the French cavalry threw 
 them into confusion. Wellington himself escaped death only by 
 
 ^ The importance of this brave decision was recognised by Gneisenau in a 
 letter to the king dated June 12, 1817. 
 
 176 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 the speed of his charger. Meanwhile the vaHant Guelph had been 
 shot dead in the midst of his body-guard. He died at the best 
 moment for his reputation ; for henceforward he lived in the 
 memory of his loyal people as a hero of the nation, as the leader 
 of the black troop ; and the detestable traits of Guelph obstinacy 
 and arrogance which had, during the brief months of his rule, 
 been extremely conspicuous to the little land of Brunswick, were 
 quickly forgotten. 
 
 At this dangerous moment, the English and Hanoverian 
 regiments of General Alten came into contact with the right wing 
 of the aUies. Wellington would not withdraw from Nivelles 
 more than this weak division, for he was still under the illusion 
 that Napoleon would attempt to surround him on the west. 
 Alten's division began to deploy in the wood of Bossu, and with 
 the help of this force Ney's second attack was repelled. For a 
 long time now Ney had abandoned the hope of being able to reach 
 the battle-field of Ligny by overthrowing the English force ; it 
 would be enough for him if he could only press his opponents 
 back at this point from the Brussels road. The man who had 
 hitherto always been distinguished above all his rivals by an 
 unshaken soldierly courage, showed himself throughout this cam- 
 paign to be in a condition of feverish disturbance ; it was plain 
 that he was profoundly disturbed by the memory of the broken 
 oath of a few weeks back, and by the fear of a shameful future. 
 In passionate excitement he adjured his vahant Rhenish fellow- 
 countryman Kellermann to give a decisive turn to the affair, as 
 he had done once before at Marengo, by a powerful cavalry 
 charge ; the whole future of France was at stake. This third 
 attempt also failed, chiefly owing to the steadfastness of the EngUsh 
 veterans under Picton. Meanwhile Alten's regiments had entered 
 the wood of Bossu, while fresh reserves were advancing upon the 
 Brussels road— the EngHsh guards and the remainder of the 
 Brunswickers. Wellington now had at his disposal more than 
 30,000 men, against 21,000. Twihght fell as the whole hue began 
 to advance, and the battle ended almost on the same spot on 
 which it had begun. 
 
 A remarkable piece of luck came to the aid of the EngUsh 
 commander. General Erlon's corps had been assigned to Ney's 
 army, but in the afternoon, before Erlon had been able to take 
 part in the battle of Quatre Bras, he had been summoned by 
 Napoleon to the battle-field of Ligny ; the regiments were already 
 close to the right wing of the Prussians, when Ney recalled them 
 
 177 N 
 
History of Germany 
 
 to Quatre Bras ; and thus throughout the afternoon this corps, 
 which might readily have inflicted a decisive blow upon Wel- 
 lington, wandered to and fro between the two battle-fields, and 
 did not finally join Ney's army until the evening, when the matter 
 was already settled. The marshal, although he had not been able 
 to fulfil the impossible demands of the Imperator, had still 
 secured a valuable success, for the junction of the two armies of 
 the coalition had been temporarily prevented. Wellington, how- 
 ever, spoke with unpleasant arrogance of a victory which was, 
 in truth, of extremely modest proportions, saying several times : 
 " We have conquered ; the Prussians have been beaten." Since 
 he still failed to grasp Napoleon's plan, and on June 17th, and 
 even on June i8th, beheved it possible that he might be out- 
 flanked from the west, he was unable to grasp that he had himself 
 been responsible for all the wretched confusion of this needless 
 double engagement, and could not find a word of gratitude for the 
 Prussians whose unselfish sacrifice had alone rendered it possible 
 for him to give battle at Quatre Bras. 
 
 Late in the night, Blucher was discovered by his general 
 staff officers in a peasant's hut at Mellery, on the road to Wavre. 
 The old man lay upon the straw, quietly smoking his pipe ; he 
 had been shaken in every limb by his heavy fall, but his cheer- 
 ful confidence was unabated. He immediately expressed his 
 approval of the orders issued by his friend Gneisenau ; the two 
 had hved in such intimate association that Gneisenau was always 
 sure that his own resolves would express the field-marshal's 
 thoughts. In the morning the commander-in-chief rode in front 
 of the army to Wavre ; the soldiers shouted with delight as soon 
 as they saw the rescued man, and they answered with a cheerful 
 " yes," when, as he rode by, he asked them if they would like 
 to fight again on the morrow. The scorching sunshine of the day 
 before was followed by a grey, oppressive day, interspersed with 
 thunder-showers ; in the evening came pouring rain which lasted 
 all through the night. The soldiers, who had now for three days 
 been continuously marching or fighting, laboriously plodded over 
 the saturated ground, helping to push the wheels of the cannon 
 through the deep mud. In bivouac, sleep was impossible, and yet 
 their courage remained imperturbable ; on the morning of June 
 i8th the Silesian fusiliers were dancing a merry waltz to the 
 strains of their field music. A cordial appeal issued by the 
 field-marshal exhorted the troops to offer up all their energies in 
 
 178 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 the new struggle : "Do not forget that you are Prussians, and 
 that our watchword is ' Death or victory ' ! " 
 
 In his report to the king, Gneisenau openly complained that 
 Wellington, " contrary to all expectation and assurance," had not 
 concentrated his forces at the right moment ; and in confidential 
 letters he expressed his views still more incisively. In the pub- 
 hshed reports from Blucher's headquarters staff, the painful ques- 
 tion was, however, carefully ignored, and after the war Gneisenau 
 magnanimously avoided any paper warfare against the alUes of 
 Prussia, although the EngUsh commander's insincere accounts 
 of the matter must have made this honourable soldier long to 
 express his own views. It was not until twenty years later that 
 the secret history of this campaign was elucidated in a posthumous 
 historical work by Clausewitz, who had unquestionably utiHsed 
 information imparted by his friend Gneisenau. At that moment 
 nothing was further from Gneisenau's thoughts than fruitless 
 squabbling about past errors ; he reported to the king that a 
 battle with separate forces was no longer possible, and immedi- 
 ately made preparations for a junction with the Enghsh army. 
 Hour by hour the feeling in the headquarters staff became more 
 confident, for the hesitating attitude of the enemy showed clearly 
 that the result of the fighting of June i6th had for the Prussians 
 been a lost battle but not a defeat. Blucher was absolutely sure 
 of the issue ; it was his wish that if Napoleon did not attack the 
 EngUsh, he hiinself in conjunction with WelUngton should imme- 
 diately offer battle, and he welcomed the violence of the 
 weather, speaking of it as " our old ally of the Katzbach." 
 The Russian military attach^ Toll had a bad time of it when he 
 thought it necessary to oifer consolation to these proud Prus- 
 sians, and said soothingly that the great army under Schwarzen- 
 berg would soon put things right. Nostitz, Blucher's aide-de- 
 camp, answered sharply : " Before you get back to your 
 emperor either the Belgian campaign will have been completely 
 lost, or else we shall have won the second battle and shall no 
 longer have any need of your great army ! " 
 
 In answer to Blucher, the English commander declared that 
 he would be ready to undertake a new battle on June i8th, on 
 the Brussels road, if he could count on the help of about 25,000 
 Prussians. Blucher rejoined that he would come, and that he 
 hoped to do so with his entire army. After a brief and brilliant 
 cavalry skirmish, in which Lord Uxbridge with the giants of the 
 English dragoon guards Uterally rode down the French lancers, 
 
 179 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Wellington returned northward in the afternoon, and collected 
 his army at Mont St. Jean, across the Brussels road, fronting 
 southward. Even now he did not completely abandon his fear 
 of being outflanked on the right, and therefore stationed at Hal, 
 nine miles to the west of the battle-field, a force of 17,000 men, 
 so that in the decisive hours nearly one-fifth of his army was 
 lacking. In the night of June I7th-i8th, the whole Prussian 
 army was assembled in the neighbourhood of Wavre, from nine 
 to ten miles to the east of Mont St. Jean, and the anxiously- 
 awaited ammunition column also put in an appearance. But this 
 short distance, which an aide-de-camp could traverse at a gallop 
 in little more than an hour, offered serious difificulties, in the 
 existing terrible conditions of the roads, to the movement of the 
 cumbrous artillery of a great army. In addition, considerable 
 delay was unavoidable, for the as yet untouched corps of Biilow 
 was to take the lead, and would have to make its way through the 
 more advanced portions of the army. If the English commander 
 intended merely to make a demonstration, as Gneisenau for a 
 time suspected, the position of the Prussians, whose left wing was 
 exposed, might become extremely dangerous ; they could only 
 undertake the venture confiding in the invincible stajdng-power 
 of the Enghsh army. All that Wellington expected from the 
 Prussian commander was that he could draw near to strengthen 
 the left wing of the English. Gneisenau, however, in his great 
 manner, chose a bolder and more difficult course, thinking rather 
 of attacking the French in the rear and upon the right flank. 
 Should this attack prove successful. Napoleon's army would be 
 annihilated, and the war would be ended at a single blow. 
 
 It was only through the sins of omission of the conqueror 
 that the conquered could venture to conceive such bold ideas. 
 It would certainly have been a grave undertaking for Napoleon to 
 pursue the Prussians with the main force of his army, but his 
 desperate situation demanded bold resolves. Had he pressed on 
 at the heels of the most active of his opponents, it was possible 
 that the beaten army would during its retreat have been thrown 
 into utter disorder, for the effect of a victory is usually redoubled 
 by persistent pursuit. It was at least doubtful whether, in that 
 case, Wellington would have ventured to attack Ney ; it is more 
 probable that the EngUsh commander would have retreated upon 
 Antwerp. It was not cowardice which prevented the Imperator 
 from making up his mind to such a course, but his old error 
 of overweening presumption. As formerly after the battle of 
 
 180 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 Dresden and after the victories in Champagne, so on this occasion 
 did he esteem his opponents too hghtly ; he fully believed that 
 the Prussians were retreating in complete disorder towards the 
 Rhine, and did not even regard it as necessary to have their 
 retreat watched. If matters had happened as he imagined, he 
 would, indeed, have had plenty of time to defeat the English. On 
 the morning of June 17th he gave his army a comfortable rest. 
 His thoughts were more in Paris than on the field of battle ; he 
 asked his generals what the Jacobins would do after this new victory 
 of the empire. Not till noon did he order Marshal Grouchy to 
 pursue the Prussians in the direction eastward towards Gem- 
 bloux and the Meuse, not to lose sight of them, and to complete 
 their defeat ; for this purpose he assigned to the marshal 33,000 
 men, a force too strong for an observation corps and too weak 
 to venture a battle against the whole Prussian army. During 
 the latter half of the day. Grouchy moved eastward to the Irre, 
 without getting in touch with the Prussians. It was not until 
 the morning of June i8th that he found their trace, and turned 
 towards Wavre. He guessed nothing of Gneisenau's plans, now 
 thinking that the Prussian army was retreating upon Brussels ; 
 just as httle as the emperor did he imagine that a beaten army 
 could regain order immediately after the battle, and prepare for 
 a fresh onslaught. The Imperator no longer thought of pushing 
 in between the two armies of the coalition, since the possibility 
 of the retreat of the Prussians northward was altogether out of 
 his calculations. He himself, on the afternoon of June 17th, 
 formed a junction with Ney's army in the neighbourhood of 
 Quatre Bras, and then, feeling perfectly secure, moved northward 
 upon the Brussels road after the English, expecting on the i8th 
 or the 19th to force them to join battle with him on one side or 
 the other of Brussels. 
 
 Whilst the course of the double battle of June i6th was 
 confused and obscure, the battle of June i8th was simple and 
 imposing. With the eye of a master, Wellington had chosen a 
 strong defensive position such as he had learned to love in the 
 Spanish campaign. His army was placed near the centre of a line 
 of low hills running from west to east, at the village of Mont St. 
 Jean, which is traversed by the well-paved Brussels road cutting 
 straight across the elevation. Upon this narrow space, over an 
 extension of less than a mile, the troops were closely packed 
 together. There were more than 30,000 Germans, 24,000 
 Englishmen, more than 13,000 Netherlanders, a force of 68,000 
 
 181 
 
History of Germany 
 
 in all. Lord Hill commanded the right, the Prince of Orange 
 the centre, and General Picton the left wing. A deeply sunken 
 cross-road, enclosed by hedges, ran along the front. At the rear 
 of the army the ground fell gently away, so that the majority of 
 the regiments were hidden from the advancing enemy ; further 
 to the north there lay close to the road the thin wood of Soignes, 
 traversed by numerous paths, and offering good cover in case of 
 retreat. For many hours the duke remained with the centre 
 at Mont St. Jean ; here, beneath an elm tree, upon an elevation 
 near the high-road, he could gain a comprehensive view of almost 
 the entire field, and could, after his usual custom, direct every- 
 thing in person. A few hundred yards to the front there lay, like 
 the outworks of a fortress, three strongly occupied positions ; 
 in front of the right was the chateau of Hougomont, standing 
 amid the ancient trees of its park and surrounded by high walls ; 
 in front of the centre, on the high road, was the farmstead of La 
 Haye Sainte ; before the extreme left wing were the white houses 
 of Papelotte and La Haye. From Mont St. Jean the road declines 
 gently southwards, then runs absolutely level through open fields, 
 to ascend once more nearly three miles to the south, crossing 
 another elevation close to the fann of La Belle Alliance. Thus 
 the battle-field has the form of a wide and shallow basin, offering 
 the freest possible opportunities for the utilisation of all arms. 
 
 Napoleon established his army upon the heights near La 
 Belle Alliance, placing Reille to the left and Erlon to the right 
 of the road, whilst his reserves were in the rear at Rossomme. It 
 was his plan simply to break through the English lines by one 
 or more frontal attacks, if possible at the enemy's weakest point, 
 the English left wing. Since the firearms of those days allowed 
 the attacking force to draw close to the defenders with unbroken 
 energy, the Imperator hoped to fight down his tenacious oppo- 
 nent by colossal, massive blows. His method of warfare had, 
 during the last ten years, become continually more violent ; to- 
 day at length, in the feverish passion of the desperate gamester, 
 he showed all the savagery of the Jacobin, pressing thousands of 
 his cavalrymen and whole divisions of his infantry into a single 
 mass, which, like Alexander's phalanxes, were to trample every- 
 thing down before them. It was in this way that the battle 
 opened with a continual advance and withdrawal of the attacking 
 forces, like the waves on a steep shore, until the appearance of the 
 Prussians in Napoleon's rear and upon his right flank completely 
 disordered the Imperator's plan of battle. The course of the 
 
 182 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 struggle was like that of a deliberately planned tragedy : at first 
 a simple development, then a violent tension and increase, and at 
 length the intervention of a crushing destiny ; among all the 
 battles of modem history, only that of Koniggratz displays a 
 similar character, that of a perfect work of art. Thus the ulti- 
 mate issue left upon the world the impression of overwhelming 
 and invincible necessity, because a wonderful destiny had allotted 
 to each of the three nations, and to each of the commanders, the 
 precise role which corresponded best to their peculiar energies : 
 the British exhibited in the work of defence their phlegmatic and 
 iron tenacity ; the French displayed their knightly and uncon- 
 trollable courage in attack ; finally the Prussians exhibited a 
 similar stormy boldness in onslaught and, in addition, what 
 counts more thaui all, the self-restraint of the inspired will. 
 
 Napoleon counted with certainty upon a speedy victory, 
 for he beheved that the Prussians were far away to the south- 
 east at Namur. His army numbered more than 72,000 men, 
 being superior to that of Wellington, above aU in the strength of 
 its cavalry and the preponderance of its artillery, for Napoleon 
 had two hundred and forty heavy guns as against one hundred and 
 fifty in WelUngton's army. In such circumstances it seemed that 
 there could be no harm in postponing the attack until noon, when 
 the sun would have had some effect in drjdng the saturated 
 groimd. In order to alarm his opponent and to increase the con- 
 fidence of his own army, the Imperator held a grand review under 
 the very eyes of the English. Sick as he was, distressed by a 
 thousand doubts and anxieties, he undoubtedly also felt that 
 it was necessary to raise his own spirits by the sight of his 
 faithful followers. Whenever, at a later date, in his lonely island 
 prison, he thought of this hour, it was with rapture, and he would 
 exclaim : " The earth was proud to carry so many brave men ! " 
 Thus for the last time there appeared in parade before their war- 
 lord the veterans of the Fyraxaids, of Austerhtz, of Borodino, 
 who had so long been the terror of the world, and who had now 
 saved from the shipwreck of their old glories nothing more than 
 their soldierly pride, their eagerness for revenge, and their 
 imtamable love for their hero. The drums sounded, the bands 
 played Partant pour la Syrie ! In long fines were extended the 
 grenadiers in their bearskin caps, the cuirassiers with helmets 
 decorated with horse-tails, the voltigeurs with tasselled shakos, 
 the lancers with fluttering pennons — one of the most magnificent 
 and bravest armies ever seen in history. All the boastful glory of 
 
 183 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the empire was exhibited once again, an overwhelming spectacle 
 for the hearts of the veterans ; and in their midst once again the 
 war-lord in his gloomy majesty. There was no end to the shouts 
 of acclamation ; the idol of the soldiery had only two days before 
 displayed his invincibihty once more. Yet this convulsive jubila- 
 tion, which contrasted so strangely with the absolute stillness 
 of the Enghsh camp, came from oppressed hearts. The conscious- 
 ness of guilt, the premonition of a tragical destiny, lay upon the 
 most vaUant spirits. Ten hours more, and the bold hope of the 
 German strategist had been fulfilled; this magnificent army, 
 with its defiant spirit, its pride, and its savage strength of man- 
 hood, had been annihilated down to the last squadron. 
 
 Half an hour before noon Napoleon began the battle, sending 
 his left wing against the chateau of Hougomont, whilst upon the 
 right he made arrangements for a decisive blow. There four divisions 
 of infantry were united to form a gigantic column ; the way was 
 paved for the attack by the persistent artillery fire of a great 
 battery placed at Belle Alliance. Towards one-thirty. General 
 Erlon led the powerful force of infantry against the British left 
 wing. But before this movement began, the calm security of the 
 emperor's calculations had already been disturbed by the receipt 
 of sinister news. Through an intercepted letter he learned at 
 one o'clock that General Billow was marching against the French 
 right wing ; and whilst standing on the hill at Rossomme, behind 
 the French centre, studying his map, he thought that already, 
 far to the east, at the village of Chapelle St. Lambert (which 
 stands on an elevation), he could discern dark masses of troops, 
 which immediately afterwards disappeared among the undula- 
 tions of the ground. An aide-de-camp was immediately 
 despatched in this direction, and confirmed the observation. The 
 emperor vigorously endeavoured to control his dismay, and for 
 the moment sent two cavalry divisions eastward across the right 
 wing of the battle-field. Surely it could only be the single corps 
 of Billow, perhaps only a portion of that corps, and before the 
 Prussians could intervene in the battle, Wellington would certainly 
 be defeated. To his officers Napoleon declared, with confident 
 mien, that Marshal Grouchy was advancing to the support of 
 the right wing — for the army must not suspect this danger. Mean- 
 while Erlon had moved forward with his four infantry divisions ; 
 during the first advance he suffered severe losses, whole ranks 
 of the deep columns being mowed down by the English artillery 
 fire, The first outcome of the attack was to put a Netherland 
 
 184 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 brigade to flight ; only part of the troops of the young kmgdom 
 maintained their position ; old Blucher had been right when he 
 expressed the opinion that these Belgians were "by no means 
 fierce animals." Now, however, the EngUsh and Hanoverian 
 infantry emerged from behind the protecting hedges, surrounding 
 with a long line the unwieldy masses of the French. After a 
 murderous struggle, in which the vahant Picton foimd his death, 
 the attacking force had to withdraw. Ponsonby's Scottish cavalry 
 pursued them, dispersing the retreating men, and pressing forward 
 irresistibly as far as the great French battery ; only here were 
 they forced to turn by the French cavalry. 
 
 The great blow had miscarried. Now, too, it was no longer 
 possible to avoid recognising that at least a considerable propor- 
 tion of the Prussian army was advancing, and advancing towards 
 the village of Planchenoit, in the rear of the French right wing. 
 It was stni possible for the Imperator to withdraw from the battle, 
 but how could his pride endure so humihating a resolve ? He 
 despatched Lobau's corps to Planchenoit, so that his line was now 
 no longer straight, but had the form of a curve bent backwards 
 towards the right. The Prussians had spoiled his entire order of 
 battle even before they had fired a single shot. The danger 
 threatening the right was carefully concealed from the portions 
 of the army which were fighting against the English. For this 
 reason Napoleon did not allow Lobau's troops to advance further 
 eastward, where they could easily have arrested the progress of 
 Billow's corps on the edge of the wide valley of the Lasne, but 
 kept them close to Planchenoit, for the collision with the Prus- 
 sians must be postponed as long as possible, so that the army's 
 confidence of victory might not be shaken by the thunder of 
 artillery upon the right. Influenced by his dread of the Prussian 
 attack, the Imperator no longer ventured to send against the 
 English the twenty-four battalions of his guard, which still 
 remained untouched in reserve, but determined to break through 
 Wellington's centre with the whole of his cavalry. This was a 
 hopeless move, for the main body of the allied infantry was still 
 unshaken. 
 
 In the morning Blucher had left camp at Wavre. He had 
 by no means recovered from his severe fall on the previous day, 
 but who could speak to the old hero of repose ? "I would 
 rather," he exclaimed, " have myself tied on to my horse than 
 miss this battle ! " In good spirits he rode among the regiments, 
 which were labouring through the mire with incredible exertions ; 
 
 185 
 
History of Germany 
 
 a conflagration in Wavre had seriously delayed the march. The 
 soldiers rejoiced wherever the commander appeared, turning 
 towards him with shouts, stroking his knee ; for every one of them 
 he had an encouraging word, sa5ang : " Children, I have promised 
 my brother Wellington that we will come. You won't let me 
 break my word ? " Thielmann remained at Wavre with the third 
 army-corps in order to protect the rear of the army against an 
 attack by Grouchy, who did in fact draw near to Wavre in the 
 afternoon. The other three corps marched upon Chapelle St. 
 Lambert ; at ten o'clock the advance-guard, and at one the main 
 body of the army, arrived there from the heights. Now the army 
 was divided. Zieten marched straight forward with the first corps 
 to Ohain and beyond, to attack the French right wing. Biilow 
 with the fourth corps, and behind him Pirch with the second corps, 
 turned to the left, southwestward towards the rear of the French 
 position. Fortunately the difficult defile of the valley of the 
 Lasne was not occupied by the enemy ; the stream was crossed, 
 and at about four o'clock Billow's troops attained a well-protected 
 position in and behind the wood of Frichemont ; the advance 
 that was to take the French by surprise, was not to be begun until 
 a sufficient force was on the spot. The regiments took up their 
 positions in profound silence ; the generals went to the border of 
 the wood and with tense glances followed the course of the battle. 
 When one of the officers expressed the opinion that the enemy 
 would now give up the attack upon the EngUsh, and, in order to 
 secure their retreat, would throw their chief force against the 
 Prussians, Gneisenau answered : " You ill know Napoleon. He 
 will now endeavour to break the Enghsh line of battle at all costs, 
 and will only employ what is absolutely necessary against us." 
 
 This actually took place. Even before the Prussians reached 
 the wood of Frichemont, between three and four in the afternoon, 
 the second great onslaught of the French had begun. Ney, with 
 fourteen regiments of heavy cavalry, galloped along the west side 
 of the road, to attack the squares of the English guard and Alten's 
 division in the centre. For some time the struggle appeared 
 indecisive, but the infantry held their position unshaken. The 
 French attack was finally repulsed, and thereupon Ney joined to 
 his force Kellermann's cavalry, so that now twenty-six cavalry 
 regiments moved to the renewed attack, the greatest force of 
 cavalry which this warlike age had ever seen in operation at a 
 single spot. The ground shook with the hoofs of ten thousand 
 horses, the basin of land was filled with a forest of sabres and 
 
 1 80 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 lances, the struggle wavered for an hour, and the attack against 
 individual battalions was renewed from ten to twelve times. But 
 the firmness of the English and German infantry still retained 
 the upper hand. This attack also came to nothing, the squadrons 
 began to retreat, a bold advance on the part of the EngUsh and 
 Hanoverian reserve cavalry threw them into complete confusion ; 
 but even the victors were profoundly exhausted. 
 
 Meanwhile upon other parts of the battle-field the course of 
 events was far more favourable for Napoleon. Quiot's division, 
 which had already taken part in Erlon's great attack, advanced 
 again along the high-road and stormed the farm of La Haye 
 Sainte. Here was Major Baring, with a battalion of light infantry 
 of the German legion, and a few Nassauers. Already at noon the 
 green yagers had repelled Erlon's columns ; the faithful men 
 were devoted to their officers, and every one of them, down to the 
 last private, was determined never to retreat from this post of 
 honour. But what a task was now theirs ! The roofs of the 
 farm buildings were already on fire, and some of the soldiers must 
 engage in the work of fighting the flames, whilst the others, 
 behind the hedges and walls of the garden, were directing their 
 fire against an overwhelmingly superior force. Powder and shot 
 were exhausted. Vainly did Baring again and again send mes- 
 sengers to the rear to Mont St. Jean, urgently begging for 
 ammunition. It was not until almost the last cartridge had been 
 fired that the valiant little garrison evacuated the position. 
 The French raged into the farmstead as the hostile force 
 withdrew, shouting as they searched the rooms and the 
 bams : " Pas de pardon a ces coquins verds ! " for how many 
 of their comrades had fallen at noon, and more recently, before 
 the well-aimed balls of the German yagers. The outwork of the 
 English centre had been taken, and soon the attacking stream 
 advanced further towards Mont St. Jean. The centre of Wel- 
 lington's line of battle had been broken. Thereupon the duke 
 himself led Kielmannsegg's Hanoverian brigade to the spot, and 
 thus succeeded for a time in filMng the gap in the centre. But 
 only for a time, for the reserves had already been called up to the 
 last man, and La Haye Sainte, the commanding position imme- 
 diately in front of the centre, remained in the enemy's hands. At 
 the same time the valiant Bernard of Weimar, upon the left wing, 
 was unable any longer to maintain the outwork of La Haye and 
 Papelotte against Durutte's division. He began to retreat. Well- 
 ington's anxiety increased. During the last few hours he had 
 
 187 
 
History of Germany 
 
 repeatedly sent aides-de-camp to Blucher with urgent requests 
 for assistance. Cold and severe he stood among his officers, watch 
 in hand, saying : " Blucher or nightfall ! " If Napoleon were now 
 in a position to send his guards against Mont St. Jean, or against 
 the shaken left wing of the English, he could not fail to gain the 
 victory. 
 
 At this momentous instant the Prussian attack commenced. 
 The thunder of artillery now began to sound over the battle-field 
 from the east, plainly audible to both contending parties, this 
 being the first intimation of the struggle which was going on at 
 Wavre in the rear of Blucher's army, between Thielmann and 
 Grouchy. At the same time the first shot was fired in front of 
 the wood at Frichemont. It was half-past four in the afternoon ; 
 Wellington's army had had to sustain the battle unaided for five 
 hours. Billow's batteries took up a position in echelon upon 
 the heights in front of the wood. It was a magnificent spectacle, 
 the way in which the brigades of the fourth corps, with drums 
 sounding and banners fl37ing, advanced, one after the other, out 
 of the wood, and, passing between the batteries, made their way 
 downwards into the plain towards Planchenoit. In the ever-young 
 heart of Gneisenau, the impression produced on this occasion 
 by the wild poesy of war was magical, and even in his official 
 reports of the battle he could not refrain from dwelling upon the 
 glorious characteristics of this spectacle. 
 
 The hero of Dennewitz did his best to atone for the errors 
 of June 15th and i6th, leading the attack with admirable cool- 
 ness, as in the great days of the northern army. At the very 
 beginning of the struggle fell the universally-loved Colonel 
 Schwerin, the man who a year earlier had brought the news of 
 victory to the capital. Lobau's corps was forced back, and the 
 Prussians advanced irresistibly to Planchenoit. Somewhat later, 
 towards six o'clock. General Zieten had reached Chain with 
 the advance-guard of the first corps, and then, as soon as he had 
 received information of the pressing need of the English left wing, 
 quickly advanced upon the outposts of La Haye and Papelotte, 
 where Durutte's division had just installed itself. Prince Bernard 
 of Weimar, with the remnants of his troops, was retreating into 
 the protecting wood of Soignes, when Prussian reinforcements 
 arrived ; by the prolonged and unequal struggle his vaUant 
 Nassauers had been completely incapacitated for further fighting. 
 Steinmetz's brigade now drove the French out of both the 
 outposts, the Brandenburg dragoons charged the retreating 
 
 188 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 forces, the fire of the batteries of the first corps swept the 
 enemy's right wing, and the terrible news spread as far as the 
 French centre that upon the right all was lost. 
 
 By seven o'clock Napoleon's defeat was unquestionable. 
 His left wing had again and again vainly attacked the chateau 
 of Hougomont ; in the centre, the great cavalry onslaught had 
 failed ; upon the right and in the rear, the Prussians were 
 pressing nearer and nearer from two directions. It was no longer 
 possible to maintain the solitary gain of the last phases of the 
 struggle, the farmstead of La Haye Sainte. By a well-timed 
 retreat, at least half the army might still be saved. It was, 
 however, a necessary outcome of the Imperator's character and 
 of his desperate political situation, that he should despise this 
 way out, and should venture a third general attack, on this 
 occasion on both sides simultaneously. At seven o'clock he sum- 
 moned the twenty-four battahons of his guard, retaining only two 
 in hand as a last reserve, and despatching twelve to Planchenoit 
 against Biilow. The remaining ten were to be led by Ney in a 
 fresh attack agjiinst the EngUsh centre, but on this occasion 
 on the western side of the high-road, as far as possible from 
 Zieten's force. With shouts of acclamation the battahons rode 
 past the Imperator at Belle Alhance ; it was their task to decide 
 the victory. Then they rode down into the sinister basin where 
 thick masses of dead men and dead horses indicated the road of 
 death to the French cavalry ; to the sound of the drums, they 
 galloped on, regardless of the fire of the English batteries, and 
 mounted the slope immediately in front of the British guards. 
 Maitland's grenadiers were hidden there in the grass. When the 
 first bear-skin caps appeared over the hill, there resounded Wel- 
 lington's urgent command : " Up, Guards, and at 'em ! " At 
 once before the eyes of the dismayed French there rose a red wall, 
 the long line of the EngUsh guards, a terrible salvo was fired, at 
 a range of a few paces, into the attacking ranks. There was a 
 brief and fierce hand-to-hand fight, and then the blues were driven 
 back down the dechvity by the reds, at the point of the bayonet. 
 Ney's horse, struck liy a bullet, collapsed under its rider, and 
 the French guards fled when they saw their leader fall. Ney, 
 however, disengaged himself from his beast, sprang to his feet, 
 and 'with an angry exclamation endeavoured to rally the routed 
 men? Vainly, however, for meanwhile the other battahons had 
 come between two fires on the left and were also retreating. 
 The imperial guard broke up ; its unhappy commander wandered 
 
 189 
 
History of Germany 
 
 bare-headed upon the battle-field, with broken sword, vainly seeking 
 a bullet which should relieve him from the pangs of conscience 
 and from his gloomy anticipations. 
 
 Blucher meanwhile had led the attack which determined the 
 annihilation of the Napoleonic army. Billow's troops advanced 
 in three columns upon Planchenoit, at the storming-pace. In 
 and near the village were twelve fresh battalions of the imperial 
 guard ; they fought with the greatest courage, for all felt that 
 here was the decisive issue of the whole war. The advancing 
 Prussians were exposed, without protection, in the open field, 
 to the bullets of the defending force, which was concealed in the 
 houses and behind the high walls of the churchyard. The last 
 struggle was almost the bloodiest of this savage age ; in three 
 and a half hours, Billow's corps lost 6,353 men, more than a fifth 
 of his whole strength, proportionally as great a loss as that of 
 the English army during the entire battle. The first and the 
 second attack were repulsed ; then Gneisenau himself led the 
 Silesian and Pomeranian regiments in the third attack, and at 
 length, towards eight o'clock, this proved successful. There 
 was a last fierce resistance in the village street ; and then the 
 guard fled in wild disorder ; pursued by Major Keller with the 
 fusiliers of the 15th regiment, and then by other battalions. 
 Along the whole line there sounded in long-drawn notes the 
 beautiful signal to advance of the Prussian bugles. Simul- 
 taneously, farther to the north, Lobau's corps was attacked by 
 Billow's troops in front and by Zieten's cavalry on the flank, and 
 was completely routed. Here the two portions of the Prussian 
 army effected a junction ; the terrible girdle which was to 
 surround the right wing of the French upon three sides, was 
 closed. The English pressed on from the north, the Prussians 
 from the east and from the south. Grolman indicated to 
 Zieten's troops the way to the height behind the French centre, 
 to the farm of La Belle Alliance, which with its white walls was 
 as conspicuous as a lighthouse, looking down across the low-lying 
 country. Thither also did the victors of Planchenoit take their 
 way. 
 
 More than 40,000 Prussians had already taken part in the 
 struggle ; and now, when the work was nearly finished, Pirch's 
 army-corps came down from the heights behind Planchenoit. 
 During this last hour Napoleon had hastened to La Haye Sainte, 
 in order to urge Quiot's division to make yet another attempt 
 upon Mont St. Jean. As soon as he noticed Ney's defeat upon 
 
 190 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 the left and at the same time the break-up of the whole of the 
 right wmg, he said despairingly : " Tout est perdu ; sauve qui peut ! " 
 He then hastened back along the high-road, not without great 
 danger, for the road was already commanded with a severe cross 
 fire by the EngUsh army and by Zieten's batteries. 
 
 Wellington contemplated the terrible confusion in silence, 
 immovable, with wonderful self-command. Not only was his 
 army utterly exhausted, but also its tactical organisation was 
 completely broken up ; by the prolonged struggle all sections 
 of the troops had been shaken inextricably together ; from 
 the renmants of the two magnificent cavalry brigades of Pon- 
 sonby and Somerset no more than two squadrons could be 
 assembled. There was no possibihty of sustaining another decisive 
 battle with such troops. The duke was well aware that it was 
 only the appearance of the Prussians which had preserved him 
 from an unmistakable defeat ; his repeated urgent messages to 
 Blucher leave no doubt about this matter, but he owed the last 
 satisfaction to the mihtary honour of his vaUant troops ; and 
 moreover he foresaw with statesmanUke inteUigence how much 
 more important would be England's word in the peace negotia- 
 tions if it could be beheved that the British arms alone had 
 played a decisive part in the struggle. For this reason, as soon 
 as he saw the whole of the French right wing exposed to the 
 Prussian attack, he advanced all the available remnants of his 
 army a httle further. In this last advance, the Hanoverian 
 colonel Halkett drove before him the only two squares of the 
 imperial guard which stiU held together, and with his own hands 
 took prisoner their general, Cambronne. But the forces of the 
 wearied men were soon exhausted, and they got only a Httle beyond 
 Belle AUiance. Wellington, having saved appearances, left the 
 further pursuit entirely to the Prussians, who in any case were 
 nearest to the enemy. The beaten forces were in a condition of 
 absolute panic ; no orders were Ustened to any longer, everyone 
 thought only of his own miserable Ufe. Infantry and cavalry 
 confusedly intermingled, the broken up masses streamed south- 
 ward along and beside the high-road. The drivers cut the traces 
 and rode off on the horses, so that of the two hundred and forty 
 gims, all but twenty-seven fell into the hands of the conqueror. 
 Even the call I'emfereur, which hitherto had instantly opened 
 every road for the imperial carriage, now lost its charm ; Napoleon, 
 although he was ill and could hardly keep his seat, had to escape 
 on horseback. It was only in order to save the colours that a 
 
 191 
 
History of Germany 
 
 few of the faithful still continued to fight ; four were lost in the 
 battle but all the others were saved. Never in history was a 
 brave army so suddenly thrown into complete disorder. After the 
 superhuman exertions of the day, all courage of body and vigour 
 of will collapsed in a moment ; the obscurity of the night, the 
 superior strength of the conquerors, the extent of the attack, and 
 the relentless pursuit, increased the confusion. A further decisive 
 factor was that in this army, notwithstanding its stormy courage, 
 there was lacking moral greatness. What held these mutineers 
 together ? Nothing but the belief in their hero. Now that his 
 star had paled, they were merely an undisciplined mob. 
 
 The sun had already sunk behind thick clouds when the two 
 commanders met a httle to the south of the farmstead of Belle 
 Alhance ; they embraced one another cordially, the self-contained 
 man of forty and the ardent grey-head. Gneisenau was close at 
 hand. Now at length there had been gained the complete victory 
 such as Gneisenau had often looked for in vain from Schwarzen- 
 berg ; now at length had come complete repa57ment for all the 
 hatred and all the shame of those horrible seven years. His heart 
 sang within him, there came to his mind thoughts of the most 
 magnificent of the Frederician battle-fields, over which he had often 
 ridden when in garrison in Silesia. " Is it not just like Leuthen? " 
 he said to Bardeleben, and regarded him with sparkling eyes. In 
 truth, just as long ago at Leuthen, the trumpeters were blowing 
 Nun danket alls Gott, and the soldiers were joining in. Gneisenau, 
 however, thought also of the night of terror after the battle of 
 Jena, of those hours in the wood of Webicht when he had shared 
 the deadly anxiety of a beaten army, and had experienced the 
 elemental force of a nocturnal pursuit. More thoroughly than on 
 the Katzbach was the victory to be utilised to-day. " We have 
 shown," he exclaimed, " how to conquer ; now we will show how 
 to pursue." He ordered Bardeleben to keep upon the heels of the 
 fugitives with a battery, continually shooting after them at hap- 
 hazard in the darkness, so that the enemy could rest nowhere. 
 He took under his own immediate command whatever troops 
 were available : Brandenburg uhlans and dragoons, and infantry 
 of the 15th and 25th and of the ist Pomeranian regiments ; the 
 elder Prince WiUiam, who led the reserve cavalry of Billow's corps, 
 joined him. 
 
 In this way the savage pursuit raged along the road 
 throughout the night ; the fugitives could rest nowhere. Not 
 until Genappe, where the road crosses the vaUey of the Dyle by 
 
 192 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 a narrow bridge, did the fragments of the imperial guard endeavour 
 to attack the uhlans ; but towards eleven o'clock, directly they 
 heard the Prussian infantry advancing to the assaiilt, they broke 
 up once more. Here General Lobau and more than 2,000 men 
 were taken prisoners ; Napoleon's carriage with his hat and sword 
 were also seized. What a surprise came when the cushions of the 
 seats were lifted ; the great adventurer had wished to secure 
 means for himself in case of flight, and had filled the carriage with 
 gold and precious stones. The poor Pomeranian peasant lads were 
 as perplexed by the brilliants as had long ago been the Swiss at 
 Grandson by the jewels of the duke of Burgundy ; many of them 
 sold valuable stones for a few groschen. The Imperator's beautiful 
 plate was retained by the officers of the 25th, and was given by 
 them to the favourite daughter of their king as a table ornament. 
 
 After a brief halt, Gneisenau and Prince WiUiam continued 
 the pursuit. Across the Dyle the French beUeved themselves to 
 be in safety, and had arranged to bivouac. At least seven times 
 they were driven away from their fires by the persistent Prussians. 
 When the infantry could pursue no further, Gneisenau made a 
 drummer mount a captured horse and beat his drum with all his 
 might while the pursuit was continued with the uhlans and about 
 fifty fusihers who were still able to keep going. What a niunber 
 of squads of the French ran away from the sound of this single 
 drum ! The road was Uttered with arms, knapsacks, and all kinds 
 of discarded articles, as had once been the road from Rosbach to 
 Erfurt. At dawn the pmsuers reached the battle-field of Quatre 
 Bras, and only when they had crossed this did they stop from 
 exhaustion at Frasnes, after sunrise. They had increased the 
 dispersal of the hostile army to complete dismemberment, so that 
 of the French fighters at Belle AUiance only 10,000 men, in utterly 
 disorganised masses, subsequently assembled in Paris. 
 
 Blucher proudly thanked his incomparable army, which had 
 rendered possible what all great commanders had hitherto 
 regarded as impossible : " As long as history lasts, your memory 
 will persist. Upon you, the unshakable pillars of the Prussian 
 monarchy, rests secure the fortune of your kmg and of his house. 
 Never shall Prussia be overthrown if your sons and grandsons 
 resemble you ! " To Stein he wrote simply : " I hope, my 
 honourable friend, that you will be satisfied with me," and 
 expressed the desire " to Uve out quietly in the country " his 
 remaining years, as Stein's neighbour. He ordered that the battle 
 should be known as "La Belle Alliance," the significant name of 
 
 193 o 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the farm where the two conquerors had met, " by the favour of 
 fortune ; and in commemoration of the aUiance which now exists 
 between the British and the Prussian nations, an alKance dictated 
 by the very nature of things ; in commemoration of the union 
 of the two armies and the mutual trust of the two commanders." 
 Wellington would not 3deld to this fine thought, which gave well- 
 deserved honour to both nations. The battle must appear as his 
 victory, and therefore he christened it after the name of the 
 village of Waterloo, where there had been no fighting at all ; for 
 there he had spent the night of June 17th, and from the days of 
 the Spanish campaign he had been accustomed to name his vic- 
 tories after the site of his last headquarters. Whereas Gneisenau's 
 report of the battle gave a straightforward and modest description 
 of the actual course of events, as far as this was already known, 
 the duke's report made it appear as if his last feint-attack had 
 decided the issue, and as if the Prussians had merely afforded an 
 unquestionably valuable assistance. Fortunately, little was as 
 yet manifest of these characteristics of Enghsh friendly alliance. 
 The relationship between the soldiers of the two armies remainoi 
 thoroughly amicable ; the valiant Highlanders who on the battle- 
 field embraced the men of the Prussian fbur-and-twentieth, had 
 joined with them in singing Heil dir im Siegerkranz, troubling therh- 
 selves little about whose services were the greatest. 
 
 In the homeland, the unhappy news of Ligny had caused 
 profound dismay ; the people already began to foresee a new 
 age of unending wars. All the more passionate was the joy when 
 the news of victory arrived. How suddenly had the relationships 
 of power between the two neighbour peoples been changed! 
 Now the Germans met the enemy across the frontier; half the 
 Prussian army and a part of the North German contingent sufficed, 
 in conjunction with about 60,000 Englishmen and Netherlanders, 
 to defeat the French army ; inevitably the thought sprang to life 
 that Prussia alone, without Austria, would be strong enough to 
 master this ill neighbour if only all the other German states would 
 join Prussia. Gneisenau declared with satisfaction : " The French 
 do not merely fear, they now actually know, that we are 
 stronger than they." In consciousness of such energy, the nation 
 like one man demanded a relentless utilisation of the victory,' 
 and the complete liberation of the German river. A contera^* 
 porary poet wrote : 
 
 " That chain of frontier forts by Vauban built for France- 
 Seize them for Germany ! " 
 
 194 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 Yet never does the imperfection of all human activity dis- 
 play itself more conspicuously than in war. One last success 
 which stiU seemed possible eluded the Prussians, and, as the 
 officers considered, not without blame attaching to the two most 
 learned men of the army. Grouchy's force escaped annihilation. 
 On June i8th, when the marshal advanced against Wavre, Thiel- 
 mann checked him at the Dyle, in the evening, by a bold and 
 coiuageously led fight. In the early morning of June 19th 
 Grouchy made a further attack, and Thielmann, who had only 
 three brigades at his disposal against the superior force of the 
 enemy, retreated upon Louvain. His chief of staff, the talented 
 Clausewitz, considered the position more serious than it really 
 was, and retreated too far to the north. Gmsequently when the 
 French, on receiving the terrible news of Belle Alliance, suddenly 
 turned and hastily retraced their steps to the Sambre, the Prussians 
 had lost touch with them and could no longer get at them. 
 Meanwhile the main army had also initiated an undertaking 
 against Grouchy. When General Pirch, late in the evening of 
 Jime i8th, reached Planchenoit, and found the battle already 
 almost over, there occurred to Aster, his chief of staff, the fortunate 
 idea that the second corps must now move eastward, in order, 
 as circumstances might dictate, to pursue Grouchy's army or to 
 cut off its retreat. In this proposal he merely suggested what he 
 was immediately afterwards ordered to do by Gneisenau. The 
 task offered great difficulties. The corps had been weakened 
 by the fight of Ligny, and by the detachment of several bodies 
 of troops, so that it now numbered only 16,000 men, its strength 
 being half that which it had possessed three days earlier ; the 
 soldiers were utterly weary ; and nothing definite was known as 
 to Grouchy's position. It is not surprising that the night march 
 was a slow one ; yet had his staff been sufficiently alert, the general 
 would have been able to learn on the 19th where Grouchy was. 
 But this activity was lacking. Not until Jime 20th did news 
 arrive that in the previous night, without a shot being fired, the 
 marshal had made his way to the Sambre, passing not far from the 
 outposts, and had th\is had the luck to sUp through between 
 the two corps of Pirch and Thielmaim. Pirch hastened after 
 him, encoimtered the rear-guard at Namur, and took the town 
 after a sanguinary fight at the gates ; but Grouchy's main force 
 was already in safety. The result was that, for the time being, 
 the French still possessed a tolerably well-ordered force of 30,000 
 men, which perhaps might constitute the nucleus for a new army. 
 
 19s 
 
History of Germany 
 
 The two commanders-in-chief speedily came to an under- 
 standing as to a common invasion of France, in which the Prus- 
 sians were again to take the lead ; but in this resolution they were 
 guided by fundamentally different intentions. Blucher simply 
 wished to complete the overthrow of the detested land, until the 
 monarchs could make further arrangements; Wellington desired 
 to restore the legitimate king to the Tuileries as speedily as 
 possible. How much more advantageous was the Englishman's 
 political position ! Whilst Blucher, ignorant of the designs of 
 his court, had to content himself with forbidding his generals 
 any official intercourse with the Bourbons, Wellington, uncon- 
 cerned about the wishes of his ally, quietly moved forward 
 towards his definite goal, and demanded of the court at Ghent 
 that it should follow the English army. 
 
 The decisive issue of the war had occurred with such 
 wonderful speed that those powers which did not desire a new 
 restoration could make no preparations to meet the altered 
 situation. King Louis was still the king of France, recognised 
 by all the powers ; the whole diplomatic corps had accompanied 
 him to Ghent, and the representations of the foreign statesmen 
 were fortunately able to overcome the dangerous influence of 
 Count Blacas, and to induce the king to assume a more moderate 
 attitude. A first unwise and arrogant proclamation was succeeded 
 on June 28th by a second, full of friendly assurances. The 
 Bourbon promised that he would henceforward place himself 
 between the allied and the French armies " in the hope that the 
 deference paid to me will turn to the advantage of France " ; 
 he solemnly pledged himself not to re-estabUsh tithes and 
 seigneurial rights, and not to demand the return of the national 
 goods. Wellington did not hesitate to declare to the peace 
 deputation sent to him by the capital, that the conqueror's 
 conditions would be very much harder if the nation did not 
 summon back its king. Strangely enough, Pozzo di Borgo, the 
 Russian ambassador, eagerly supported the efforts of the English 
 commander ; and did this altogether on his own initiative, for at 
 that time the czar was thinking of promoting the accession of the 
 duke of Orleans. It was Pozzo's hope that through favouring the 
 cause of the Bourbon he might for years to come be the most 
 powerful man in the Tuileries. A portion of the possessing classes 
 was also incUned to the view that a new restoration was the only 
 possible issue from the hopeless confusion, and that in especial 
 it would be advantageous to the position of France in Europe. 
 
 196 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 This was a matter of cool calculation which had nothing to do with 
 any sentiments of dynastic loyalty. 
 
 The Imperator had immediately to learn that Frsmce had 
 no place for an milucky Napoleon. Acting on the advice of his 
 entourage, on Jime 20th he left the army, which was his sole 
 support, and hastened to Paris ; there he found himself so 
 utterly abandoned by all the world that, two days later, he 
 abdicated in favour of his son. The provisional government 
 which had constituted itself under the leadership of the cunning 
 Fouch6, no longer regarded the words of the fallen man. Full of 
 anxious doubts, he remained for a few days at Malmaison, where 
 formerly the divorced Josephine had Hved in solitude, and vainly 
 offered the government his services as a simple general. At length 
 he perceived that the game was finished; the thought of getting 
 control of the wheel of state with the aid of the Jacobin 
 confederates in the suburbs, seemed to the despot too unsol- 
 dierly. At the approach of the Prussians he left Paris, on June 
 29th, and hastened to the coast at Rochefort. The great play- 
 actor now threw his toga into artistic folds, declared to the prince 
 regent that he came like Themistocles to seek protection at the 
 hospitable fireside of his magnanimous enemy, and on July 15th 
 went on board the English line-of-battle ship " Bellerophon." 
 Hardenberg now learned with satisfaction that the proposal he had 
 himself so often made was approved without hesitation by all 
 the powers ; nothing remained but to keep the dangerous man in 
 safe custody far from Europe. Upon the lonely fortress-island 
 of St. Helena the prisoner provided for himself with his own hands 
 such a punishment as even his bitterest enemy could hardly have 
 conceived. This titanic life came to a rogue's end. He filled his 
 last years with idle quarrels and the professional diffusion of 
 colossal Ues ; he himself withdrew the veil from the boundless 
 vulgarity of the giant spirit of the man who had once been so 
 audacious as to set his foot upon the world's neck. 
 
 Not without difficulty did the two commanders come to an 
 agreement concerning the fate of Napoleon. The contrast 
 between the British and the German poUcy was displayed 
 throughout. Wellington desired to spare the feelings of the 
 French as much as possible, and since at heart he remained abso- 
 lutely cold, he recognised rightly that it ill became the con- 
 querors to besmirch their victory by a deed of violence. In 
 JBlucher's headquarters, on the other hand, the old hatred flamed 
 violently forth ; so many Germans had met their deaths through 
 
 197 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the fault of this one man ! Blucher had gone so far as to deter- 
 mine that if he could capture the evil-doer, he would have him 
 shot in the fortress of Vincennes, on the very spot where the due 
 d'Enghien had formerly been murdered ; otherwise what was 
 the meaning of the Viennese declaration of outlawry against the 
 disturber of the public peace ? Only upon Wellington's urgent 
 request did he abandon the savage plan, acquiescing in the 
 " theatrical magnanimity," as Gneisenau bitterly wrote, " out of 
 respect for the character of the duke and — out of weakness." 
 On the other hand, the Prussian commander insisted that the 
 march must be continued as far as Paris, whereas the Englishman 
 would have preferred to spare the capital this fresh humiliation, 
 and wished to allow his Bourbon protege to enter alone. Blucher 
 stood firm, imposing such harsh conditions upon the peace envoys 
 from Paris that the continuation of the war was unavoidable. 
 
 The Prussian army pushed on irresistibly, far in advance of 
 the Enghsh. Siege operations were vigorously pressed, so that 
 fourteen fortresses had to open their gates to the Germans. 
 Everjnvhere the populace displayed intense hostility ; the French 
 persisted in believing that this new war of the coalition was a 
 monstrous injustice. The Prussians, too, behaved more harshly 
 than in the previous year. Gneisenau hoped that on the Oise he 
 would be able to cut off Grouchy's army from Paris. He did not 
 succeed ; but by his persistent pursuit, the marshal's troops were 
 broken up almost as completely as had been the conquered French 
 after Belle Alliance. Major Frankenhausen, the bold mihtary 
 adventurer, gave them no rest, maintaining now the ancient glories 
 of the Prussian cavalry which hitherto in this war had little 
 opportunity of distinguishing itself. In the battles of Compi^ne 
 and Villers-Cotterets the French made but a feeble resistance. 
 It was in dispersed fragments that the conquered reached the 
 capital. With their accession, the force commanded by Davoust, 
 the military governor of Paris, now amounted to over 70,000 men, 
 but what could be expected from these discouraged and undis- 
 cipUned hordes ? On June 29th Blucher reached Gonesse, a few 
 hours' march to the north of Paris ; the charming basin of the 
 Seine lay before him. His army had traversed the one hundred and 
 sixty miles from the Belgian battle-field in eleven days, resting but 
 one day on the march. 
 
 Here, in the headquarters at Gonesse, there came a bad time 
 for Gneisenau. What draws all our hearts to the image of this 
 great German is that in everything he was so simply human, and 
 
 198 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 for this reason on occasion he could be humanly bitter and unjust. 
 So was it with him to-day. He knew that he had been the real 
 commander in this war, that the saving idea of the junction of the 
 two armies had sprung from his head alone. Now he had to 
 learn how the aUies praised Wellington as the leading hero ; this 
 EngUshman, who had indeed displayed upon the battle-field great 
 circumspection and tenacity, but who in the conduct of the cam- 
 paign had heaped error upon error. Gneisenau became pro- 
 foundly embittered when he reflected upon his inglorious and 
 inconspicuous activities, upon all the distresses of recent years 
 which he had so long borne in silence ; how he had been the sport 
 of fate from childhood upwards. He had been bom at Schilda, 
 the Saxon Abdera, amid the confusion of the war-camp of the 
 imperial army, among the enemies of Prussia ; Prussian cannons 
 were the child's lullaby, and during the noctiimal retreat after the 
 battle of Torgau he would have perished under the hoofs of the 
 horses, had not a compassionate grenadier picked him up out 
 of danger. Thereupon followed the weary, joyless time when as 
 a barefooted lad he had to herd geese in Schilda, until at length his 
 Catholic relatives in Wiirzburg took pity on him. The homeless 
 man never really knew to what German stock, or to what Church, 
 he properly belonged. Next came the wild, mad days of student 
 life in Erfurt, a brief period of service in the Austrian cavalry, 
 and a journey to America with the unhappy men whom the 
 margarve of Ansbach sold to the British. Next he entered the 
 Prussian service, at the outset with brilliant, exaggerated hopes, 
 then to endure once more the utter futihty of hfe as a subaltern, 
 so miserable, so depressing, that this fiery sprit, which had once 
 almost consumed itself in its own ardency, was in danger 
 of degenerating into philistinism. But now, when a world- 
 transforming destiny broke over Prussia, in Gneisenau, genius 
 sprang to life ; it was through his work that the discouraged 
 army gained the first success, and since Schamhorst's death there 
 had been no one to compare with Gneisenau. What was his 
 reward ? The officers of the general staff who in daily intercourse 
 experienced the magic of his genius, could not fail to know what 
 Germany possessed in this man ; it seemed to them that they 
 stood in a topsy-turvy world when they saw this bom leader of 
 men standing humbly beside the czar with his plumed hat in his 
 hand. Yet when the soldiers greeted old Blucher with thunderous 
 hurrahs, they hardly noticed the unknown general standing beside 
 the, field-marshal. Bulow had engraved his name in the tablets 
 
 199 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of history; but of Gneisenau they knew nothing. He believed 
 himself to be older than all the generals of infantry ; and still 
 remained no more than lieutenant-general ; he had never led an 
 independent command, and had received neither the order of the 
 black eagle, nor that of the great iron cross. The king did not 
 love him, the ill-natured gossip among the people of the court 
 never ceased ; he felt so little secure of his position in the army 
 that, shortly before, he had begged the chancellor to give him, 
 when peace came, the position of postmaster-general. Vanity was 
 far from his mind ; how often did he speak of himself as a mere 
 soldier favoured by fortune ; but once at least his discontent had 
 to find expression. In a single day, in a towering rage, he wrote 
 to the chancellor three letters full of violent complaints, accusing 
 in his anger even Stein and Blucher of ingratitude.* It was not 
 long before the king did him ample justice ; he subsequently 
 wore the star which had been found in Napoleon's carriage. 
 Yet the majority of his contemporaries never assigned to him 
 the historic renown to which he was in truth entitled ; it was 
 only a later generation of his countrymen which recognised his 
 greatness, and even to this day the French are not aware who 
 was the greatest commander of allied Europe. 
 
 The ill-humour passed over Gneisenau's free spirit like a 
 fugitive cloud. On this same June 30th the hero was once more 
 fully himself when he laid before the two commanders his plan 
 for taking the capital. Whilst Biilow kept the tolerably well- 
 fortified north side of Paris busy by feint-attacks, Blucher 
 marched to the right with the rest of the army, crossed the Seine 
 below the town, and moved to attack the place from the south ; 
 on July 2nd Biilow was relieved by the arrival of the English, 
 and followed the field-marshal. The last fights on the open 
 southern side of the city were left once more entirely to the 
 Prussians. Vainly did Davoust, in a letter couched in moving 
 terms, beg for a truce. The marshal's contention that after the 
 fall of Napoleon there was no longer any reason for the war, 
 sounded to the German commander like mockery ; in a per- 
 emptory reply he demanded that the detested oppressor of German 
 citizens should capitulate : "Do you wish to bring upon yourself 
 the maledictions of Paris, as you have already brought those of 
 Hamburg ? " A skirmish in which his favourite arm came off 
 badly, profoundly grieved old Blucher. The veteran Branden- 
 burg and Pomeranian hussars, six hundred and fifty horse under 
 
 * Gneisenau to Hardenberg, three letters from Gonesse, June 30, 1815. 
 
 200 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 the leadership of Sohr, fell into an ambush at Versailles, set by the 
 eleven cavalry regiments of General Excelman ; when they took 
 to flight, they fomid their way into a blind alley, between high 
 walls, in the village of Chesnoy. One-third of them cut their way 
 out, but most of the others were killed. Among them weis the 
 youthful volimteer, Heinrich von York, the general's favourite son ; 
 when the enemy offered him quarter, he shouted out : " My name 
 is York ! " and went on fighting until he was killed. Thus the 
 iron man who had begun the German war had to pay once more 
 with his heart's blood just before the ultimate victory. 
 
 On July 2nd Zieten's corps, after a severe fight, made its 
 way on to the plateau of Meudon. During the following night, 
 the wild Vandamme, endeavouring to reconquer this position 
 from Issy, was completely defeated ; the superiority of the 
 Prussian arms was so manifest that on the next morning Davoust 
 declared himself prepared to surrender. Blucher sent, down 
 Miifaing to negotiate. He had once in Blucher's name signed 
 the never-to-be-forgotten capitulation of Ratkau ; since then 
 Blucher had never been able to look upon him without sup- 
 pressed anger, and now sent him to arrange another capitulation 
 so that the old blot might be wiped from his scutcheon. The 
 town had to be evacuated within three days, and Davoust was to 
 retire with the remnants of his army across the Loire. Blucher 
 wrote in triumph to Knesebeck : " My day's work is completed, 
 Paris is mine ! I owe everything to my brave troops, to their 
 tenacity, and to my own iron will ! " Subsequently the whole of 
 the west and north of the country was occupied by the allied 
 armies. With what delight did Schamhorst's son-in-law, Friedrich 
 Dohna, make his cavalrymen water their horses in the Loire ; 
 he thought proudly of his vaUant ancestors who, in the wars of 
 the Huguenots, had also borne the terror of German arms as far 
 as the walls of Blois and Orleans. 
 
 On this occasion Blucher would not afford the detested town 
 the honour of his visit, or the dehghtful spectacle of a ceremonial 
 entry. They were to feel what war is. The regiments entered 
 separately, and were all of them billeted, though the citizens 
 complained bitterly of this ill-usage. The authorities and the 
 inhabitants were profoundly incensed ; it seemed to them an 
 incredible disgrace that in four days these Prussians had made 
 an end of French military glories. The conqueror demanded the 
 furnishing of two months' pay for the army, and the immediate 
 delivery of two millions as a war tax ; those who complained 
 
 20 1 
 
History of Germany 
 
 were referred by him to Daru — he understood how to provide 
 money. On the very first day the Danzig picture was removed 
 from the Louvre by Prussian musketeers, and thus began the 
 retaking of the spoil. Everything must be given up, to a single 
 hair, said Blucher ; and he pursued the work in haste so that 
 the accursed diplomats might not again intervene. It was only 
 to the hard will of the German commander that the world owed 
 it that the European scandal of the great Parisian plunder-shop 
 now came to an end. Altenstein, Eichhorn, and de Groote, the 
 young connoisseur of Cologne, showed the Prussian soldiers the 
 stolen goods ; but notwithstanding the zeal with which the 
 search was pursued by the German experts, a portion of the 
 invaluable spoil was never recovered. After the Prussians had once 
 set in hand the work of atonement, the other states also put in 
 their claims. The manuscript treasures of the Heidelberg Pala- 
 tina, which long before Tilly had removed to Rome, and sub- 
 sequently Bonaparte to Paris, were at length returned to the 
 Neckar. The artistic people of Florence received with songs and 
 with a flower-decked procession their statues of the Gods, the 
 Venus and the Apollo, when they were brought back to the magni- 
 ficent Uffizi gallery. It was Blucher's wish to blow up the 
 bridge of Jena, and this would have given him especial satisfac- 
 tion if he could have done it while Talleyrand was on it ; only 
 the intervention of the monarch held Blucher in check. 
 
 The headquarters were established at St. Cloud. In the 
 Salle de I'Orangerie, where the coup d'etat of Brumaire had once 
 been carried out, the Prussian regimental tailors established their 
 workshop ; on his departure the field-marshal took with him 
 David's picture of Bonaparte crossing the Alps, and gave it to 
 the king for the palace in Berlin. Governor Muffling ruled Paris 
 with a firm hand, this applying equally to the troops and to the 
 eternally complaining hosts of the billeted ; second in command was 
 Colonel Pfuel, a zealous Teutoniser, renowned in all the gymnastic 
 and swimming places of the North German youth. It did not 
 come amiss to the stalwart man to give a complaining French- 
 man immediate satisfaction with the national weapon, the foil. 
 His position was difficult among the feverishly excited people ; 
 the Prussian guard-posts were frequently attacked at night ; on 
 several occasions the Prussian guards had to make their way by 
 force of arms into the arcades of the Palais Royal when the taunts 
 of the guests in the coffee houses became too arrogant. Well- 
 ington's calculated lenity afforded a remarkable contrast to 
 
 202 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 the severe, but by no means violent, conduct of the Prussians. 
 The duke had his troops quartered in the open, in the Bois de 
 Boulogne, and avoided everj^hing which could offend Parisian 
 vanity, whilst coolly completing a master-stroke of British 
 diplomacy which would have done honour to the most adroit of 
 the London stock-jobbers. From his point of view it seemed a 
 matter of course that England's wiU should be alone decisive in 
 this coaUtion war. Without even asking the allied courts, he 
 arranged for the Bourbon to enter the Tuileries under the pro- 
 tection of Enghsh bayonets. On the afternoon of July loth, when 
 the three monarchs entered Paris, King Louis had already been 
 two days re-estabUshed upon his throne, and received them as a 
 courteous host. Fouche, who was quick to note which way the 
 wind was blowing, had adhered to the Bourbon cause in good time, 
 and saw to it that the chambers of the empire should not reas- 
 semble. What availed it to refuse all Louis's invitations or that 
 the Prussian guards in the Tuileries would not notice the court ? 
 The second restoration had been completed by England alone ; 
 none of the other powers could seriously think of re-expelling the 
 Bourbons. By this accompUshed fact, British pohcy at the same 
 time frustrated the just demands of the German nation. The 
 detachment of Alsace-Lorraine from France would have been 
 possible if the aUies had first agreed among themselves, and had 
 then siunmoned back the Bovubon king to the diminished king- 
 dom ; it had become impossible now that it was necessary to 
 negotiate on the question with a friendly monarch. With good 
 reason did Hardenberg complain that the arbitrary procedure of 
 the Englishman had forced the coalition into an " amphibious 
 position."^ 
 
 To the two emperors the brilUant success of the Belgian 
 campaign was a surprise, and by no means an agreeable one. 
 The czar's army had not been under fire at all. The Austrians and 
 the South Germans, after an insignificant fight at Strasburg, began 
 a lifeless investment of the fortresses of Alsace : the archduke 
 John, having conquered Hiiningen almost without bloodshed, was 
 honoured by the grateful Baslers Hke a second Napoleon. All 
 the other places still held out. The populace everywhere dis- 
 played fanatical hatred ; many stragglers from the allied army 
 were killed with inhuman tortures. The mountain guards 
 assembled in the Vosges ; after the war the people of Schlettstadt 
 had the extremely mild horrors of the siege commemorated on 
 
 1 Hardenberg's Diary, July 3, 1815. 
 203 
 
History of Germany 
 
 their town-hall in pathetic pictures. In a word, Austrian military 
 glories remained of an extremely modest character. Emperor 
 Francis said in his wheedling way to the officers of Blucher's head- 
 quarters staff : " You Prussians are devils of fellows " ; and 
 Metternich declared to Baron von Stein that after the battle of 
 Ligny an Austrian army would have required at least six weeks 
 in which to recover, to which Stein bluntly answered : " You see, 
 then, what moral energy can do." More faithfully than in such 
 civilities were the true sentiments of the Hofburg manifested in 
 the rancorous letters of Adam Miiller, who could not vent his 
 wit sufficiently about " Blucher's Berlinese soldiers who were 
 strutting about the boulevards of Paris imagining themselves 
 Romans." 
 
 The czar, too, hardly concealed how profoundly he was 
 annoyed that his alhes had deprived him in advance of all the 
 miUtary glory. As soon as he saw that the restoration of the 
 Bourbons was beyond repair, he immediately abandoned his 
 Orleanist plans, endorsed Pozzo di Borgo's arbitrary procedure, and 
 once more endeavoured by generosity towards France to get the 
 better of his English rival. The magnanimous sympathy which 
 he had made it a pleasure to display, now assumed a peculiar 
 mystical colouring. On the journey, while at Heidelberg, he had 
 fallen into the nets of the bigoted enthusiast, Frau von Kriidener, 
 who henceforward never let him escape. The nature of the cele- 
 brated prophetess was fundamentally shallow ; when she died, 
 Goethe exclaimed, " What a life ! Like shavings. You couldn't get 
 a handful of ashes out of it for the soap-boiler 1 " She knew, 
 however, how to conduct herself gracefully in the fashionable 
 speech and fashionable sentiments of the romantic age, and 
 Alexander's heart, thirsty for love, longed for sweeter consolation 
 than could be offered by the barren rationalism of his tutor 
 Laharpe. In Paris, the czar was immediately received by a circle 
 of ladies inspired with Christian enthusiasm, rendering homage to 
 the new saviour of the world who was to found the reahn of God's 
 peace on earth, and who naturally, after the example of the 
 Saviour, was to forget and forgive everything. It was just as 
 much a matter of course that these generous intentions should 
 once more coincide precisely with the reputed interests of Russian 
 policy. Although Alexander, after his manner, was really a 
 faithful ally of his western neighbour, it was by no means his 
 desire that Prussia should become strong enough to dispense with 
 Russian friendship: for this reason Germany must remain vulnerable 
 
 204 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 on the western frontier. Even more vigorously than in the 
 previous year did the czar advocate the cause of the French, and 
 he remained altogether inaccessible to the suggestions of Stein. 
 Mettemich, too, quickly adapted himself to the new situation 
 which Wellington's lack of consideration had brought about ; he 
 immediately abandoned the idea of establishing Napoleon II 
 on the throne, with which Gentz had played for a time, and 
 adhered cordially to the Bourbon. Since now, as before, he was 
 of the opinion that Austria must on no account resume her 
 dangerous position on the Upper Rhine, he desired a speedy con- 
 clusion of peace on mild terms. What did the court of Vienna 
 care about the just claims of the German people ? 
 
 Nowhere did these hopes of the Germans find warmer expres- 
 sion than in the letters of the Prussian generals. Foiu: days after 
 the decisive battle, Gneisenau wrote to the chancellor : " Woe 
 to them, shame to them, if they do not seize this unique oppor- 
 tunity to safeguard Belgium, Prussia, Germany, to all eternity ! " 
 For Belgiimi he demanded certain fortresses in French Flanders ; 
 for Prussia, Mainz and Luxemburg, and also Nassau and 
 Ansbach-Bayreuth ; Bavaria was to receive compensation in 
 Alsace-Lorraine, and the House of Nassau in French Luxemburg. 
 " You know better than I, what language Prussia can and must 
 use. Prussia has never before stood so high ! " In a similar 
 sense, Blucher begged the king " to tell the diplomatists that they 
 must not lose once more what the soldier has gained at the cost 
 of his blood ! " The old man, like almost the entire German 
 nation, cherished the naive belief that it would be impossible 
 for the foreign powers to refuse the honourably earned reward of 
 victory if only our diplomats should remain firm. The king was, 
 personally speaking, in perfect harmony with the desires of his 
 generals, and commissioned Gneisenau to take part beside Har- 
 denberg and Humboldt as plenipotentiary at the peace congress ; 
 it gave immense satisfaction to the fiery hero that Talleyrand, 
 who in Vienna had incited to the war of annihilation against 
 Prussia, must now encounter him as a simple negotiator on behalf 
 of the conquered. The sober spirit of Frederick William recog- 
 nised, however, how Uttle this harsh struggle for power would be 
 decided on rational grounds, or in accordance with the manifest 
 justice of the Prussian demands ; "To pursue the interests of 
 my own state alone," he wrote soothingly to the field-marshal, 
 " will encounter difficulties in the concurrent interests of the 
 other states." 
 
 20S 
 
History of Germany 
 
 In actual fact, the position of the Prassian negotiators was 
 to-day even more unfavourable than it had been in the first peace 
 congress ; in all important questions they encountered the united 
 opposition of the other four powers. It is true that the old 
 opponents at Vienna, the Netherlands, Baden, and Wiirtemberg, 
 were on this occasion eloquent advocates of the Prussian claims, 
 since it was far more important for them even than for Prussia 
 that the French eastern frontier should be weakened. So 
 markedly, however, had the system of the pentarchy already 
 developed, that the memorials of the powers of the second rank 
 were treated by the great powers as empty exercises in literary 
 style, and were rarely regarded as worthy of an answer. The 
 Prussian state stood alone ; the Prussian army had sacrificed 
 itself heroically for the common cause of Europe, without in the 
 end acquiring anything to speak of for its own country. 
 
 §2. THE SECOND PEACE OF PARIS. 
 
 When Hardenberg reached Paris on July 15th, the czar met 
 him with violent reproaches regarding the undisciplined conduct 
 of the Prussian army. Yet Blucher kept strict order, and 
 punished relentlessly the isolated excesses of his troops. It was 
 only the Netherlanders and, in accordance with their usual 
 custom, the Bavarians, who could be accused of certain outbreaks 
 of roughness ; sometimes, too, the intractable ill-feeUng of those 
 upon whom the soldiery were billeted was a contributory cause of 
 Hjisconduct. The prefect of the Seine himself incited the Parisians 
 against the aUies. When Miifiling had the Venetian four-horse 
 chariot taken down from the Arc de Triomphe in the Place du 
 Carrousel, the workmen were several times driven away by the 
 mob and by the body-guard of the Bourbon, until at length an 
 Austrian battahon restored order. The chancellor immediately 
 Realised that the accusations directed by the czar against the 
 Prussians, and the Prussians alone, masked a definite intention, 
 and that this was to represent the Prussians as drunk with the pride 
 of victory ; moreover, their warlike renown was diligently mini- 
 mised and disputed. 
 
 In the great council of ministers there sat : Nesselrodej 
 Gapodistrias, and Pozzo ; Castlereagh, Wellington, and Stewart ; 
 Mettemich, Wessenberg, and Schwarzenberg— -and there was 
 not one of them who displayed a friendly disposition towards the 
 three Prussian plenipotentiaries. The presidential power of the 
 
 206 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 new Germanic Federation at first adopted an attitude of reserve, 
 for it could not venture to contradict too obviously the xinanimous 
 desire of the German nation ; on the other hand, it did nothing 
 at all to support the demand for the restoration of the Vosges 
 frontier. Gentz from the first spoke with poisonous mockery of 
 the " narrow-minded views " of the Prussians who wished to 
 derive a selfish advantage from the war against the revolution. 
 The proposal of Stein and of his friends that Alsace should be 
 given to the archduke Charles, served merely to arouse the hostiUty 
 of the emperor Francis, who always cherished a deep mistrust of 
 this brother. 
 
 Between the two rivals, Russia and England, there now 
 ensued a vigorous competition for the reward of generosity ; both 
 powers hoped to secure the friendship of France in view of the 
 threatening eastern compHcations. Among the British, too, 
 there was operative the memory of the compact of January 3rd 
 and of the entente cordiale which had then been established ; 
 but the main factor in their conduct was the spiritual narrowness 
 pecuUar to the high tories. It was impossible for these islanders 
 to attain to the wide outlooks of continental policy. Castlereagh 
 frankly declared : " If we can take measures for the next five or 
 seven years, the best has been effected that we can hope from 
 diplomacy." The conquerors determined not to begin negotia^ 
 tions with the crown of France until they had come to an under- 
 standing among themselves. The unhappy land lay disarmed at 
 the feet of the conqueror. Everywhere prevailed the frenzy of 
 partisan hatred : in Paris there was profound hostility towards 
 the king, the protege of the foreigners ; in the south there was 
 already beginning a civil war, the fierce struggle of the White 
 Terror. In addition, the remnants of the Napoleonic army were 
 now dissolved, upon Alexander's advice, because the czar wished 
 to prove to the allies that there was no longer an enemy opposed 
 to them and that the hour of forgiveness had arrived. The country 
 was not in a position to offer any kind of opposition to the condi- 
 tions of the conquerors. All the more difficult was it for the con- 
 querors to arrive at an understanding among themselves. The 
 deliberations were on this occasion as stormy as the negotiations 
 for the first peace of Paris had been easy. For two entire months 
 the Prussian statesmen carried on a iplomatic struggle against 
 the whole of Europe, until at length they had to give way, and 
 then, after the powers had come to their decision, the peace 
 negotiation with France was opened. 
 
 207 
 
History of Germany 
 
 As early as July 15th, Castlereagh had laid down the prin- 
 ciples from which the allies ought to start* : "To discredit or 
 weaken the prestige of King Louis, is tantamount to the diminu- 
 tion of the power of the allies themselves." It was also the duty 
 of the powers to treat the nation with forbearance and concilia- 
 tion, whilst the king should be supported in the reconstruction 
 of the army and in the suppression of the conspirators. In sharp 
 contrast with this view, in which the conqueror of Belle Alliance 
 was regarded as no more than the devoted police officer of the 
 Most Christian King, were the demands expressed by Harden- 
 berg on July 22nd. '^ Three aims, he said, have to be attained 
 by this peace : a guarantee for the peace of Europe ; indemnifica- 
 tion for the cost of the war ; finally, the carrying out of the 
 promises which were given at the first peace. The peace of 
 the world can be secured only by the weakening of the eastern 
 frontier of France, for the French will display themselves as hostile 
 immediately our army is withdrawn. The last war had mani- 
 fested the vulnerability of the Netherlands, just as the military 
 weakness of High Germany was proved by the Napoleonic cam- 
 paigns. Consequently the Netherlands must be strengthened by 
 taking over a number of French fortresses ; Alsace must be 
 restored to Germany, and its fortresses garrisoned by Austria ; 
 Prussia must receive the fortresses on the Saar and the Upper 
 Moselle ; Switzerland must be given a border fortress in the Jura ; 
 Piedmont should have the whole of Savoy. From Dunkirk as far 
 as Chamb^ry and the lakes of Savoy, a strip of land many miles 
 wide, running along the whole of the eastern frontier, and including 
 the three chains of fortresses constructed by Vauban, must be 
 ceded, as was shown in detail by a map from the chancellery. 
 
 Just as throughout this war Prussia had displayed uncal- 
 culating self-sacrifice for the common cause of Europe, so now 
 Hardenberg demanded very Uttle directly for his own state as 
 the reward of victory; no more than Metz, Diedenhofen, and 
 Saarlouis. Even Gneisenau had speedily recognised how strong 
 was the general mistrust of Prussia, and therefore now advised 
 that more should be asked for the Netherlands, Austria, and 
 South Germany, than for Prussia herself. To the British, matters 
 must be represented in this way ; that thus Prussia could be 
 safeguarded in the west, and would consequently be better able to 
 
 * Castlereagh, Memorandum of July 5, 1815. 
 
 ^ Hardenberg, Memorial concerning the principles to be acted upon by the 
 Committee of Four, July 22, 1815. 
 
 208 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 make head against Russia. ^ Finally, the chancellor suggested as 
 possible that the Burgundian Franche Comte should be detached 
 from France, since this urgently longed for its ancient freedom. 
 In the general confusion of those days there were displayed isolated 
 centrifugal tendencies which had long been supposed defunct. 
 Even from Lyons envoys came to Emperor Francis begging that 
 the town should be separated from France as an independent 
 republic. In Franche Comte, the old Hapsburg traditions were 
 still active ; Besangon, the birth-place of Granvelle, preserved 
 in every street memories of the golden days of Charles V, and over 
 the doors of the town-hall there still flaunted the eagle with the 
 proud and ancient Deo et Ccesari, semper fidelis. But all this 
 signified httle ; the war of aimihilation waged by the Convention 
 against the provinces had ended in a complete victory of the unity 
 of the state. In all the regions whose return was demanded by 
 Hardenberg, the great majority of the people cherished hostile 
 sentiments towards the allies. The only exception was the loyal 
 Saarbrixcken, which had twice ceremonially greeted the chan- 
 cellor upon his journeys, and had subsequently urgently petitioned 
 for vmion with Prussia ; ^ even^the neighbouring Saarlouis, the 
 home of Ney, was fanatically French in sentiment. 
 
 With regard to the question of war indemnity, Hardenberg 
 remembered the vain and fooUsh generosity displayed by Prussia 
 in the previous year, and declared : "It would be preposterous 
 to act in this way again." Although the timid Altenstein had 
 coimseUed him to content himself with 800,000,000 francs,' Har- 
 denberg demanded the pa3mient of 1,200,000,000 francs ; out of this 
 came 200,000,000, first of all, for each of the conquerors of Paris, 
 Prussia and England. The account given by the chancellery 
 proceeded to show that France in the years from 1806 to 1812 
 had taken from Prussia alone 1,228,000,000 francs — ^an estimate 
 which was considerably more than 300,000,000 below the truth.* 
 Finally, a European commission must provide for the return of the 
 art treasures and fot the fulfilment of the other still unfulfilled 
 promises of the previous year. The Prussian proposals were 
 severe, but thoroughly just, in view of the complete overthrow 
 of the Napoleonic army and of the imteachable hostility of the 
 French. It was unfortunate that the renunciation which the 
 
 1 Gneisenau to Hardenberg, July 27, 181 5. 
 
 2 Hardenberg's Diary, July 11, 1815. 
 
 ^ Altenstein's Memorial concerning the Contribution, Paris, July 21, 1815. 
 « Vide supra, Vol. I, pp. 375 and 460. 
 
 209 P 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Prussian state displayed on its own behalf would render it difficult 
 to safeguard the desired booty ; for who but Prussia could 
 manage with a strong hand the refractory Alsatians during the 
 difficult time of transition, and until a new and good German 
 generation had grown to maturity ? Since Austria obstinately 
 renounced her ancient inheritance, the most extraordinary proposals 
 were made ; one of them was that there should be a federal 
 state with forty members, under the crown prince of Wiirtemberg. 
 Gagem even desired that Alsace should join the Swiss con- 
 federacy, this while close at hand in France were 100,000 ran- 
 corous Napoleonic veterans. What a prospect for the future ! 
 
 Meanwhile, however, this objection, the only valid one that 
 could be made against Hardenberg's proposals, hardly received 
 from the opposing party even a cursory attention. The great 
 memorial which on July 28th was handed in by Capodistrias moved 
 rather in the airy regions of poUtical romanticism, since Russia 
 could not reveal the true aims of her policy. The clever Greek 
 had foimd it all the easier to adopt the unctuous tone which cor- 
 responded to Alexander's present mood because he himself was 
 fond of great words and empty generalities. He began in moving 
 terms by saying that no one had been waging war against. France, 
 but only against Bonaparte, consequently the right of conquest 
 was inapplicable without sacrificing the legitimate royal house 
 to hatred, and justifying in the eyes of posterity all the horrors 
 of the Revolution. For this reason there must be a simple re-estab- 
 '■ lishment of the peace of Paris, and to provide ageiinst the 
 eventuality of a further revolution, a renewal of the alliance of 
 Chaumont ; finally, the covmtry must be subjected for a brief 
 period to mihtary occupation, until the payment of the contribu- 
 tion had been completed, this contribution being employed by 
 the neighbouring states chiefly for the institution of border 
 fortresses. 
 
 These proposals, though adorned with the fine-sounding title 
 of " A combination of moral and real guarantees," aroused great 
 anger in the Prussian camp. On August 4th, Humboldt wrote to 
 the chancellor: "The Russian plan is the most disastrous for 
 Prussia that could possibly have been imagined. If it were to be 
 adopted, Prussia would derive from the entire war, from her losses, 
 from her colossal sacrifices, no other advantage than a share in 
 the contribution which is to be employed chiefly for the construc- 
 tion of fortresses against France. On the other hand, Prussia would 
 suffer from the great disadvantage of being unable to apply the 
 
 210 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 moneys secured by the present war to the rehef of her own 
 exhausted country and to the safeguarding of her eastern frontier ; 
 she would have for years to endure the passage of Russian troops 
 through her own territory and through Germany ; in all her 
 negotiations with France she would continue to be hampered by 
 the influence of the Russian court." At any cost we must induce 
 the allies to diminish the French domain, and thus counteract 
 " the possible reproach that Prussia is pursuing her own advan- 
 tage only. In actual fact, Prussia in her present situation is 
 concerned more about safeguarding her frontiers than about aggran- 
 disement." * In a second confidential memorial, he went on to 
 expound the system which he had so often discussed with Met- 
 temich, that of " an intermediary Europe," a firm union between 
 Englcind, Austria, and Prussia, which was to keep within bounds 
 the two threatening masses of France and Russia ; in Vienna this 
 system had already been shaken by the undue enlargement of 
 Russia, and it would become altogether untenable if Prussia were 
 to be left with her frontiers unsecured, opposed to the profoimdiy 
 hostile French nation, and to the Bourbons who had already so 
 clearly shown their hostiUty to Prussia.* 
 
 Humboldt then handed the Committee of Four a striking 
 refutation of the Russian memorial ; the task was, as it were, 
 created for his pitiless dialectic. He showed how the war, though 
 in truth it had not been begun with the aim of conquest, had now 
 in fact eventuated in a state of conquest ; how France must atone 
 for France's errors ; how the aUies did, indeed, possess the right 
 to safeguard themselves, but had not indisputably the right to 
 interfere in the internal affairs of France ; it was right to take 
 from France what was indispensable for the miUtary protection of 
 her neighbours, but independence must then be immediately 
 restored to the country, for Prussia knew, from her own experi- 
 ence, that nothing caused more profound embitterment to a nation 
 than the presence of foreign troops in times of peace ; if Europe 
 proposed to take the French under her protectorate, the Revolution 
 would never come to an end. At the same time, Hardenberg 
 renewed his own proposals in a detailed memorial of August 4th, 
 showing how, since the days of Louis XIV, France had trans- 
 gressed her natural lines of defence, and that it was precisely 
 through the possession of these outposts that she had been con- 
 tinually lured on to new wars of conquest. Even Knesebeck 
 
 ^ Humboldt to Hardenberg, August 4, 1815. 
 
 * Humboldt, Mlmoire Iris-confidentiel, August 4, 1815. 
 
 211 
 
History of Germany 
 
 agreed here, speaking quite soberly and without doctrinaire eccen- 
 tricities ; he insisted that even if the peace should be concluded 
 upon terms of excessive lenity, this would afford no security 
 for the persistence of the Bourbon rule, for the French people 
 would never forgive the defeat in Brabant. 
 
 Meanwhile Stein came to Paris at Hardenberg's request. 
 On the way the baron spent a few days on the Rhine with Goethe, 
 and Arndt noted with profound emotion how the two best sons 
 of the fatherland regarded one another in so friendly a manner, 
 each endeavouring to make due allowance for the other's 
 pecuUarities. In Paris, Stein employed all his eloquence with 
 the czar. In a terse memorial, dated August i8th, he refuted 
 the Russian opinion that France was the ally of her conquerors. 
 If France is our friend, he asked, why have we occupied the 
 country, why are we requisitioning supphes from her ? He con- 
 cluded admonishingly : " England and Russia ought not to 
 believe it to be to their advantage that Germany should be left 
 continually in a state of excitement and distress." But what 
 could Stein's words avail beside the tears and prayers of Frau 
 von Kriidener and Frau von Lezay-Mamesia ? The lightnings 
 of his oratory were unable to penetrate the thick clouds of 
 incense which surrounded the czar in the Hotel Montchenu. If 
 Stein no longer counted, what could be expected from the repre- 
 sentatives of the powers of the second rank ? The Bavarian 
 ambassador, Rechberg, held back cautiously, for Bavaria needed 
 the help of Austria for the attainment of her own plans of aggran- 
 disement. The Badenese assumed an extremely modest atti- 
 tude, describing in moving memorials the untenable situation on 
 their Rhenish frontier, describing how recently the French had 
 endeavoured to bridge the Rhine from Strasburg, and demanding 
 that they should at least have exclusive possession of the Kehl 
 bridge, and that the fortresses of Strasburg should be dis- 
 mantled.^ Far more audacious was the language of the ambitious 
 crown prince of Wiirtemberg and of his minister Wintzingefode. 
 In their letters and memorials they already referred to that 
 opposition on the part of the middle-sized states to the great 
 powers which for many years to come was to disturb German 
 life. They declared threateningly that Europe could as little bear 
 the new fourfold despotism as it had been able formerly to bear 
 the single despotism of Napoleon, and the crown prince pro- 
 
 1 Hacke to Hardenberg, August 19; Hacke and Berstett to Hardenberg, 
 October 21, 1815. 
 
 212 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 phesied that which forty years later he repeated to Bismarck, the 
 envoy of the Bundestag, that the unprotected condition of our 
 south-western frontier would sooner or later compel the South 
 German crowns to combine in a new Confederation of the Rhine. 
 
 No one worked more unweariedly than Gagem, the Netherland 
 imperial patriot, for on this occasion the interests of the Nether- 
 lands coincided perfectly with those of Germany. The inde- 
 fatigable man felt perfectly in his element when in innumerable 
 memorials he displayed the entire armoury of his learning in the 
 history of the empire, and when he enumerated the long series of 
 French arbitrary acts since the days of Henry II and Maurice of 
 Saxony. The pupil of Montesquieu, however fantastical might be 
 his federalist dreams, was untouched by the romanticism of the 
 legitimist doctrine of the state. The contention that the war 
 had been waged against Bonaparte alone, he countered bluntly 
 with the question whether it was at Bonaparte alone that the 
 musket-balls and case-shot of Belle Alliance had been discharged, 
 whether Bonaparte alone had been sabred there. "It is the 
 nations which are at war; upon nations must fall the fortunate 
 as well as the unfortunate consequences of war." It was natural 
 that the former barrister should also defend the petty states against 
 the hegemony of the great powers. Don Labrador, the Spanish 
 ambassador, formally demanded admission to the conferences.* 
 But the impossibiUty of conducting these difficult negotiations 
 before the forum of all the European states was obvious, and on 
 August loth the Committee of Four determined that the states of 
 the second rank were to be admitted only to the actual negotia- 
 tions with France, that is to say, after the issue had been really 
 decided. 
 
 The inseparable community of interests between Prussia and 
 the South German states was so plainly manifest that all the evil 
 memories of Rhenish Confederate days seemed to have passed 
 away without leaving a trace. Prussia resumed her natural role 
 as protector of united Germany. All the legal and political 
 grounds for the re-establishment of our ancient western march 
 were brought forward exhaustively by the Prussian diplomats 
 and their colleagues from the smaller states. With sound tact, 
 the statesmen laid the greatest stress upon the point of view of 
 military security, the only one which could make some impression 
 upon an assembly of diplomats. Dr. Butte, on the other hand, 
 in his widely read work upon the conditions of peace, and also 
 
 * Labrador to Hardenberg, September 15, i8ig. 
 213 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the majority of the German newspapers, once more took up the 
 ideas of Amdt, and demanded the linguistic frontier as a neutral 
 right of the nation. In view of the friendly disposition on both sides, 
 no serious dispute about the division of the spoil need be feared 
 if only the return of Alsace to the Germanic Federation could be 
 assured. But this decision lay wholly in the hands of the great 
 powers, and all too soon did it appear that in Paris, as shortly 
 before in Vienna, Humboldt's dream of " an intermediary Europe " 
 was an empty picture of fancy. England and Austria, which he 
 had regarded as Prussia's natural alUes, were just as strongly 
 averse to the German demands as were Russia and France. 
 
 On August 6th, Metternich for the first time gave expres- 
 sion to his views, with the formal declaration that this war 
 had been carried on against armed Jacobinism, and must not 
 degenerate into a war of conquest. Consequently he sought 
 guarantees of European peace chiefly in a reasonable ordering of 
 the internal affairs of France, and in a provisional military occu- 
 pEition ; in addition, the fortresses of the most advanced line 
 must either be ceded to the neighbouring states, " or must at least 
 be dismantled." Corning down to details, he declared that Ger- 
 many needed nothing more than the fortress of Landau, in com- 
 pensation for the destroyed Philippsburg ; it would suffice, for 
 the rest, that the fortresses in Alsace should be dismantled, and 
 that Strasburg should retain only the citadel. To the experienced 
 diplomatists of the Committee of Four, it was immediately obvious 
 that in this "or at least," expressed at the very beginning of 
 the negotiations, was to be found Mettemich's true opinion ; 
 in accordance with the rounding-off system of policy which he 
 had for three years unerringly pursued, he could not desire the 
 restoration of Alsace. It was only the Prussian statesmen, 
 always inclined to believe the best of their Austrian friend, who 
 could not grasp the true significance of Mettemich's memorial ; 
 they merely deplored " the vacillating attitude " of the court of 
 Vienna, whereas the Russian and the English ministers imme- 
 diately recognised that Austria dissociated herself from the common 
 cause of Germany, and for this reason spoke only of "the 
 Prussian demands." 
 
 For a time Hardenberg continued to cherish hopes also of 
 EngHsh help ; yet everyone now knew that the attitude of Castle- 
 reagh and Wellington by no means corresponded to the wishes 
 of their country. The London newspapers were loudly demand- 
 ing a vigorous utilisation of the victory ; Castlereagh's poUtical 
 
 214 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 associates, the tones, who had always been the most decisive 
 opponents of France, expressed their lively disapproval of any 
 false generosity. Lord Liverpool wrote in the name of the 
 cabinet that the manifest sentiments of the nation could not be 
 overlooked. Even the prince regent expressed himself in favour 
 of the German claims, and followed the advice of Count Miinster, 
 who, in Paris, to Stein's astonishment and delight, faithfully 
 espoused the Prussian cause. Altogether undisturbed by the 
 opposition of the nation, Castlereagh and Welhngton went their 
 own way. The duke insisted that the sole purpose of this war 
 had been to bring the Revolution to a close, and that for this 
 reason the only result could be an occupation for a few years. 
 Castlereagh agreed with the duke, and held out hopes to the 
 Prussians for a better reward after future wars : ^ " Continued dis- 
 turbances in France may doubtless in the future render it neces- 
 sary for Europe to undertake the partition of France, and Europe 
 will effect this change in its territorial distribution, will carry it 
 out with energy, and will maintain it with unanimity, should it 
 ever appear in the eyes of humanity to be a necessary and a jus- 
 tified measure." The present war, bowever, had not been begun 
 for such a purpose. In conclusion he wrote : " Should the allies 
 prove deceived in their confidence, through the warlike ambition 
 of France, they will then take up arms again, basing their 
 strength, not alone upon commanding military positions, but also 
 upon that moral energy which alone can hold together such a 
 coalition." 
 
 Consequently the Germans, who were longing for peace, were 
 to abandon this unique opportunity of safeguarding their frontiers, 
 in the agreeable expectation of further shedding of blood and of 
 fresh need for war ! Is it to be wondered at that this reference 
 to future misery, and that these unctuous words on the moral 
 energy of the coaUtion, sounded to the Germans like mockery ? 
 Day by day they became more incensed. Even social intercourse 
 between the statesmen of the two parties was brought to a stand- 
 still ; the British uttered bitter complaints regarding Humboldt's 
 icy coldness and his cutting sarcasms. In this way the negotia- 
 tions were carried on for a month and a half. Finally the chan- 
 cellor determined to yield half a step ; on August 28th he offered 
 to relinquish Upper Alsace, demanding for Germany no more than 
 Diedenhofen and Saarlouis, Landau and Bitsch, and, finally, 
 Strasburg as a free town. 
 
 1 Castlereagh, confidential Note to Hardenberg, probably written in August. 
 
 215 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Meanwhile Gneisenau had composed a memorial for the czar, 
 which on August 31st he handed in on the command of the king ; 
 Frederick William expected that a certain impression would be 
 created by the fiery words of the general, and hoped that on the 
 next day, in a personal interview, he would be able to effect a 
 complete change in his friend's mood.^ Without entering in detail 
 into the Prussian demands, Gneisenau endeavoured in the first 
 place merely to win over the czar to the principle of the cession 
 of territory. He showed that in fact France was responsible for 
 the misfortune of the new war ; without the assistance of all the 
 energetic men in France, and without the dull-minded indifference 
 of the masses, " the despised adventurer " would never have 
 been able to complete the journey from Cannes to Paris. "Europe 
 rightly expects from the allies the punishment of such misdeeds, 
 and will learn with astonishment that it is proposed to conclude 
 a new peace of Utrecht, to eternaUse the sorrows of unfortunate 
 - Germany ; this will bring the govenunents to despair and will embitter 
 the nations. If of two neighbouring countries, one possesses a 
 unified state authority and is physically and morally prepared for 
 attack, whilst the other, through the natural defects of a federal 
 constitution, and through the physical characteristics of its fron- 
 tiers, is strictly limited to defence, it is easy to foresee which of the 
 two will tend to become subordinate to the other. That which in 
 the hands of one of these states becomes a means of attack will 
 in the hands of the other be a means of defence. Unquestionably 
 the Bourbon government will not be able to secure popular favour 
 unless it completely gives itself up to the adventurous and 
 revengeful spirit of the nation. Encouraged by the experience 
 that their frontiers remain uninjured even after the greatest 
 defeats, and that the calculations of a narrow-minded policy will 
 secure the integrity of their domains under all conditions, the 
 French will soon know no bounds to their arrogance. Ought we to 
 give the French party in Germany new grounds for the belief that 
 more is to be gained by adhesion to French plans of conquest than 
 by the fulfilment of duties to the fatherland and by adhesion 
 to the common cause of Europe ? Powerful Russia stands, 
 indeed, too high for petty considerations which do not corres- 
 pond to the magnanimous character of the czar. If the frontier 
 of France remains unaltered, it will be generally said that England 
 desired to throw the continent into new confusions, so that time 
 
 1 Boyen to Gneisenau, August 31, 1815. Gneisenau, Memoranclunj to his 
 majesty Czar Alexander. 
 
 216 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 might not be given for the continental countries to defend them- 
 selves against British commercial policy." Such was the general 
 trend of the long memorandum, couched in defective French, 
 and yet written with the highest oratorical energy. Nor did 
 Gneisenau hesitate to demand that Piedmont, the Netheriands, 
 and the smaller Gennan states, should be admitted to the con- 
 ference, a demand which in the eyes of the other great powers 
 was a terrible heresy. 
 
 The czar turned a deaf ear. Nor did his conversation with the 
 king lead to any result. Alexander thanked the general, curtly 
 and dryly, for his well-meant and zealous endeavours on behalf 
 of the great interests of Europe,* and made Capodistrias 
 compose a detailed refutation, which, whilst lacking in reasoned 
 considerations, furnished an incredible abundance of moral common- 
 places. " Is it for this reason that Europe has overthrown 
 military despotism and annihilated the spirit of conquest, in order 
 subsequently to make a victim of the king of France and to 
 prepare a new desecration for the French kingdom ? To do this 
 would be once for all to banish morality from aU poUtical negotia- 
 tions. Force alone would become a principle, a means, and an 
 end, of statecraft ! If France were to be debased, and by means 
 of a series of arbitrary measures to be yet more morally corrupted, 
 the country would be forced ultimately to throw itself into the 
 arms of the strongest party. A transient occupation of the country 
 would afford to the neighbours of France all the security they can 
 desire." In conclusion, Capodistrias wrote : " Let us, in so 
 decisive a moment, not fail to recognise the inalterable course of 
 providence, which has allowed the cause of religion, morality, 
 and justice, to stumble, only in order to prepare for that cause 
 new triumphs, and in order to give a powerful and valuable 
 stimulus alike to princes and to peoples."" 
 
 When this masterpiece of oriental pulpit oratory was 
 handed to the Prussian statesmen on September 5th, they had 
 already been forced to abandon their last hope from England. 
 Castlereagh's brother. Lord Charles Stewart, had hastened to 
 Windsor, and in the last days of August had returned with the jo3^ul 
 tidings that he had overcome the influence of Count Miinster and 
 had won over the prince regent entirely to the views of Castlereagh 
 and Wellington. The two might now proceed with enhanced 
 
 * Czar Alexander to Gneisenau, September 5, 1815. 
 
 " Capodistrias, Riponse au Memoire du Gdnlral de Gneisenau, September 5, 
 1815. 
 
 217 
 
History of Germany 
 
 confidence. On August 31st the duke replied in brief and incisive 
 terms to Hardenberg's last memorial, to the effect that any cession 
 of territory would be unpolitic and illegal because it would not 
 be in harmony with the Viennese declaration of the allies ; an 
 occupation for a few years would suffice perfectly.* On 
 September 2nd, Castlereagh, in the name of the prince regent, 
 expressed England's complete agreement with the Russian pro- 
 posals. Thus there was an absolute divergence of views : Russia 
 and England objected on principle to all the Prussian demands 
 for territory ; Austria, with her modest desire for the dismantle- 
 ment of the Alsatian frontier fortresses, seemed to assume a middle 
 position, but was in reality in close approximation with the Anglo- 
 Russian opinion. Could Prussia, depleted of money and troops, 
 now carry through her demands by force of arms ? It was not 
 to be thought of . 
 
 Yet even the czar felt that he must not expose his best ally 
 to an unconditional and humiliating defeat, for he had an urgent 
 desire that the Prusso-Russian alHance should continue. He there- 
 fore determined on September 7th to give way a httle, a very Uttle, 
 and ordered Nesselrode to declare to the chancellor that Russia, 
 like England, held absolutely to the idea of a transient occupation 
 (le systeme des garantis temforaires) ; but certain trifling cessions 
 of territory were not irrecoiicilable with this system. Thus 
 Landau could be ceded to Germany, Savoy to Piedmont, certain 
 fifdntier fortresses to the Netherlands, perhaps even Hiiningen 
 to Switzerland ; but to Prussia nothing at all. This memorial, 
 too, was full of the teachings of wisdom and virtue : " The duplex 
 aim of the tranquiUisation of Europe and of France cannot be 
 attained unless the allies display in the peace negotiations the same 
 purity of aims, the same unselfishness, the same spirit of modera- 
 tion, which has hitherto constituted the irresistible energy of the 
 European league." ^ Notwithstanding all this, the czar now did 
 the very thing which two days before he had described as treason 
 to religion and morahty, abandoning the inviolability of French 
 soil, which he had been advocating with so much sacred wrath, 
 and thus opening the way to an understanding. In a confidential 
 covering letter, Nesselrode implored the chancellor " to bring this 
 unhappy affair to a speedy close. This would be the best birth- 
 day present you could give to the czar. There is nothing more 
 
 * Wellington's Memorial to Hardertberg, August 31, 1815. 
 2 Nesselrode to Hardenberg, concerning Castlereagh's Menaorial of September 2 
 (September 7, 1815). 
 
 218 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 painful to him and to us all than this difference of opinion between 
 two coiuls whose relations are so intimate."* 
 
 Mettemich immediately utilised the favour of the moment with 
 extreme adroitness in order to play the part of mediator 
 between the disputants. In a memorial dated September 8th, he 
 gratefully recognised the moderate and conciliatory attitude of 
 all the coiuis, and found it readily comprehensible that, none the 
 less, in consequence of the differences in their respective geo- 
 graphical situations and national moods, their views might not 
 perfectly harmonise. It was Austria's desire to secure the 
 greatest possible safety with the least possible sacrifice for France, 
 and she therefore proposed " a mixed system of permanent and 
 temporary guarantees," therefore, above all, that France should 
 return to the status quo of 1790 ; " the frontiers of 1790 " — here 
 was a happy discovery of one of the convenient catchwords which 
 the diplomacy of those days, still entirely French in sentiment, 
 so greatly loved. The further proposals of the memorial were 
 indeed extraordinarily inconsistent with these fine-sounding words : 
 they showed clearly that Mettemich was not mediating in an 
 honourable spirit, but was really an adherent of the Anglo-Russian 
 party. There was no longer any mention of the fourth part of 
 Alsace which in the year 1790 had still been German ; on the con- 
 trary, Austria demanded in addition to Landau and those Nether- 
 land fortresses to whose cession the czar had already agreed, 
 nothing more than Saarlouis ; and even this was not demanded 
 unconditionally, since it was suggested that France might 
 pay money to Prussia for the building of another fortress 
 on the Saar. Finally, there was to be a war indemnity of 
 1,200,000,000 francs ; and for some years the country was to be 
 occupied by 150,000 men, to constitute " a European police," 
 under the supreme command of Wellington. ^ 
 
 Having thus been sacrificed by Austria, Hardenberg finally 
 declared, on September 8th, that the king of Prussia, in order to 
 secure harmony, would renounce his more extensive demands, 
 and would accept the frontiers of 1790 ; but he understood that 
 this principle was to be honourably interpreted, and demanded, 
 in compensation for the German enclaves in Alsace, in addition 
 to Landau and Saarlouis, Bitsch and the northern regions of 
 Alsace, with Fort Louis, Weissenburg, and Hagenau. Not even 
 England now found any objection to raise to a moderate demand 
 
 ' Nesselrode to Hardenberg, September 7, 1815. 
 
 ^ Mettemich, Memorial to the Committeee of Four, September 8, i8ig. 
 
 219 
 
History of Germany 
 
 for territory, and thus the negotiations ended, as had before the 
 dispute about Saxony, with a repulsive chaffering about indivi- 
 dual towns and fortresses. Hardenberg defended his ultimate 
 demands with the utmost obstinacy, but since none of the other 
 powers supported him, he could save for Germany no more than 
 Landau, Saarlouis, and the coal-fields of Saarbriicken. Of Met- 
 ternich's proposal to return to " the status quo of 1790 " there 
 ultimately remained little more than the name, for the so-called 
 mediator did not take his own proposal seriously. On Sep- 
 tember 19th, the four powers resolved that they would now open 
 negotiations with France. Next day they handed in their joint 
 ultimatum. They assumed that peace was assured, for what 
 could unarmed France do to oppose these far too lenient conditions ? 
 The Russian army was already preparing to depart. On Sep- 
 tember 23rd Blucher wrote home : " The peace has been arranged, 
 not, unfortunately, upon the terms that ought to have been 
 secured, upon the lines upon which I opened the matter ; but 
 owing to the firm stand Hardenberg finally took, the terms are 
 better than they seemed likely to be. We had to fight against 
 all the others at once." * 
 
 In the eyes of the French, on the other hand, the allies' 
 ultimatum was the beginning of the real negotiations. The whole 
 of Paris eagerly endeavoured, as if by tacit conspiracy, to detach 
 the high-minded czar from his aUies. The distinguished world 
 displayed a luxuriant abundance of those pious modes of speech 
 which were agreeable to the new world-saviour, and admired the 
 solemn phrase of Talleyrand : " There is nothing less aristocratic 
 than unbelief." The czar was overwhelmed at once with skilful 
 adulation and with gross flattery ; when he mustered his army 
 to take leave of it upon the plain of Vertus, the Parisian news- 
 papers, as if drunk with ecstasy, declared that the noble com- 
 mander must feel himself so perfectly at home upon this field of 
 virtue ! Wellington, on the other hand, notwithstanding his 
 reserve, did not escape the most savage attacks, and on one 
 occasion in the theatre was actually hissed out of the royal box. 
 Finally, everyone displayed fierce enmity against the Prussians, 
 What anger was manifested in Paris on August 3rd when the 
 Prussian troops illuminated their quarters and barracks in honour 
 of their national festival, and when upon the king's house the 
 nscription was to be read : Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos I 
 What petty quarrels there were, too, about the payment and 
 
 1 Blucher to Hienen, September 23, 1815. 
 220 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 provisioning of the troops ! At first the Bourbons, owing to the 
 general disorder, were hardly able to fulfil the duties imposed upon 
 the conquered. But when Hardenberg had 5,000,000 francs 
 brought from Prussia, in order to discharge the arrears of pay, 
 Blucher refused to accept this new sacrifice from the hands of 
 his fellow-citizens : " The army," he wrote proudly, " is not a 
 mercenary army which must be bought off at any cost, it is one 
 with the nation ! " At length an understanding was reached, in 
 virtue of which France Wcis to resume the administration of the 
 occupied portions of the country, and was at the same time to 
 undertake to pay and maintEiin the troops. But just as in the 
 previous year the Bourbons had failed to carry out the promised 
 restoration of the art treasures, so also on this occasion did they 
 break their word. The czar, whose generosity was inexhaustible, 
 inmiediately granted a postponement for the overdue pay- 
 ments ; wealthy England was not pressing ; while Austria lacked 
 courage to separate herself from the other two. Prussia alone, 
 devoid of all financial resources, was unable to display any con- 
 sideration. When Louis, the minister of finance, wrote ciurtly 
 and arrogantly to Humboldt, that the sums demanded for the 
 clothing of the Prussian troops could not be paid, he received a 
 letter saying that he would be responsible if Prussia should now 
 help herself. The generals were ordered to make requisitions in 
 the departments, and at length the Bourbon court resolved to 
 meet its obhgations.^ ^ 
 
 The note in which, on September 21st, Talle57rand answered the 
 ultimatvun of the aUies was likewise couched in a tone of stubborn 
 arrogance. The wily schemer had derived new hopes from the 
 commencing departure of the Russian army, and began in a lofty 
 strain to the effect that the Most Christian King had not been 
 waging war against the four powers, his alhes, and therefore could 
 not agree that they possessed a right of conquest ; never could 
 he cede a single scrap of land from " ancient France " ; if the four 
 powers put forward such demernds, the French plenipotentiaries 
 -were instructed not even to hsten to them. Yet the allies were 
 demanding from " ancient France " nothing more than Saarlouis, 
 Landau, and a strip of land along the Meuse ; they were prepared 
 to leave the Bourbons, in exchange, Avignon and the German 
 quarter of Alsace, the conquests of the Revolution, so that " ancieiit 
 France " would still secure an increase of several hundred thousand 
 
 1 Louis to Humboldt, August 23. Humboldt's Annotations, August 24, 
 1815. 
 
 221 
 
History of Germany 
 
 souls ! Two days earlier, Talleyrand had also declared that the 
 return of the art treasures was inadmissible, for this would increase 
 the hatred of the people for the Bourbons. Such language in the 
 mouth of a completely disarmed state seemed intolerable even 
 to the British and the Russians. Wellington, who had hitherto 
 regarded the demand for the return of the art treasures as a 
 dubious one, now expressed the opinion that this was necessary 
 " in order to read the French a great moral lesson." The four 
 powers replied on the following day, expressing sharp dissent. 
 There was no question of conquests but merely of measures for 
 the safety of Europe. Was the royal court desirous of upholding 
 once more that principle of the intangibility of the French frontiers 
 which had caused so much unhappiness under Napoleon ? In 
 contrast with the Germans, the Enghsh and the Russians had 
 at first unctuously defended the principle of the inviolability of 
 France ; but now they abandoned this principle. 
 
 The answer caused profound dismay in the Tuileries. King 
 Louis endeavoured once more by personal intervention to take 
 the emotional spirit of the czar by storm. " In the bitterness of 
 ray heart," he wrote on September 23rd, " I take refuge in your 
 majesty, to express to you with devotion the painful feelings with 
 which I have read the proposals of the four powers. One thing, 
 above all, disturbs me profoundly and leads me to despair in the 
 well-being of unhappy France — the overwhehning thought that your 
 majesty, upon whom I place my hopes, seems to have approved 
 the note which was sent to me. I do not hesitate. Sire, to assure 
 you, that I shall refuse to be an instrument in bringing about the 
 destruction of my country, and to declare that I would rather 
 abdicate than agree to besmirch the ancient glories of my throne 
 by so unexampled a humiliation ! " In autograph notes, the 
 attention of Emperor Francis and of King Frederick William III 
 was drawn to this despairing despatch. ^ The threatened abdica- 
 tion was, however, utterly improbable, and the theatrical pathos 
 of the letter was in ludicrous contrast with the fact that the allies 
 were leaving ancient France in undisturbed possession of a 
 notable enlargement of territory. Even the czar was estranged 
 by the immeasurable distress of his protege. Alexander did not, 
 indeed, remain completely unaffected ; he secured that of the last 
 demands of the coalition a trifle should still be abated. The 
 allies renounced the important Meuse fortress of Givet, and also 
 
 ^ King Louis to Czar Alexander, September 23 ; to Emperor Francis, 
 September 23, 1815. 
 
 222 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 Conde : the glorious name of this fortress was too dear to the 
 House of the Capets. 
 
 A change of ministry in the Tuileries estabUshed the work 
 of peace on a firmer foundation. Since the legitimist ultras had 
 secured a victory in the elections to the chamber, through the 
 adoption of the forcible methods of the White Terror, neither 
 Fouch6 the regicide nor Talleyrand the mediator could 
 maintain his position in the cabinet. Beneath the surface, the 
 czar gave his aid to the change, for he regarded Fouche's inter- 
 course with the Enghsh as suspect ; he even had serious 
 thoughts of securing for Pozzo di Borgo, the declared enemy of 
 the military Jacobins of Prussia, a place in the ministry, for Pozzo 
 was a Frenchman by birth ; but in the end he regarded it as more 
 prudent to leave his confidant in the secure position of Russian 
 ambassador. On September 26th, the due de RicheMeu formed a 
 new cabinet. RicheUeu was a well-meaning statesman, but one 
 totally unacquainted with France ; he had acquired the favour 
 of the czar during a prolonged stay in Russia. Powerless as he 
 was, and entirely dependent upon the favour of Alexander, he soon 
 bowed before the inevitable ; and on October 2nd a decisive 
 agreement between France and the four powers was effected. The 
 protocol employed the high-sounding phrase that the frontier of 
 1790 was to constitute the rule ; but in reality all that France 
 lost was a strip of land on the Belgian border with Marienburg 
 and PhiUppeville, the remainder of Savoy and, finally. Landau 
 and Saarlouis, with Saarbriicken. 
 
 Alexander could not abandon the scene of his deeds without 
 once more astonishing the world by the display of his subUme 
 sentiments. In the anxious days after the battle of Bautzen, 
 Frederick WiUiam, upon a solitary ride with his friend, had once 
 said with profound emotion : " Now God alone can save us ; if 
 we conquer, we will render to Him the honour before all the 
 world ! " How frequently since then had memories of that con- 
 secrated hour entered the czar's mind. Profovmdly moved by 
 the prophecies of Frau von Kriidener, and by a fantastic little 
 work by the German philosopher Baader, he now resolved to 
 transform after his own manner the thought thus uttered by his 
 friend, and wrote with his own hand the charter of the Holy 
 AUiance, a personal confession of faith which was to show the world 
 that the new European three-starred constellation owed its glories 
 solely to the sun of Christ. In this remarkable document were 
 displayed all the nobihty of sentiment and aU the ardency of faith, 
 
 223 
 
History of Germany 
 
 but also all the obscure sentimentality and worldly vanity, of this 
 suggestible character. The recognition that the European society 
 of nations constitutes a hving community, this old and half-for- 
 gotten truth which was now pressing vigorously for revival, after 
 the horrors of the Napoleonic age, xmderwent a strange theocratic 
 transformation in the language of the God-inspired man. The 
 three monarchs of Austria, Prussia, and Russia (thus wrote the 
 czar) regarded themselves as united by the bonds of a true and 
 indissoluble brotherhood, and as occupjdng in relation to their 
 subjects the position of fathers ; they considered themselves 
 appointed by providence to rule three branches of a single family, 
 and they recognised as the sole sovereign of the Single Christian 
 nation, " God, our divine Saviour Jesus Christ, the word of the 
 Most High, the word of hfe." All states recognising these sacred 
 truths were fraternally invited to enter the Holy AUiance.^ 
 
 The enigmatical favour of fortune by which it always happened 
 that Alexander's outbursts of emotional feeling coincided with 
 his advantage, presided also over this outpouring of his most 
 sacred sentiments. All the powers of Europe might accept his 
 brotherly invitation, except those two which, in accordance with 
 Russian poUcy, were traditionally regarded as Russia's irrecon- 
 cilable enenaies. The pope must necessarily hold aloof, because 
 the vicegerent of Christ on earth could not recognise the civitas 
 Dei except under the rule of the crowned priest. Again, the 
 infidel sultan, as the czar expressly declared, was necessarily and 
 for ever excluded from the great brotherly aUiance of Europe. 
 The oracular phrases in which Alexander earnestly and ceremo- 
 niously presented his proposals were extremely antipathetic to the 
 sound sense of Frederick William ; but why should the king refuse 
 to oblige his old fnend in a matter which, after all, imposed no 
 obligations upon the Prussian state ? The king, therefore, did as 
 the czar desired, and signed the charter on September 26th. 
 Emperor Francis found it less easy to make up his mind ; he 
 foresaw how distressing this Holy AUiance would be to his good 
 friend in Constantinople, Since Metternich, however, smilingly 
 declared the pious charter to be no more than empty talk, 
 Austria also gave in her adhesion on the same day. All the states 
 
 ^ A reference in a parliamentary speech by Lord Liverpool has given occasion 
 to the frequently repeated assertion that the charter of the Holy Alliance contains 
 certain secret articles. Although the untenability of this assumption is manifest 
 from internal considerations, the assurance may here be given, as a work of 
 supererogation, that the original charter, preserved in the private state archives 
 of Berlin, contains nothing more than the universally-known text. 
 
 224 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 of Europe subsequently joined the Holy Alliance, most of them 
 out of complaisance for the czar, but some also because the pious 
 words regarding the paternal government of the princes were well 
 suited to the ultra-conservative tendencies of the epoch of the 
 restoration. 
 
 Three only among the European powers withheld their assent : 
 the two ancient enemies of Russia — and England. Whilst the 
 prince regent, as ruler of Hanover, gladly signed the document, 
 Castlereagh declared in an incisive speech that Parliament con- 
 sisted of practical statesmen, and therefore, while it was able to 
 approve a diplomatic treaty between states, it could not approve 
 a declaration of principles which would thrust England back into 
 the days of Cromwell and the Roundheads. The high tories' 
 true motive, however, was not regard for Parliament, with which 
 thay well knew how to deal, but mistrust of Russia, and regard 
 for the sultan, who was in fact greatly disturbed by the conclusion 
 of the Holy Alliance. The remarkable episode is not without 
 interest to the historian of civilisation, since the romantic moods 
 and the lively sentiment of European community characteristic 
 of the age are all therein reflected. But the Holy AUiance never 
 had any poUtical significance ; such a significance was merely 
 assigned to it by poetic fiction in the opposition press of all the 
 countries, who soon took to speaking of " the system of the Holy 
 Alliance," and who directed to this imaginary address their com- 
 plaints against the policy of the eastern powers. 
 
 Peace was at length signed on November 20th. Not even 
 this treaty, however, brought to the Germans the final conclusion 
 of their internal disputes about territory. Landau was ceded to 
 Austria, and by Austria to Bavaria, but this did not sufi&ce to 
 satisfy the demands of the Wittelsbachs. Since Austria spumed 
 the reacquisition of Alsace, and had thus abandoned the simplest 
 means for the complete satisfaction of the court of Munich, 
 Mettemich, in order that he might stiU have in his hands some- 
 thing to bargain with, made the great powers guarantee the future 
 " reversion " of Breisgau and the Badenese Palatinate — a promise 
 that was utterly illegal — and the unhappy territorial dispute 
 between Bavaria and Austria remained temporarily unsettled. 
 England was more fortunate. In addition to the abolition of 
 the slave trade, which to the British nation had already become an 
 object of national vanity, of general sport, the tories acquired a 
 protectorate over the Ionian islands, so that the island kingdom's 
 position of power in the Mediterranean was now established more 
 
 225 ^ 
 
History of Gei'many 
 
 firmly than ever. France had to accept the military occupation 
 of her north-western provinces for a^period of from three to five 
 years (the term being dependent upon her conduct), and had to pay 
 an indemnity of 700,000,000 francs.f (Of this sum 500,000,000 were 
 allotted in sums of 100,000,000 to each of the four great powers 
 and to the minor states taken as a unit ; in addition, England 
 and Prussia received 25,000,000 each for the occupation of Paris. 
 The remainder was ear-marked for the fortification of the terri- 
 torial areas bordering on France, Bavaria receiving 15,000,000 
 and the Germanic Federation 25,000,000 for the Rhenish for- 
 tresses ; Prussia had to content herself with 20,000,000, since 
 Saarlouis and the right of garrisoning Luxemburg were ceded to 
 this country. 
 
 On the same day the four powers renewed their old aUiance. 
 England had desired a simple prolongation of the treaty of Chau- 
 mont for a period of twenty years. Russia, however, held that 
 France ought to be treated as a suspected enemy only during the 
 exceptional conditions of the period of occupation, and she secured 
 that the four powers should guarantee, for a time that was not 
 distinctly specified, the maintenance of the legitimate royal house 
 and of the Charte,^ for the czar considered that the greatest dangers 
 for France would arise from the party fanaticism of the emigres. 
 The four powers solemnly promised one another to watch over 
 the safety of Europe by repeated meetings of the monarchs or of 
 their ministers. In this way the whole continent, and especially 
 France, was placed under the poUce supervision of the coalition ; 
 it was impossible to expect that the Bourbons would be con- 
 tent until they had secured release from this situation, so 
 humihating to a proud nation, and until they had effected the 
 acceptance of France into the alliance of the great powers. Since 
 the four powers, Austria and England not excepted, mistrusted 
 the savage passion of the emigres, when taking leave, they 
 directed a note to Richelieu, exhorting him to eombine moderation 
 with firmness, and with strict loyalty to the constitution to oppose 
 all enemies of the public peace in whatsoever form they might 
 display themselves. It was with profound anxiety that the states- 
 men of the coalition left Paris. Not one of them believed in the 
 vitality of the ancient royal house ; they all estimated the dura- 
 bility of the Bourbon dominion at no more than a few years. Yet 
 such a state as this, whose future seemed altogether incalculable, 
 
 1 Russian Memorial concerning the treaty of aUiance, October 9-21, 1815. 
 
 226 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 had been re-established by allied Europe in a dominant position on 
 the German Upper Rhine ! 
 
 In the whole of modem history there was^only one occasion 
 on which, after brilMant successes in the field, a peace was con- 
 cluded which in leniency could be compared with the treaty of 
 November 20, 1815, and this was the peace of Prague of 1866. 
 But that which in Prague was effected by free determination, 
 and by the wise restraint of the conqueror, resulted in Paris from 
 the common suspicions of the other aUies towards the boldest 
 and most active of their own comrades in victory. The great 
 moment in which the beilance of power in Europe, which since 
 the days of Cardinal RicheUeu had been so unnaturally disturbed, 
 might have been restored, and in which their ancient inheritance 
 might have been given back to the Germans, was wasted, because 
 all the powers of the east and of the west were united in the resolve 
 that the central region of the continent should be kept in a state 
 of continuous suppression. It was by painful experience that the 
 German nation bought the knowledge that they could expect 
 atonement for ancient wrongs from their own good swords alone. 
 All the gloomy prophecies of Hardenberg, Humboldt, and 
 Gneisenau were literally fulfilled. Not only did the French feel, 
 as was reasonable, that the presence of foreign troops for several 
 years was an indeUble disgrace, they also regarded a peace whose 
 mildness was unexampled as a cruel wrong. It was not the loss 
 of Saarbriicken or Landau which they took to heart ; what they 
 could not forget was the defeat of Belle AlUance. Revenge for 
 Waterloo — ^for decades to come this remained the watchword of 
 the French nation. From this idea sprang the revolution of 1830, 
 the threats of war of 1840, and the re-estabhshment of the empire ; 
 until after more than half a century, the old and cherished wish 
 foimd expression in a wicked war of conquest, and the German 
 victor in this war at length atoned for the sins of omission of 1815. 
 
 Thus for many decades the relationship between the two 
 neighbour peoples remained morbidly insecure and tense. It 
 was with fierce anger that the Germans received intelligence of the 
 ineffectual peace. It was in the name of the whole nation that 
 Blucher exclaimed : " Notwithstanding all their exertions, Prussia 
 and Germany once more stand before the world as betrayed." 
 Thereupon he again vented his anger against the diplomats, asking 
 fiercely how long " this extraordinary collection of subjects who 
 rule their own monarchs" was to continue to exist. In their naive 
 ignorance of the political situation, many Germans had seriously 
 
 227 
 
History of Germany 
 
 hoped that in Paris not only would the ancient frontiers of the 
 fatherland be re-established, but also that all the errors of the 
 federal constitution would be put to rights. Schenkendorf could 
 not abandon the hope that the heirs of the Leopolds and the 
 Ferdinands, who had so cold-bloodedly spurned the German crown, 
 would now be forced to don the ancient purple. The loyal man 
 could not await the hour in which the stony and pear-shaped 
 countenance of Emperor Francis was once more to be surmoimted 
 by the crown of the Carlovingians, and he sang : 
 
 "O be at length then wiser. 
 You flock that lacks a herd, 
 Choose ye at once your Kaiser, 
 Make him by force your lord ! " 
 
 What wrath was now disseminated throughout this genera- 
 tion of Teutonisers when it was learned that everything remained 
 as before, that the imperial glories were buried, that Rappolts- 
 weiler and Oberehnheim were again to be named Ribeauville and 
 Obernai, that the ancient and powerful homeland of Germsm 
 civilisation was once more to be defiled with the shme of French 
 ill-breeding, and was perhaps to sink therein for ever ! Through 
 a thousand German hearts resounded the complaint of the poet : 
 
 "There lies a long-lost treasure 
 Among the hills of Vosges, 
 Tis ours the task that German blood 
 Be freed from hell's own yoke ! " 
 
 The sorest wound of all was that these same lost German lands, 
 to which Germany had wished to bring freedom, rejoiced over 
 the diplomatic success of the foreigner. Riickert despairingly 
 exclaimed : 
 
 " Fruitless the victory that we prized ; 
 All France laughs in oxrr face. 
 And you, Alsace, de-Germanised, 
 Mock, too ! Supreme disgrace ! " 
 
 In the Rheinische Merkur Gorres thundered with all the 
 savagery of his Jacobin anger against the basilisk's egg which the 
 Gallic cock had laid, and which German folly had hatched. The 
 incensed man would not see the obvious reasons for the great failure, 
 assigning all the blame to Hardenberg's weakness and to " the 
 
 228 
 
Belle Alliance 
 
 German lack of unity," which was to remain a persistent cause of 
 complaint, a permanent grievance, of the disillusioned patriots. 
 Yet the king and his statesmen had done their duty as best they 
 could, and had received loyal support from the ministers of most 
 of the middle-sized states. It was not the Germans who had 
 failed to exhibit unity, but Austria which had fallen away from 
 Germany. That traditional domestic policy which had so often 
 sacrificed German imperial lands to foreigners in exchange for 
 Hapsburg hereditary dominions, had, on this occasion, simply left 
 the Germans in the lurch, because there was nothing desirable 
 to gain for the House of Lorraine. 
 
 It was the curse of peaceful dualism that the Prussian 
 government was henceforward blamed by public opinion for the 
 sins of Austria, and that this government, simply in order to avoid 
 offending the dear Austrian ally, refused on principle to justify 
 itself before the nations. How wickedly and shamelessly, too, did 
 the Hofburg now lie to the German people ! Gentz, who hence- 
 forward completely lost moral stabiUty, declared with a brazen 
 face in the Osterreichischer Beobachter, that there had never 
 existed any difference of opinion between the great powers regard- 
 ing the conditions of peace, and concluded by sa3dng that if this 
 were not the case " then we must have unwittingly or deliberately 
 misinformed the public ! " Is it surprising that in face of such a 
 policy the language of the patriots daily became more violent, and 
 that Gorres wrote in a fury : " Just as the Vendome column is 
 a perpetual sign of our disgrace, so in the Rheinische Merkur shall 
 there be a perpetual protest on the part of the nation, so that 
 posterity may recognise that our contemporaries were not all in 
 agreement with what was done ! " 
 
 Not merely did the unhappy peace embitter the sentiments 
 of the nation to such a degree that from the first there was not 
 even a glimmer of joyful hope radiated over the youthful Ger- 
 manic Federation. It resulted further in increasing the exces- 
 sive self-esteem of " the people," which had originated during the 
 war ; there could be no doubt about the matter that " the people " 
 would have done everything very much better than the diplomats. 
 The masses of the nation soon turned their backs on all political 
 ideas ; they devoted themselves to the cares of domestic life, 
 engaging in faithful work in order to heal the wounds of the 
 titanic struggle. Whoever still preserved in his heart the ardent 
 idealism of the War of Liberation, consoled himself with the belief 
 that the hour had now arrived when the people must take over 
 
 229 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the conduct of the German state. It sounded Uke a prophecy of 
 the struggles and sorrows of the coming decade, when one of the 
 best of the younger generation, F. G. Dahlmann, the historian, of 
 Kiel, uttered in commemoration of the victory words which in 
 form and content were characteristic of the spirit of the time : 
 " Peace and joy cannot return to earth until, just as wars have 
 become national and thereby have become victorious, so also 
 peace-times shall become national ; peace and joy cannot return 
 until, in peace-time also, the national spirit is cultivated and held 
 in honour, until the Hght of good constitutions is diffused 
 over thejpaltry lamps of the cabinets." 
 
 230 
 
CHAPTER III. ^ 
 MENTAL CURRENTS OF THE FIRST YEARS OF PEACE. 
 
 § I. LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS OF THE EPOCH. 
 
 Not every epoch understands its own nature. More especially 
 in those weary periods which usually follow the decisive moments 
 of national life, courageous and high-spirited individuals are apt 
 to be completely deceived regarding the driving energies of the 
 age. Before the war no one had imagined how much bravery and 
 civic sense, how much power of self-sacrifice and noble passion, 
 slumbered among the people of the German north ; now, when all 
 these hidden virtues had manifested themselves so gloriously, 
 the greatly moved spokesmen of the patriots were simply unable 
 to beUeve that the high enthusiasm of the War of Liberation ceuld 
 evaporate as soon as its aim had been secured. Who could dispute 
 the contention that the federal act and the conclusion of peace 
 had miscarried only because the people had not been able to parti- 
 cipate in the negotiations of the diplomats ? All the more certain 
 was it that the nation, as soon as it had received the promised 
 constitutional government, would attend to its own affairs with 
 zeal and understanding, and would lead the errant cabinets back 
 into the paths of national statecraft. It was in such a sense that 
 Amdt wrote, at the beginning of the first year of peace : " In this 
 year 1816, between the rulers and the peoples, the bond of love 
 and obedience must be indissolubly tied." He saw the doors of 
 a new epoch widely opened ; as soon as the beautiful new-born 
 child of this year, constitutional freedom, should make its entry 
 into all the German states, " those who had fallen in the field 
 would exult, and widows and affianced maidens in their soUtude 
 would weep tears of joy." 
 
 The sanguine man was to learn all too soon how completely 
 he had misunderstood the character and sentiments of his nation. 
 Germany stood at the threshold of a lengthy period of political 
 tutelage, full of error and disillusionment ; public opinion, which 
 
 See Appendix III 
 231 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Arndt esteemed as " the mightiest queen of life," showed but 
 little understanding of the problems of constitutional government, 
 and hardly even displayed any serious interest in the matter. The 
 solitary widows and affianced maidens, the warriors who had 
 returned to their homes to exchange the sword for the ploughshare 
 or the carpenter's plane, were hard pressed by poverty ; their 
 struggles were directed to providing a subsistence for themselves, 
 to discovering how they could rebuild huts upon the plundered 
 battle-fields of the national war. Germany was once again the 
 most impoverished of all the lands of western Europe ; in many 
 regions of the march of Brandenburg there began for the fifth time 
 a fierce struggle for the first beginnings of civic welfare. With a 
 quiet confidence in God, the common people returned to the 
 arduous labours of the day, patiently bearing the lot of privation 
 which came to them as the reward of so many victories. That 
 spirit of restlessness and brutalisation, which after great struggles 
 is apt for a time to persist in the sentiments of the masses, was 
 nowhere seen among the pious and sober-minded men who had 
 fought in this holy war. But amid the pressure of economic cares 
 there was no room left for political passion. Even the memory of 
 all the wonders of the last three years rarely found open expression, 
 although it still persisted in loyal hearts. Twice or thrice in suc- 
 cession, on October i8th, bonfires flamed on the hill-tops ; but 
 after that, in most cases, they were seen no longer, sometimes 
 bec9,use they were forbidden by the police, sometimes because 
 the masses became indifferent. In this generation, which was in 
 general so passionately fond of writing, the number of popular 
 books and woodcuts describing to the nation the most remarkable 
 age of its recent history, remained extraordinarily small. An 
 affected picture, " The Return of the Young Hero," was occa- 
 sionally to be seen hanging on the walls in the houses of well-to-do 
 bourgeois whose sons had gone to the front among the voluntary 
 yagers ; at fairs, and in country inns, even the portrait of Blucher, 
 the popular hero, was rarely to be seen. 
 
 Among the cultured classes, too, there were, generally speak- 
 ing, only three sharply separated circles in which the elevated 
 mood, the proud patriotic hopes, of the years of war, were still 
 long preserved during peace : the Prussian officers' corps ; the 
 students at the universities ; and finally, a moderate number of 
 patriotic authors and men of learning, to whom people now 
 began to apply the new Spanish party-name of liberals. Prussian 
 officers lived and moved among memories of the campaigns ; 
 
 232 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 with a vigorous sense of self-approval they regarded the re-estab- 
 lished glory of their flag, while contemplating with profound 
 discontent the rickety structure of the Germanic Federation and 
 the disastrous issue of the peace negotiations. During the 
 struggle they had learned to respect the warlike energies of the 
 bourgeoisie, and had adopted into their own circle many valiant 
 comrades from the ranks of the volunteers. Now, by the new 
 Army Law, the education of all young men fit for military service 
 was entrusted to their hands ; they came in contact with all 
 classes of the population, and continued at the same time to pre- 
 serve the free scientific spirit which had been awakened in them 
 by Schamhorst ; it was only in cases of isolated reversion that 
 they continued to exhibit the caste arrogance of earlier days. But 
 although the foreign powers and the minor German courts regarded 
 with great suspicion the national pride and the fresh intellectual 
 life of this people's army, the strictly monarchical sentiments of 
 the ofiicers remtdned completely inaccessible to all party aspira- 
 tions. Their comrades of the Russian guard had for the first time 
 become acquainted with the ideas of the Revolution during their 
 stay in France, and had thence taken home with them revolutionary 
 views which were subsequently to bear fruit in foolish con- 
 spiracies. Upon the Prussian ofiicers, on the contrary, the sight 
 of the general perjury and the savage party struggles of the French 
 exercised only a repellent influence ; now, as in the nineties, they 
 prided themselves on their opposition to the Revolution ; they 
 prided themselves on their antique Prussian loyalty to the throne, 
 and were inclined to despise the new constitutional doctrine, if only 
 for the reason that it was derived from France. Even Gneisenau, 
 who, but a year before, had demanded the speedy completion of 
 the Prussian constitution, returned home in a changed mood, and 
 urgently advised that the carrying out of such proposals should 
 be allowed to mature with extreme slowness.* The only political 
 idea which was passionately discussed in the letters and con- 
 versations of the army, was the hope of a third Pimic War, which 
 should finally enable the Germans to secure their ancient western 
 frontier and should restore to them a respected position among the 
 nations. 
 
 Far more lively was the mood of the young volunteers who 
 now returned from their regiments to the lecture theatres of the 
 universities. Patriotic and religious enthusiasm, anger at the 
 shameful peace, and obscure ideas regarding freedom and equality, 
 
 1 Gneisenau to MuiSing, March 25, 1816. 
 233 
 
History of Germany 
 
 which had, unconsciously for the most part, been borrowed from 
 the despised French — all this was simmering confusedly in the 
 heads of these Teutonising youths, generating a noble barbarism, 
 which regarded as vahd only the virtues of the citizen, and which 
 avowed adhesion to the saying of Fichte, that it was better to 
 have life without science than science without life. Meanwhile 
 the exaggerated national pride of Teutonism was too obviously 
 in contradiction with the free broad-mindedness of our cosmo- 
 politan people, to whom it was quite impossible to remain per- 
 manently unjust to a foreign nation ; the contempt displayed for 
 all grace and for refined culture was too un-German, the aspect 
 of this arrogant student-community, now childishly touching, now 
 almost ludicrous, was too sectarian for its political fanaticism 
 to be effective throughout wide circles. The old rule still held 
 good that the men of fifty and sixty years of age govern the world. 
 Whilst the political war-cries of the patriotic writers found, indeed, 
 approval in isolated instances among the older men, they did not 
 awaken the strong passion which eventuates in action 
 
 With more accuracy than Amdt did Hegel grasp the spirit 
 of the time when he said that the nation had completed the work 
 of rough-hewing, and could now once more turn its mind inward 
 to the kingdom of God. The mighty harmonies to which the age 
 of our classical poetry had given utterance were still resounding ; 
 the rich treeisures which during the last two generations the intel- 
 lectual work of the nation had disclosed were by no means 
 exhausted. The ambition of this thoroughly unpolitical genera- 
 tion continued, undisturbed by all the prose of external life, to 
 concern itself almost exclusively with the things of the spirit. To 
 its best men, the days of the Napoleonic wars soon came to seem 
 no more than an episode, like a hailstorm which had broken over 
 the blooming garden of German art and science. Just as the 
 common people once more returned to their ploughs, so the 
 men of culture again took their pens in hand, not, hke the 
 former, in quiet renunciation, but inspired with the joyful conscious- 
 ness that they belonged once more to themselves and their own 
 inmost life. With astonishing distinctness now became visible 
 that inward contradiction which, since the flourishing of the new 
 literature, had come to exist in the character of our nation : those 
 valiant Teutons who in the sagas of primitive heathendom had 
 continually dreamed of war and victory, and who since then in 
 each successive century had deafened the world with the clash 
 of their swords, now esteemed warlike renown less highly than 
 
 234 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 did any other people ; they lived in the belief that Germany's 
 sharpest weapon was German thought. 
 
 Throughout the world, the decade following the overthrow 
 of Napoleon was a blossoming time of the sciences and the arts. 
 The nations which had just been fighting so fiercely one with 
 another, now engaged in a fine rivalry in respect of the fruits of 
 their intellectual hfe ; never before had Europe approximated 
 so closely to that ideal of a free world-literature of which Goethe 
 dreamed. In this peaceful rivalry, Germany took the first place. 
 What a change from the days of Louis XIV, when our nation 
 had been forced to go humbly to school to all the other nations 
 of the west. Now the whole world revered the name of Goethe. 
 The quaint guest-chambers of the Erbprinzen and of the Adler 
 in Weimar were always fuU of distinguished Enghshmen who 
 desired to pay their respects to the prince of the new poetry. In 
 Paris, Alexander Humboldt enjoyed a repute which exceeded 
 that of almost any native man of learning ; when a stranger entered 
 a hackney-coach and gave the address of the great traveller, the 
 driver respectfully lifted his hat and said : " Ah ! chez M. de 
 Humboldt ! " When Niebuhr came to Rome as Prussian ambas- 
 sador, no one in the world-city ventured to contest with him the 
 glory •f being the first among all men of learning. 
 
 Foreigners spoke httle of our state, of its warlike deeds. To 
 all the foreign powers the sudden revival in strength of the centre 
 of Europe was disagreeable, and they all rivalled one another in 
 the endeavour to consign to oblivion Prussia's share in the hbera- 
 tion of Europe. Not one of the foreign miUtary historians who 
 in these years of historical production described the most recent 
 campaigns, did anything like adequate justice to the services of 
 Blucher's headquarters staff. The old prestige of the Prussian 
 army, which in the days of Frederick had been dreaded by all as 
 the greatest army in the world, had by no means been re-estabUshed 
 by the victories of Dennewitz and Belle AlMance. Since it is always 
 difficult to gain a comprehensive view of the true course of a coali- 
 tion war, the public opinion of Europe gladly contented itself with 
 contemplating the simple conclusion that since the Prussians 
 had been beaten when they fought alone at Jena they had been 
 saved only by foreign help. For this reason, too, no one in foreign 
 lands had any interest in the political institutions to which Prussia 
 owed her freedom. Now, as before, Prussia remained the lejist 
 known and the most completely misunderstood state of Europe. 
 Moreover, the new Reichstag of Ratisbon, which now assembled 
 
 235 
 
History of Germany 
 
 in Frankfort, aroused the scorn of Europe by its fruitless disputes. 
 Soon after the wonderful uprising of our nation, the old and con- 
 venient opinion became generally current that by a wise pro- 
 vision of nature the German nation was foreordained to eternal 
 weakness and dissension. All the more willingly did people 
 recognise the intellectual greatness of this powerless nation ; it 
 was solely to their artists and to their men of learning that the 
 Germans owed the fact that by all the civilised peoples of the 
 west they were once more regarded as one among the great nations. 
 In foreign lands, they were now spoken of as the nation of poets 
 and thinkers ; in the partition of the earth they should be content 
 with the lot of the poet which Schiller ascribed to them, and, 
 intoxicated with the divine light, should be satisfied to lose the 
 light of earth. 
 
 For the first time since the days of Martin Luther, the ideas 
 of Germany once more made the round of the world, and now 
 found a more willing acceptance than of old had the ideas of the 
 Reformation. Germany alone had already got completely beyond 
 the view of the world-order characteristic of the eighteenth 
 century. The sensualism of the days of enlightenment had been 
 long replaced by an idealist philosophy ; the dominion of reason 
 by a profound religious sentiment ; cosmopolitanism by a delight 
 in national peculiarity ; natural rights by a recognition of the 
 living growth of the nations ; the rules of correct art by free poesy, 
 bubbling up as by natural energy from the depths of the soul ; 
 the preponderance of the exact sciences by the new historico- 
 aesthetic culture. By the work of three generations, those of the 
 classical and of the romanticist poets, this world of new ideas had 
 slowly attained to maturity, whereas among the neighbour nations 
 it had hitherto secured no more than isolated disciples, and only 
 now at length made its way victoriously through all the lands. 
 
 With wonderful elasticity did France resume her intellectual 
 labours after the long and heavy slumber of the imperial age. 
 Madame de Stael's book upon Germany, which the Napoleonic 
 censors had suppressed as an affront to the national pride, was 
 now in everyone's hands, and gained everywhere adherents for 
 German ideas, which were given the comprehensive name of 
 romanticism. The dominion of the sensualist philosophy 
 collapsed before the criticism of the doctrinaires ; a compact 
 circle of men of talent, such men as Mignet, Guizot, and the 
 Thierrys, opened to the French an understanding of the 
 world of history. The age of Louis XIV, which ^ even the 
 
 236 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 revolutionary thinkers of the eighteenth century had still regarded 
 as the epoch of classical beauty of form, began to lose 
 its prestige, and soon there uprose a new school of poets 
 to liberate France from the tyranny of academic rules, so 
 that Victor Hugo could say with considerable truth of his own 
 people that romanticism is in Uterature that which liberalism is 
 in poUtics. Ye* more vigorous and more direct was the exchange 
 of ideas between Germany and England ; the Germans now 
 repaid to the British what they had once received from Shakes- 
 peare and Sterne. Walter Scott, the most fruitful and best-loved 
 poet of the age, went to school to Biirger and Goethe, drawing 
 from the profound spring of sagas and folk-songs which the Ger- 
 mans had unlocked for the world ; by his historical romances the 
 broad masses of the European reading public was first won over 
 to romanticist ideals. Some of the ItaHans, too, above all Manzoni, 
 entered the path of the new poetry ; but among this semi-antique 
 people of Italy, romanticist poetry could just as Uttle attain to an 
 undisputed dominion as had in former days the northern artistic 
 form of Gothic architecture. 
 
 Ever5^where there was an awakening of spirit. In Germany 
 itself, the wealth of this fruitful epoch seemed less striking than in 
 neighbouring countries, for the classical age of our poetry had barely 
 come to an end, and the great majority of the younger poets 
 regarded themselves, when compared with the heroes of those 
 great days, as nothing better than a generation of epigones. All 
 the more powerfully and fruitfully did the creative energy of the 
 German spirit unfold itself in the domain of science. Almost 
 simultaneously appeared the epoch-making writings of Savigny, 
 the brothers Grimm, Boeckh, Lachmann, Bopp, Diez, and Ritter ; 
 whilst Niebuhr, the Humboldts, Eichhom, Creuzer, and Gottfried 
 Hermann, went vigorously forward along the paths they had 
 already opened. The current of new ideas flowed everjnvhere 
 unceasingly. There was an overplus of brilliant men, as there 
 had been in former days when Klopstock led the revival of Ger- 
 man poetry. And just as had previously been the case with the 
 pioneers of our poetry, so now this new generation of learned 
 men was permeated with an innocent and youthful enthusiasm, 
 with a serene ambition which sought nothing more in the world 
 than the blessedness of knowledge, and the increase of German 
 glory through the activities of free investigation. 
 
 The dry dust which had so long lain upon the works of German 
 learning was, as it were, wafted away ; the new science felt itself 
 
 237 
 
History of Germany 
 
 to be the sister of art. Its disciples had all drunk from the cup 
 of beauty, and many of them had even received the determinative 
 impressions of their lives in the circles of the poets. Diez con- 
 tinued to cherish after many years the sheet of paper on which 
 Goethe had once written for him the title of Reynouard's 
 Provengal researches, and had thus indicated to the young man 
 the way to his hfe work. Boeckh and Creuzer had idled, revelled, 
 and caroused so many nights with the enthusiasts of Heidelberg 
 romanticism ; I. Bekker had delved with Uhland among the 
 treasures of the Paris library ; the impish Bettina Arnim some- 
 times played her mischievous tricks in the studies of Savigny and 
 of the brothers Grimm. They all looked up with veneration to 
 old Goethe, assembling round this central spirit to form as it were 
 an invisible church, round this man who had received the veil of 
 poesy from the hand of truth herself, and who incorporated the 
 ideal of the age, the living unity of art and science, at once in his 
 life and in his works. All endeavoured to express the results of 
 their researches in a nobler and worthier form ; the chaste sim- 
 plicity of Savigny's writings, the powerful sentiment and the 
 abundance of unsought, vivid, and intuitive images in the pithy 
 style of Jacob Grimm, put to shame the sugary artificiaUty of many 
 later poets. In all the works of these investigators, a warm heart 
 and that creative imagination which reshapes historic life had 
 just as great a share as had industrious research and critical 
 acumen. 
 
 Just as the poetry of the previous generation had inspired 
 the men of the rising generation, so the speculative work of the 
 previous age made its way into the flesh and blood of the new 
 science. It was only because the German spirit had so long been 
 profoundly immersed in the problem of the unity of being and 
 thinking, that that spirit now became able to diffuse itself through- 
 out the world of history without becoming superficial and without 
 losing itself in a mass of details. It was not in vain that all these 
 young lawyers, philologists, and historians had sat at the feet of 
 the philosophers. They wished to reach out through history 
 into the secret of the human spirit itself ; they endeavoured, as 
 W. Humboldt declared of himself, to gain a view of how man had 
 ceme to be, and thus to acquire some idea of what man may be 
 and ought to be, to approach more closely to the ultimate ques- 
 tions of existence. Hence was derived the comprehensive outlook, 
 the splendid multiplicity, of this generation^of learned men. It 
 was only so recently that the wide field of the world of history had 
 
 238 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 been first occupied ; whoever drove his ploughshare through this 
 virgin soil, subsequently scattered the seed with no niggard hand, 
 so that it was dispersed also upon his neighbour's land. Almost 
 all the notable men of learning were simultaneously at work in 
 several fields, and every one of them, when immersing himself in 
 some particular form of study, never failed to keep his glance fixed 
 upon the great interconnection of the sciences. It was the pride 
 of this fruit-bearing generation to propound briUiant hypotheses, 
 and to illuminate wide prospects which the scientific researches 
 of individual workers in two successive generations have since 
 made accessible to the whole world. 
 
 Through the blossoming of science, the universities entered 
 the foregrovmd of the nation's spiritual life. They had ever taken 
 a rich share in the struggles and transformations of German 
 thought ; but now they assumed the leading position in the domain 
 of the spirit, as they had done once before in the epoch of 
 humanism and at the outset of the Reformation. University 
 professors gradually acquired a determinative influence upon the 
 activities and views of our nation, such an influence as they 
 possessed in no other country ; among the leading authors of the 
 ensuing decades, there were but few who had not held an academic 
 position for a shorter or longer period. The university of Berhn 
 soon 6utsoared all others ; here, during these years, there were at 
 work the most ardent reforming minds in German science ; yet 
 Berlin was never more than first among equals, for this country 
 offered no opportunities for a centraUsation of culture. Never 
 have our universities been so truly free, fulfilled with such 
 profound inward happiness, as in these quiet years of peace. 
 The quarrelsome youths brought home from the battle-fields, in 
 addition to their unmannerly Teutonism, to their arrogant political 
 dreams, a fine enthusiasm, and a warm receptivity for ideals ; the 
 deplorable roughness and intemperance of earlier times did not 
 return. Education remained free from corporate coercion and 
 corporate tendencies, for all felt that in science everything was 
 still in a state of youthful growth. No one was astonished when 
 a man of leeiming, even of mature age, changed from one faculty 
 to another, or when a philologian hke Dahlmann, who had never 
 heard a historical lecture, was summoned to the chair of history. 
 When a man displayed the stuff of which a master is made, no 
 one asked whose pupil he had been. Most of the university 
 lecturers did their professorial work with admirable zeal ; but if 
 a fine spring day lured them into the neighbouring hills, even 
 
 239 
 
Flistory of Germany 
 
 the most industrious among them did not hesitate to write up 
 on the door of his lecture-theatre hodie non legiiur. 
 
 The students of all faculties thronged round notable teachers 
 of philosophy, history, and philology, and many of them con- 
 tinued to pursue such studies for years before thinking of engaging 
 in a professional occupation for themselves. The classical state 
 schools, avoiding mind-destropng polymathy, still knew how to 
 awaken in their pupils a permanent delight in classical activity 
 and an impulse towards free human culture. The disease of the 
 universities of to-day, the dread of examinations, was still 
 almost entirely unknown. The princely schools of Saxony, and 
 the convent schools of Wiirtemberg, anciently celebrated homes 
 of classical learning, sent their senior students to the uni- 
 versity as soon as the teachers considered that the time was ripe, 
 the state leaving them to do as they thought best. Entry into 
 the state service and the ecclesiastical service of the petty states 
 was for the most part secured by young men who had finished their 
 university career, and was secured by patronage, in accordance 
 with the ancient patriarchal manner. It was only in Prussia, 
 after the reorganisation of the administration by Frederick 
 William I, that a system of regular state-examinations had come 
 into existence, and from Prussia this mechanical ordering, which 
 was unquestionably juster, and was demanded by the manifold 
 relationships of a great state, gradually made its way into the 
 petty states. But here also a very moderate standard was 
 exacted, for the state needed many young officials for its new 
 provinces. The idealistic tendency of the time forbade that 
 studies should be anxiously directed with the view to the earning 
 of a living. Youth still enjoyed undisturbed academic freedom ; 
 everyone listened and learned as fancy directed him, if he did 
 not prefer to pass his golden student days in the sole pursuit of 
 uncontrolled enjo3nTients. 
 
 Such was the life of the little learned republics, happy free 
 states of absolute social equality and freedom from restraint, raised, 
 as it were, above the pettiness of everyday life. Men of great 
 talent, who in every other country would have demanded a wide 
 stage for their activities, felt perfectly happy in the poverty and 
 exiguity of these httle university towns, with their ancient castles 
 and narrow, winding streets, where every house had memories 
 of some merry wit among the students, or of some distinguished 
 professor. Here science was supreme ; the professor, revered 
 by a grateful audience, regarded himself with frank self-satisfaction. 
 
 240 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 Often enough there occurred fierce intellectual disputes, 
 after the German manner ; the scientific opponent was apt to 
 be regarded as a desecrator of the temple, for everyone was 
 whole-heartedly devoted to his own researches. But these 
 straightforward and frugal-minded men were Uttle troubled 
 with vulgar ambition. They made it a point of honour to 
 despise the display and comfort of material existence ; they still 
 all firmly beheved in the proud saying of Schiller : "In the end 
 we are idealists, and would be ashamed that it could be said 
 of us that things formed us, and not that we formed things." 
 
 Even after decades had passed, in Tiibingen people used to 
 speak of the wealthy bookseller Cotta, who had first introduced 
 the unheard-of luxury of a sofa into the unpretentious town of 
 the Muses. The youthful incompleteness of our civilisation, 
 which still knew nothing of the many-sided social activities of 
 the Ufe of great towns, redounded to the advantage of 
 reflectiveness and the peaceful pursuit of scientific work. Like 
 the classical poetry of an earher day, so now the new research 
 remained perfectly free, almost imtouched by the favour of the 
 court and by official influence ; not even the prosecution of 
 the demagogues was able to disturb the inner fife of science. 
 Although now almost all the German states, nobly competing 
 one with another, endeavoured to secure the activities of leading 
 teachers for their respective universities, in the eyes of the courts 
 and of the bureaucracy even a professor of European reputation 
 was merely a professor, without rank at court. The man of 
 science, on the other hand, looked down with all the pride of 
 idealism upon the aims of commercial life. Every teacher 
 appealed to the best intelligences among his pupils to devote 
 themselves entirely to science; mediocrities were good enough 
 for the handicraft work of the soldier and the official, and above 
 all for the thoroughly despised world of business fife. An 
 incomparably greater preponderance of the spiritual energies of 
 the nation devoted itself to learned activities, and it remains a 
 fine testunony to the fertihty of this generation that, none the 
 less, the officialdom now numbered among its ranks an extraordi- 
 nary abundance of men of talent. 
 
 Now, just as sixty years before, while the political fife of 
 the nation was flowing subdivided in innumerable streams and 
 streamlets, it was only the authors and the men of learning who 
 spoke directly to the nation as a whole. For this reason they 
 regarded themselves as the chosen representatives of the people 
 
 241 R 
 
History of Germany 
 
 and of its highest goods; it was but very slowly that a few 
 politicians gained general repute beside them. The whole epoch 
 exhibited, for good and for evil, the characteristics of a literary 
 ag-e. Even now, a poem by Goethe, an incisive criticism, or a 
 learned feud, such as that between the symbohsts and the 
 critical philologians, aroused far greater interest among the 
 leading spirits of the nation than did any event in the world of 
 politics. Karl Immermann voiced the very spirit of this 
 romantic age when he declared that he could not follow a 
 parliamentary debate with attention, because he could not form 
 any mental picture of such void abstractions. The complete 
 sacrifice of the free personality in the service of the state 
 remained no less antipathetic to this generation than was the 
 life of pohtical parties, with its voluntary limitations and its 
 fundamentally unjust hatreds. To the German, the highest of all 
 aims was still to Hve out his own life, to develop his own ego, 
 in its free peculiarities, in all possible directions, and, as W. Hum- 
 boldt expressed it, to pay more attention to the doing than to 
 the deed. 
 
 Although the dominant tendency of the age ran absolutely 
 counter to the enlightened cosmopolitanism of the years before 
 the Revolution, this romantic generation had none the less 
 preserved many of the humanly lovable virtues of the philosophic 
 century. The young Teutonisers might arrogantly decry 
 French triviality ; the leaders of science and art continued, after 
 the old and genuine German manner, to exhibit gratitude and 
 receptivity for every fine work of poetry and research, even 
 if it came from much-abused France. Notwithstanding the 
 mystical enthusiasm of the time, the old broad-minded 
 tolerance still persisted. The contrasts of religious life had not 
 yet become accentuated ; they did not as yet exercise, as they do 
 to-day, a falsifying and embittering influence in the sphere of 
 politics. No one was surprised if a liberal was at the same time a 
 strict church Christian. To everyone it seemed perfectly in 
 order that Catholic ecclesiastics should attend the consecration 
 of a Protestant church ; even zealous converts like F. Schlegel, 
 Stolberg, and Klinkowstrom remained on terms of cordial 
 friendship with some of their old Protestant associates. The 
 struggle of the literary parties did not render impossible the 
 recognition of the human value of an opponent, nor exclude a 
 genuine delight in every happy discovery. Uproarious youths 
 prided themselves upon their Germanic strictness of morals ; 
 
 242 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 mature men displayed in their moral judgments a fine and 
 liberal mildness, which was in truth far more German. 
 Exhibiting consideration for human weakness, they placed little 
 value upon that correctness of conduct which to the prudish sense 
 of the present day appears to be the only token of morality, 
 and willingly let a hot-blooded friend go his own way, if he 
 would but co-operate in the work of a free human culture, and 
 if only he did not lose faith in the divine destiny of our race. 
 
 It was not without reason that the poets and men of 
 learning looked down with contempt upon the prose of 
 Philistinism. They hved in a free and intelUgent sociabihty 
 which knew how to ennoble hfe by the serene play of art and 
 which approximately realised Schiller's ideal of an aesthetic 
 education. The exchange of ideas in correspondence and 
 conversation, the natural means for the intercommunication of 
 daily impressions, had not yet been rendered obsolete by news- 
 papers. There yet existed the basis of all social charm, the 
 frank and daily intercourse between the two sexes, for women 
 were still able to follow in their entirety the thoughts of men. 
 There was not a town in the realm without its connoisseurs, 
 collectors, and critics, without its circles of lovers of the theatre 
 and of the arts. When the cheerful populace of the smaller 
 towns assembled for their simple meals by the gloomy flickering 
 light of tallow candles, all contributed according to their 
 respective capacities in the way of riddles and witticisms, songs 
 and rh)niied toasts — since for many years past every cultured 
 German had known how to provide on his own initiative for 
 the poetic needs of the household. Social life was warmed by 
 cheerful pleasures ; in a game of forfeits a kiss was still 
 permissible in all honour ; the free-spirited girls of the day, who 
 were none the less carefully trained for domestic life, still 
 frankly admitted that Kathchen of Heilbronn was a figure 
 altogether after their taste. In the narrower circles of the 
 initiates how much fine intelligence and wit, how much merry 
 humour and eager enthusiasm, now prevailed — as when Ludwig 
 Devreint and Callot-Hoffmann celebrated their extravagant 
 bacchanals all through the night in the taverns of Lutter and 
 Wegner ; or when Lobeck and the Konigsberg philologians joined 
 in a drinking-bout after the Greek manner, their heads crowned 
 with roses, talking in Greek of the heroes of Homer and of the 
 fortunate island of the Phaeacians. The social life of the day, 
 notwithstanding its occasional beastliness and excesses, exhibited 
 
 243 
 
History of Germany 
 
 none the less an abundance of noble intellectual enjoyments, of 
 which music almost alone has been preserved amid the dulness 
 and the weary ostentation of modem society. The women who 
 had been young during those years, seemed, even in advanced 
 age, to the posterity of a duller generation, to be illumined 
 as by a poetic charm ; they won the hearts of all by their 
 inexhaustible amiability, by their refined understanding of every- 
 thing that is human. 
 
 Doubtless there was also manifest at the same time an 
 indication of the commencement of decay. Literature had for 
 some time run to seed ; writers offered to readers what they 
 thought the readers wanted, whereas the classical poets of 
 earlier days had spontaneously expressed what already lay 
 half-conscious in the soul of the nation. The love of novelty 
 and the sensuality of the reading world were exploited by a mass of 
 trivial light literature ; since a national style had not come into 
 existence in any branch of creative literature, profounder natures 
 readily lapsed into arbitrary and strained experiments, so that 
 Goethe characterised these years as the epoch of forced talents. 
 The fashionable intermingling of poetry and criticism rendered 
 it easy for a barren dilettantism to increase beyond measure. 
 Whoever moved in the circles of romanticism, repeating the 
 catchwords of this school, and sometimes cudgelling his brains 
 over the design for a drama or an epic poem, regarded himself 
 as a poet, and forgot the consciousness of his incapacity in the 
 favourite consolation that the artist was made in the world of 
 thought and aspiration, and that Raphael, even if bom without 
 hands would have been the greatest of all painters. The terribly 
 misused word " genius " was a charter for every folly, every 
 extravagance. The straightforward human understanc^g was 
 apt to be ruined by ingenious toying with new ideas and 
 with surprising points of view. The belief in the boundless 
 rights of the sovereign personahty, the general desire to be 
 something different from other men, led some to moral anarchy 
 and others to vain self-admiration. With nervous sensitive- 
 ness, people watched every breath of their own beautiful spirits. 
 In the letters of Gentz and in the memoirs of Rahel Vamhagen, 
 the barometer plays the part of the mysterious elemental energy 
 which bestows upon genius the dark and the bright hours. 
 
 The thoughts of the nation were still so completely 
 dominated by literature, that even the great contrasts of 
 political and religious Hfe frequently found expression in 
 
 244 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of P^i:;^ 
 
 learned disputes. Such was the nature of the struggles 
 between Savigny and Thibaut, between Voss and Stolberg. 
 When Gottfried Hermann took the field against Creuzer and the 
 symboUsts, he regarded himself as the champion of freedom 
 against the tenebriones, the men of darkness in the state and in 
 the church. Even the purely pohtical parties, whose weak 
 beginnings were now at length becoming manifest, emerged 
 directly out of Uterary life. The immediate intervention of 
 poUtical theory in the destiny of states, which so strikingly 
 distinguishes modem history from the more ingenuous days of 
 antiquity and of the middle ages, was nowhere more conspicuoTis 
 than here in the land of learning. German liberalism sprang, 
 not from the class interests of the wealthy and self-conscious 
 bourgeoisie, but from the academic ideas of the professors. 
 With the indefinite historical yearning for the great days of the 
 old emperordom, which had first come into existence in Uterary 
 circles during the epoch of foreign dominion, there gradually became 
 intermingled the doctrines of the new philosophy regarding 
 the natural right of the free personahty ; to these were 
 subsequently added a few phrases from Montesquieu and 
 Rousseau ; and finally, in addition, a large proportion of the 
 unconscious prejudices of the learned caste. Thus there came 
 into existence a system of ideas which were supposed to 
 correspond with the law of reason, and were to lead our 
 nation through freedom back to the attainment of its ancient 
 power. In the writings of Rotteck this doctrine was 
 produced in a condition of complete elaboration, like a 
 philosopher's system and, just Uke such a system, put forward 
 a claim to perpetuate itself through the world by the might 
 of reason, by its theoretical incontrovertibihty. The over- 
 throw of the Napoleonic world-empire had been effected solely 
 by the power of ideas which had been bom in the circles of 
 the brain-workers, had from these passed to the nation, had 
 finally overpowered even the hostile crowns, and had led to the 
 holy war — ^this view was assumed by Uterary poUticians to be 
 indisputable ; thus it seemed that Germany's internal Uberation 
 would also be weU secured if only all parties would fuUy accept 
 the sacred truths of the new constitutional doctrine, and would 
 hold firmly to this creed with the faithful conviction of the man 
 of learning or of the martyr of the church. To this generation 
 of well-meaning doctrinaires it still remained altogether unknown 
 that the state has power, and belongs to the realm of the 
 
 245 
 
History of Germany 
 
 will. It was not until decades had passed, filled with crass 
 confusions and profound disillusionments, that German party life 
 could outgrow the cradle of doctrine and raise itself from a 
 policy of belief to a policy of action. 
 
 In the Latin countries, poetry, when it had attained to 
 classical perfection, had ever5rwhere and for a long period given 
 form and direction to the spirit of the nation. So extreme was 
 the stubbornness of the Germans that even during the golden 
 days of Weimar they would never yield to the dominion of a rule. 
 Whilst Schiller and Goethe still stood at the summit of their 
 creative activities, romanticism was already begiiming a fierce 
 attack upon the classical ideal. When the War of Liberation 
 had reduced the literary struggle to silence, the anxiety about 
 the fatherland repressed all other thoughts ; the few writings 
 which ventured forth during this wild time seemed to unite in 
 advocating Christian and patriotic enthusiasm. But hardly had 
 peace been concluded when the sharp contrasts which the 
 manifold Hfe of Germany contained, once more and in a moment 
 broke forth into active life. Even half-forgotten thoughts from 
 the first years of the Revolution, ideas which had been sup- 
 posed to have been long outgrown, re-emerged into the light 
 of day ; for it is the lot of every literature which is no longer 
 in its first youth to find that at times the past once more comes 
 to hfe, and that the shades of the dead take part in the struggles 
 of the hving. RationaUsm and religious sentiment, criticism 
 and mysticism, natural rights and historical doctrines of the 
 state, Nazarene and Hellenic ideals of nationalism and 
 cosmopolitanism, hberal and feudal tendencies, struggled and 
 intertwined in perpetual change. 
 
 It was not merely the timid Gentz who complained in alarm 
 that the long-desired time of peace had brought to the Germans 
 a war of all against all. Even Arndt, who was ever sanguine, 
 could not conceal his disgust when at the court of the young 
 crown prince of Prussia he saw Alexander Hmnboldt, the 
 advocate of a purely scientific cosmopolitanism, and at the same 
 time the brothers Gerlach, hotspurs of Christo-Germanic 
 religious fanaticism. He anxiously asked how, in view of the 
 immeasurable divergence of sentiments, this nation could ever 
 attain to internal peace, to firm decision. In the long run, 
 indeed, the healthy sense of the nation succeeded in grasping 
 and retaining all that was genuine and viable in this anar- 
 chical confusion. Nevertheless, many a fine talent succumbed 
 
 246 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 hopelessly amid the confusion of opinions ; and whoever found 
 courage to take part in the struggles of the German spirit had 
 to be prepared to accept a lot of renunciation. Every notable 
 intelligence, even if high above the sectarian spirit, was forced, 
 willingly or unwillingly, into the struggle of the literary parties 
 and was extolled beyond measure by one faction, while being 
 abused by the other with all the lack of restraint characteristic 
 of German fault-finding ; those only who had attained to a great 
 age might hope, like Savigny and Uhland, to secure belated 
 recognition even from their opponents. 
 
 § 2. POETRY AND THE FINE ARTS. 
 
 Even in the serene and youthful days of our classical 
 literature, unrestrained criticism had frequently hampered the 
 free natural growth of poetry. Now, when during seventy years 
 Germany had experimented in almost all conceivable artistic 
 styles and had made trial of even more manifold aesthetic 
 theories, artistic creation showed itself to be affected with the 
 disease of learned over-refinement. No branch of poetic art 
 suffered more severely in this respefct than the drama, which 
 needs popular favour as flowers need the sun. Goethe had 
 good reason for calling the arrogant spokesmen of romanticism 
 " starvelings yearning for the unattainable " ; notwithstanding 
 their talented flashes of thought and their high intentions, 
 they completely lacked the gift of architectonic, the constructive 
 and convincing energy of the creative genius. Although they 
 had promised themselves to oust the classical ideal by a popular 
 poetising, their works, after all, remained unknown to the 
 people, and were the property of no more than a small circle of 
 admiring connoisseurs. To them, art was, as it were, a magic 
 philtre, one which the philistine was incapable of enjoying, and 
 which was intoxicating to those alone who possessed divine 
 grace ; under its influence these rare spirits forgot reality and 
 smiled upon life as upon a foolish masque. This sovereign 
 disdain which prided itself upon "pursuing sport as earnest 
 and treating earnest as sport " conflicted with the healthy 
 sentiment of the crowd. 
 
 Of the older German dramatists, the romanticist art-critic 
 would allow a high rank to Goethe alone, and Goethe had hardly 
 thought of writing his most mature works for presentation on the 
 
 247 
 
History of Germany 
 
 stage; the peaceful sensual beauty of his Iphigenia and of his 
 Tasso were not fully conceivable except to the mind of the 
 reader. Lessing was no longer counted among the poets ; 
 Schiller's tragic passion was mocked as empty rhetoric ; even 
 Heinrich von Kleist, the one dramatist of genius whose outlook 
 was closely akin to that of the romanticists, remained long 
 unnoticed by the critics of this school. The two most efficient 
 dramatists of the period, Iffland and Kotzebue, who continued 
 to dominate the stage even for a decade after their death, were 
 regarded by the arrogance of the romanticists with such unjusti- 
 fied contempt that youthful talent was necessarily frightened 
 away from the drama. All that the romanticists could see in 
 one of these writers was his honoittable philistine sensibility, and 
 all that they could see in the other was his insipidity and the 
 commonness of his thought ; in neither could they recognise the 
 exceptional technical talent, nor yet the fortimate gift of ready 
 invention, whereby both put to shame their obscure critics. Of 
 the dramatic endeavours of the romanticists themselves, but few 
 ever appeared before the foot-lights, and all those that did thus 
 appear stood the test badly. The leaders of the school soon 
 turned their backs upon the stage, speaking with scorn of the 
 common prose of theatrical success. Utterly regardless of the 
 vital conditions of the modem theatre, which on five or seven 
 nights a week had to satisfy an audience wearied by the cares 
 of every-day life, dramatic theory constructed its stately cloud- 
 pictures and made excessive demands, for which not even the 
 splendid stage of the Hellenes could have furnished satisfaction. 
 The heroes of our classical poetry had never had the same 
 intimate relationships with the stage as in earlier days Shakes- 
 peare or MoMre. Now, however personal intercourse between 
 dramatists and play-actors became ever rarer. Dramatic art 
 forgot that, above all other arts, it is its fine destiny to constitute 
 a bond of unity between the higher and the lower strata of 
 society. There gradually came to exist within our nation a 
 momentous cleavage which down to the present day has remained 
 a grave evil of German civilisation : the reading public separated 
 itself as an aristocracy from the onlooking and listening pubUc. 
 A large proportion of the daily needs of the theatre came to be 
 suppUed by literary journeymen ; spectacular plays and bad 
 translations from the French appealed to the sightseeing spirit 
 of the crowd. Whoever esteemed himself one of the select circle 
 of true poets, commonly loaded himself too heavily with the 
 
 248 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 impedimenta of the aesthetic doctrine to be able to act with that 
 boldness, to laugh vsdth that heartiness, which the stage demands 
 from its rulers ; and such writers incorporated their dramatic 
 ideas in bookish dramas. That mongrel type of poetry with which 
 an over-elaborated modem culture cannot completely dispense, 
 exhibited in Germany a more luxuriant growth than elsewhere. 
 Here, upon the patient paper, all the complicated theorems and 
 fantastical ideas of the wajnvard German intelligence found 
 free play : tragicomedies and plays for jeunes filles, in which every 
 conceivable metre recurred in riotous confusion ; hidden allusions 
 comprehensible only to the poet himself and to his intimates ; 
 literary satires which made art the object of art ; and, finally, 
 exotic poems of all kinds, which had to be read as if they were 
 translations. 
 
 Among foreign prototypes, Calderon, in the judgment of 
 initiates, occupied the first place. The German cosmopolitans 
 would not see that this purely national poet ranked as a 
 classic writer precisely because he had given artistic expression 
 to the ideals of his epoch and of his nation ; they slavishly 
 imitated his southern forms which in our northern speech 
 sounded operatic and simply undramatic, and they transported 
 into the free Protestant world the conventional ideas of honour 
 of the Cathohc knighthood. Much inteUigence and much energy 
 were wasted in such artifices ; at long last these pretentious 
 activities effected nothing more than the destruction of all tradi- 
 tional dramatic art-forms. But the poets grew accustomed to 
 regard an ungrateful world with proud bitterness. Germany 
 became the classic land of talent misunderstood. The excess of 
 imsatisfied authors constituted a force of discontent in society, 
 nourishing the national errors of fault-finding and hopeless 
 moroseness. Subsequently, when political passions awakened, 
 this contributed greatly to the embitterment of party struggles. 
 
 Pushed to the grotesque seemed the moral and aesthetic weak- 
 nesses of the romanticist epigones as displayed in the unsettled 
 Ufe of Zacharias Werner ; his dramatic talent failed to procure 
 him fame because the virile art of the dramatist demands an 
 entire man. Throughout fife he vacillated restlessly to and fro 
 between dissolute sensual desires and exaggerated ecstasy, between 
 cjTiical commonness and lachrymose sentimentahty, which could 
 not refrain from prapng beside the grave of a dog for the soul's 
 peace of the deceased. Since his distracted spirit could find no 
 consolation in " God and St. Rousseau," he ultimately took 
 
 249 
 
History of Germany 
 
 refuge in Rome, in the bosom of the ancient church, clinging 
 in convulsive anxiety to the rock of Peter. Though the critical 
 understanding of the East Prussian sometimes awakened in him, 
 though the festival of the hquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius 
 appeared to him like a Peruvian idolatrous service, he deafened 
 his doubts with the turmoil of his own ecstatic outcries. Then 
 he went to Vienna, in the days when the nimble-minded 
 Father Hoffbauer had for the first time founded a strict eccle- 
 siastical party in the pleasure-loving town, and had collected 
 a crowd of converts around himself. Werner joyfully accepted 
 all the views of this clerical circle, and countered the songs of 
 freedom of the North German youth with the song " Let the 
 watch-cry be, the old time becomes new ! " During the days of 
 the Vienna congress he was the favourite preacher of the fashion- 
 able world. Half repentant and half diverted, elegant Vienna 
 listened while the long, lean priest with the sinister dark eyes 
 raised his powerful bass voice, now describing in glowing 
 colours the molten sulphur pool of eternal damnation, and now 
 depicting, with a thorough personal knowledge and with hardly 
 concealed satisfaction, the aberrations of sensuality. Growth 
 and nobility were lacking in his poetic creation as they were 
 lacking in his life. His youthful dramas displayed strongly 
 realistic talent and a living sense of historic greatness ; in 
 isolated scenes of Die Weihe der Kraft the mighty figure of Martin 
 Luther, and the high-spirited, richly-coloured hfe of our sixteenth 
 century, are vigorously and vividly displayed. Intermingled 
 therewith was, indeed, a morbid dehght in the ghastly, the 
 horrible, and the savage : that enigmatic combination of fervour 
 and belief, voluptuousness and bloodthirst, which repels us in 
 the natural religions of immature peoples, seemed to come to life 
 once more in this unhappy man. After his conversion, with the 
 zeal of the penitent, he recanted his finest drama, and wrote a 
 pitiable work entitled Die Weihe der Unkraft. In his last play. 
 Die Mutter der Makkdbder, he already displayed the lack of 
 principle of a partially deranged mind, endeavouring to conceal 
 the poverty of his religious sentiments behind turgid hymns and 
 horrible images of martyrs. 
 
 More effective than Werner's historical tragedies, was his 
 " fate- tragedy," published in 1815, Der vierundzwanzigste Februar, 
 a master-work of its kind, aiming at the production of physical 
 horror. The tragical destiny did not here arise by internal 
 necessity out of the character of the actors, but out of the 
 
 250 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 enigmatical sorcery of a momentous anniversary, and the 
 astonished reader, notwithstanding the sublime insight afforded 
 into the rationality of the moral world, bore away nothing but 
 an impression of unaccountable horror. Since the novelty of this 
 extravagant conceit attracted attention, and since in any case 
 the romantic world was inclined to seek profound significance in 
 mania, it was natural that an adroit producer should soon be 
 foimd to elevate the whimsy into a system, with characteristic 
 German wrongheadedness. AdoU Milliner, the lawyer of 
 Weissenfels, composed a drama. Die Schuld, and subsequently in 
 inniimerable critical writings developed the theory of the new 
 fate-tragedy. According to this theory, a higher world-order, 
 more mysterious even than the blind destiny of the ancients, 
 intervened in earthly life ; and by some fooUsh chance, by a 
 broken string, by some sinister place or day, overwhelmed unsus- 
 pecting mortals with destruction. In this way, everything which 
 the Protestant world had ever conceived regarding tragical 
 blame and responsibility was once more placed in question by 
 the unbridled love of innovation of the romanticist doctrine, and 
 it seemed as if our art of tragedy was to end in self-annihilation. 
 Milliner made himself at home in three hterary periodicals at once, 
 loudly trumpeted the long series of his own works, and alarmed 
 his opponents by Ms filthy coarseness. For some years the 
 fundamentally prosaic man continued to occupy the throne he 
 had usurped, and the repute of German poetry was now so 
 firmly established throughout the world that even foreign 
 periodicals spoke with credulity of the new dramatic revelation. 
 Then the fate-tragedy suffered the inevitable destiny of stilted 
 nonentity : the pubHc began to weary of it and turned to other 
 fashions. 
 
 The art of dramatic presentation also suffered from the 
 decline in dramatic poetry. How many talented monographs 
 upon the theatre as a means of national education had already 
 been pubhshed, and yet, among all German statesmen. Stein 
 alone had made this idea his own, and had drawn the conclusion 
 that it is the duty of the state to care for the stage. When, on his 
 retirement, he sketched the plans of Prussian governmental 
 reorganisation, he placed the theatre, as well as the academy of 
 arts, under the control of the department of pubHc instruction ; 
 yet, barely two years later, they were by Hardenberg brought 
 back into the domain of public amusement, and, with the 
 exception of the court theatre, were subjected to police supervision. 
 
 251 
 
History of Germany 
 
 In the royal capitals, the support of the court theatres was 
 generally held to he a personal duty of the sovereign, and it 
 soon became manifest that such theatres had more to expect from 
 the free-handedness of artistically disposed princes than from the 
 frugal petty-bourgeois sentiments of the new diets. Hardly had 
 the Stuttgart stage, in the year 1816, been elevated to the 
 position of a national theatre and had been nationally financed, 
 when the diet began to complain of extravagance, and cheerfully 
 acquiesced, three years later, when the king declared himself 
 prepared to strike the maintenance of the court theatre out of the 
 civil list. For the most part the monarchs cared with commend- 
 able zeal for the external equipment of their theatres, as well as 
 for the emplo3mient of notable individual talent ; the old social 
 prejudice against actors soon became mitigated when the stage 
 was seen to be in such close association with the court. 
 
 None the less, the histrionic art gained little through the court 
 theatres. After the death of Iffland, Frederick Wilhajn entrusted 
 Count Briihl with the management of the court theatre of Berlin. 
 Briihl was an amiable and highly-cultured man, but neither 
 dramatic poet nor actor, and he had merely assimilated, with the 
 zeal of a talented connoisseur, the strict classical principles of 
 the theatrical school of Weimar. The dangerous example was 
 quickly followed ; soon at all the courts the office of theatre- 
 intendant was reckoned among the high court dignities, the 
 control of the greatest German theatres was taken out of the 
 hands of skilled experts and placed in those of high-born dilettantes. 
 
 Yet the good traditions of earlier days still persisted for a 
 time. The lack of fine new pieces was not yet too plainly percep- 
 tible, for the dramas of the classical epoch could still count upon 
 general acceptance, and the works of Shakespeare now for the 
 first time became fully established upon the German stage. The 
 court theatres of Berlin, Munich, Carlsruhe, and Brunswick, 
 were distinguished by many excellent performances, and the 
 same was true of the long celebrated theatre of Hamburg and of 
 the new municipal theatre of Leipzig. In Berlin, the realist 
 tendency, which had here in former days gained dominion 
 through the work of Fleck, found a talented representative in 
 Ludwig Devrient. What sinister and diabolic energy was dis- 
 played in his Richard III, what an extravagance of exuberant 
 humour in his Falstaff ! Almost more astonishing was the 
 ability with which he played minor parts ; his Knecht Gotts- 
 chalk, in Kdihchen von Heilbronn, so admirably presented simple 
 
 252 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 loyalty and truthfulness that in the souls of the audience there 
 was awakened in a moment an understanding of the pristine 
 energy and greatness of old German Ufe, None the less, the firm 
 artistic discipline of the stage became gradually more and more 
 relaxed. The new romanticist ethics encouraged every man of 
 talent to press recklessly towards the front, and to emphasise 
 his own pecuharities ; while the distinguished intendants had 
 neither the technical knowledge which might have empowered 
 them by their own example to maintain in the company a unity 
 of style, nor yet had they sufi&cient prestige to enable them to 
 keep the individual members within bounds. The brilliant new 
 court theatres were no longer able to display such equably 
 cultured and harmonious performances as had formerly produced 
 deUght in Hamburg in the days of Ekhof , and in Berlin in the days 
 of Iffland. Moreover, dramatic criticism had for some time 
 estabUshed itself like a noxious fungus upon the healthy tree of 
 dramatic art. It had already become the rule that every aspiring 
 senior school-boy or university student should win his Uterary 
 spurs by dramatic criticism ; almost every man of culture occa- 
 sionally exercised his powers in the tragical handicraft of the 
 critical spoil-sport. By far the majority of these notices had the 
 sole aim of winning renown for the writer by arrogant distribu- 
 tion of blame ; or else of giving rise to party struggles in 
 theatrical spheres, struggles in which the populace in the small 
 towns took part with passionate zeal. The trouble became still 
 greater when the poUtical prosecutions began. Thenceforward 
 theatrical criticism remained the only domain in which the pens 
 of the newspaper writers could run freely, for Count Bem- 
 storff, the minister of state, said " the snappish dogs must be 
 left at least one bone to worry ! " 
 
 There were but two poets of this epoch who succeeded in 
 enriching the theatre with works at once suitable for the stage 
 and possessed of permanent artistic value. These were the firet 
 two Austrians since the Thirty Years' War to win for themselves 
 an honourable place in the history of German poesy. Just as, 
 long ago in the thirteenth century, the remote lands of the 
 Danube had fortunately preserved the ancient German national 
 epic, when the rest of Germany had long turned already to 
 knightly poetry, so now these same regions had remained almost 
 untouched by the wealth of thought, but untouched also by 
 the errors of the doctrinaire over-refinement of our Uterary 
 revolution. When now at length a few fine intelligences in 
 
 253 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Austria became aware of the world of new ideas which had been 
 opened up in Germany, they occupied a position of fortunate 
 freedom in relation to the catchwords of our Uterary parties. 
 From a distance, more unrestrainedly than the Germans in the 
 German realm, they could discover that which was genuine and 
 great in the powerful movement. Their pubUc was one which 
 loved spectacles and was gratefully receptive, a public whose 
 naive and vigorous sensuality had not yet been corrupted by 
 learned criticism. They had also before their eyes the fine 
 example of the great musicians of Austria, who all held in honour 
 the golden soil of handicraft, and who did not think themselves 
 too good to work straightforwardly for the stage. 
 
 It was just at this time that the Burgtheater, under the 
 skilful management of Schreyvogel, began to outsoar all the 
 theatres of Germany. Here the Viennese learned to know the 
 finest dramas of Germany, presented artistically and yet simply ; 
 the admirable dramaturge knew so well how to bring even foreign 
 works near to the German spirit by clever adaptation, that such 
 a play as Moreto's Donna Diana seemed almost as homelike to 
 the audience as a native comedy. Here there was no field for 
 subtle artificiality. The result was that even Franz Grillparzer 
 was infected, on one occasion only, by the theoretical priggishness 
 of German romanticism. His first work. Die Ahnfrau, was a 
 fate-tragedy ; the tragical issue arose, not out of the free activity 
 of the hero, but from " intimately concealed and obscure powers." 
 But the beauty of the language and the ardour of the passion, 
 the stormy progress of the action, and the remarkable and 
 precocious security of the technique, make us almost forget the 
 perversity of the fundamental idea. Soon, too, the sound sense 
 of the poet broke completely loose from the fetters of the artistic 
 theories of Milliner. In his tragedies Sappho and Das goldene Vliess 
 there were displayed purity of form, precision of character- 
 drawing, German seriousness, and the fine and truthful sensuality 
 of the old Austrians — a happy fusion of classic and of romantic 
 ideals. To him, henceforward, Goethe remained the master 
 beloved with childish veneration, and Weimar the consecrated 
 focus of German life. In the historical dramas of a later period 
 of his activity, Grillparzer created nothing greater than the 
 elemental character of Medea in Das goldene Vliess ; notwith- 
 standing his high artistic diligence he was denied continuous 
 development. Not his one of those mighty spirits which in 
 irresistible progress gradually come to illumine wider and ever 
 
 2S4 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 wider circles of the world with the Ught of their ideas ; but his 
 was an amiable and modest artist's nature, he was a true poet, 
 who, even in the days of the decadence, preserved with invaluable 
 loyalty the traditional ancient principles of dramatic ideaUsm, 
 and was the worthy herald of the new German poetry in Austria. 
 Soon afterwards another Austrian, Ferdinand Raimund, 
 conquered a new domain for German dramatic art. For years, 
 upon the bocurds of the Leopoldstadt theatre, he had delighted 
 the audience by his masterly acting as a comedian ; and when 
 now in all modesty he devoted himself to providing his little 
 stage with new matter elaborated by himself, he did not produce, 
 as have done the majority of actor-plajrwrights, pieces carefully 
 designed to draw a full house and possessing grateful roles, but 
 created works of national art. He was the originator of the new 
 fairy extravaganza, and since the days of Hans Sachs was the 
 first German poet who really understood how to enthral the 
 whole population with the stage, and who delighted the masses 
 by poetic works in which even cultured persons could take cordial 
 pleasure for a time. In this child of Vienna, the deUght in telUng 
 stories was inborn ; from the medley of folk-life he drew his 
 merry figmres, having an inexhaustible supply of those genial 
 jests and foolish conceits which the Austrians and the Upper 
 Saxons are accustomed to greet with the delighted exclamation, 
 " Look here, that is really too absurd ! " But behind the unre- 
 strained and sportive action, there was the h£df-hidden humour 
 of a profound disposition smiling through tears. How firmly, 
 too, was the ancient German moral idealism still established in 
 those blameless days of social peace ! Raimund continually 
 returned to the question of what is the true happiness of life, 
 which to the oppressed man of the common people remains the 
 highest of all moral problems ; and ever and again, whether he 
 was representing the spendthrift, the misanthrope, or the peasant 
 as milhonaire, he allowed the audience to perceive that happiness 
 is to be found only in peace of the soul. The mtisses beUeved 
 him ; the old German folk-songs extolling cheerful poverty had 
 not yet been forgotten. Among the numerous imitators of the 
 unpretentious folk-poet none came near to the master. The folk- 
 comedy rapidly became brutaUsed ; pithy bluntness degenerated 
 into slovenliness, kindly wit became tedious punning, ingenuous 
 simpHcity sank to dulness. It was not until a much later period, 
 during an epoch of embittered pohtical and social struggles, 
 that in North Germany a new form of farce came imto existence, 
 
 255 
 
History of Germany 
 
 which in wit and incisiveness excelled these innocent fairy-tales 
 just as much as it was inferior to them in humour and poetic 
 content. 
 
 As far as narrative poetry was concerned, the insatiable 
 passion for writing and reading characteristic of the epoch 
 became a source of severe temptation. Never before had so 
 vast a number of busy pens been simultaneously at work in 
 all branches of literature. The catalogue of the books which the 
 Leipzig booksellers had on sale at the fair, swelled to become a 
 volume of inconvenient size. In every town a lending library 
 provided for the needs of the reading public. The customs 
 characteristic of an old-established prosperity could not yet 
 become developed in this impoverished land ; the Germans found 
 no shame in the fact that they read more and bought fewer books 
 than any other people. Nevertheless certain works already 
 secured a sale which was unheard-of according to the ideas of 
 the old times : for instance, Rotteck's AUgemeine Weltgeschichte, 
 Zschokke's Stunden der Andachi, and the translations of Walter 
 Scott's novels. In the year 1817, Friedrich Konig, the inventor 
 of the cylinder-press, returned home, and at Oberzell near 
 Wurzburg founded his great printing establishment which ren- 
 dered it possible for the book-trade to work for the needs of 
 the masses. Since people gradually became accustomed to 
 accept greedily every novelty in the domain of science and art, 
 discontent was soon felt with the simple classical education upon 
 whose fruitful soil the new German civiUsation had flourished. 
 No longer did it suffice to give the mind a strictly formal culture, 
 rendering it possible, starting from a narrow circle of well-secured 
 knowledge, to develop gradually, but freely and continuously, 
 and to acquire new knowledge through independent work. 
 Under the high-sounding name of " realistic culture," there was 
 now demanded a variegated abundance of disconnected memo- 
 randa, which might enable everyone to converse about ever3rthing. 
 People were ashamed of the frank admission of ignorance ; no 
 one wished to remain in the background when conversation 
 flitted rapidly from the fate-tragedy to the Spanish constitution 
 or from phrenology to the new English steam-engine. 
 
 The alert F. A. Brockhaus, with the secure insight of the 
 experienced bookseller, noted this powerful impulse of the time, 
 and from the year 1818 onwards engaged in the elaboration of 
 an older and hitherto little noticed compilation, to constitute a 
 
 256 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 great encyclopaedia which, in a convenient alphabetic arrange- 
 ment, placed at the disposal of cultured Germans " all that it was 
 desirable to know." This was the beginning of that gigantic 
 pons asinorum Uteratmre which distinguished the nineteenth 
 century, by no means to its advantage. The undertaking, which 
 was as un-German as its name (Konversationslexikon) , none the 
 less foimd acceptance in wide circles, and there speedily followed 
 numerous imitations ; this generation, burdened with the heri- 
 tage of so many centuries, could no longer get along without 
 such crutches. Neibuhr watched with unconcealed disgust the 
 transformation which was gradually taking place in national 
 customs ; he foresaw how uneasy, empty-headed, and desultory, 
 how dependent in its modes of thought, the modem world must 
 become, if the empty arrogance of half knowledge and of poly- 
 mathy, if the desire for continually changing impressions, should 
 get the upper hand. In a world so fond of reading, a refined 
 sense of form speedily became blimted. What was desired above 
 all was material stimiilation, and since every epoch has the 
 authors which it demands and deserves, there was to be found 
 an army of ^busy romance writers satisfied to provide for the 
 needs of the moment, and to have their names current for a few 
 years in the critical periodicals. It remained henceforward a 
 distinctive characteristic of the new century that works of true 
 poetry lay, like isolated nuggets, dispersed throughout a colossal 
 rubbish-heap of worthless hght literature, and that they were 
 discovered only after a considerable time amid the masses of 
 inferior matter. In those unpretentious days, however, it was 
 not, as in our own time, the money-making impulse which led so 
 many interlopers to the German Parnassus ; it was as a rule 
 vanity and literary fashion. Just as in the drama, so also in 
 the field of romance and novel-writing, those of a truly poetic 
 nature seldom displayed a talent for composition, whilst the 
 virtuosi of absorbing and fascinating narrative just as rarely 
 exhibited the formative energy of the poet. 
 
 In consequence of the stem realism of the war, that lachry- 
 mose sentimentahty which had before been chiefly nourished by 
 the writings of Jean Paul, had for a brief period been forced into 
 the background. Now, however, it regained its sway ; in many 
 of the houses of North Germany there prevailed a tasteless, 
 sickly-sweet tone. Many vigorous men of tlae present generation 
 who grew up in this sentimental atmosphere were filled thereby 
 with such loathing that throughout life they earnestly avoided 
 
 257 s 
 
History of Germany 
 
 every expression of aroused sensibilities. The insipid scribbler 
 H. Clauren was the writer best suited to the taste of the great 
 reading pubhc. Fashionable ladies delighted in the heavenly 
 steel engravings and the moving novelettes of the pocket- 
 companions which were then in fashion : " Urania," " Aurora/' 
 " Alpine Roses," " Forget-me-Not," or " Evergreen," stood upon 
 the title-page of the elegant gilt-edged volumes. Upper Saxony, 
 which in former days had so often intervened decisively in the 
 mental development of the nation through the activities of 
 vigorous reforming spirits, was for some decades the principal 
 seat of this light hterature ; it was as if the " Gottshed-Weisse- 
 Gellert flood" once mocked at by the young Goethe, had 
 again broken over the beautiful country. In Dresden, Friedrich 
 Kind and Theodor Hell, with a few other equally meek and 
 gentle poets, met weekly at a " poets' tea," displaying for mutual 
 admiration and regarding with invincible mutual pohteness their 
 dull novels, which were worthy of the Chinese beverage — ^novels 
 that were then pubhshed in the widely-read Abendzeitung. Carl 
 Bottiger, most prohfic of critics, then hastened, as Goethe said, 
 " to hail as masterpieces the pap of these bunglers and scrawlers." 
 Ludwig Tieck, who had also removed to the charming town 
 on the Elbe, distinguished himself by holding aloof from this 
 void activity. It was plain to him that the mysterious " poesy 
 of poesy," upon which the romanticists prided themselves, 
 was essentially nothing more than ingenious connoisseurship. 
 Although his admirers ranked him immediately after Goethe, 
 he was numbered among those who are rather than do. Since in 
 these days he was but rarely seized with the overwhelming 
 creative impulse of the poet, he threw himself with a fine zeal, 
 and with his highly-praised " powers of rapid perception," into 
 the study of the Shakespearian drama. What he effected by 
 word of mouth, and by his pen, in the elucidation and imitation 
 of the great Englishman, was in reality more fruitful for German 
 Ufe than were the shapeless romances and the literary-satirical 
 dramatised tales of his youth, which failed to appear as the 
 ingenuous children of fancy, precisely because they themselves 
 declared with conscious intention that " they were completely 
 unreasonable." How many youthful poets and dramatists 
 gained their first inkling of the true nature of art in the old house 
 in the Altmarkt, when the poet, in his celebrated evening read- 
 ings, displayed to his hearers, with a truly S3mipathetic energy, 
 the whole world of Shakespeare's figures in all their abundant 
 
 258 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 vitality. Tieck early attained celebrity, and while still in his 
 prime was regarded as a patriarch of German poetry. The 
 paralytic man with the clear eyes of the poet received good- 
 naturedly and with S3mapathetic understanding the young men 
 who came to him on pilgrimage, and although his inspired words 
 now and again conveyed strange impressions, his gaze remained 
 ever directed towards the altitudes of humanity ; again and 
 again he referred his young admirers to the sacred four, the 
 masters of the new art — ^Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and 
 Goethe. It was not until after many years that he himself 
 resumed the writing of poetry. Even more than Tieck had the 
 brothers Schlegel become estranged from poetic creation. 
 Friedrich Schlegel was completely immersed in the intrigues of 
 ultramontane policy. August WUhehn Schlegel pursued his 
 historical and philological studies in Bonn, an ornament of the 
 new Rhenish university ; the small foppish old gentleman was 
 always venerated by the students as the representative of a 
 prolific epoch which had given birth to the new science. 
 
 It was only in the young poets who had formerly assembled 
 in Heidelberg that the poetic vein did not run dry. No one had 
 wandered farther into the labyrinths of the romantic dream-life 
 than had Clemens Brentano. Half rogue, half enthusiast, to-day 
 high-spirited to the verge of insanity, to-morrow crushed and 
 contrite, a riddle to himself and to the world, the restless man 
 now wandered from one town to another in the Catholic south, 
 and now tinned up in Berlin in order to read to the brothers 
 Gerlach and to the other Christo-Germanic members of the 
 Maikdfer-Gesellschaft his essay upon the phiUstines, the audacious 
 declaration of war of the romanticists against the world of 
 reality. He greeted the War of Liberation with loud rejoicing, 
 but just as little as Zacharias Werner could he accommodate 
 himself to the North German Protestant tone of the movement ; 
 how strangely forced and artificial seemed his war poems, mostly 
 written for the glorification of Austria : 
 
 Through God and thee, Francis, 'tis shown. 
 What Austria wills, she can do ! 
 
 Subsequently his mystical tendency led him into vulgar supersti- 
 tion ; he spent several years by the sick-bed of the stigmatised 
 mm of Dulmen, and recorded his observations upon the miraculous 
 woman in ecstatic writings. And yet the serene, heavenly Ught 
 
 259 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of poetry again and again made its way through the mists in 
 which his sick spirit was enveloped. Hardly had he finished 
 giving free rein to his distorted fancy in the wild fantasia of 
 Die Grundung Prags, an unhappy imitation of Kleist's Penthe- 
 silea, when he pulled himself together, and actually succeeded in 
 doing that which men of learning had hitherto vainly demanded 
 of romanticism— in producing popular matter in a popular form. 
 He created his masterpiece, Geschichte vom braven Kaspar und 
 dem schonen Annerl, the prototype of German village stories. 
 With perfect justice FreiUgrath subsequently praised him in the 
 following words : " Well did Brentano know the feelings of the 
 lowly. No other writer has described so frankly and faithfully 
 that which gives its simple greatness to the mental life of the 
 common people — the pent-up energy of untutored passion, vainly 
 struggling for expression and then suddenly breaking out into 
 consuming flame." No less unequal remained Brentano's activi- 
 ties in subsequent years. The romanticist epicures admired his 
 story of the barn-door fowls, Gockel, Hinkel, and Gackeleia ; 
 they could not prize enough the way in which here an artificial 
 conceit was hunted to death, the way in which the Ufe of fowls 
 and the life of human beings were confused one with another 
 in childish sportiveness. Meanwhile, in his better hours, he 
 wrote his Mdrchen, valuable stories of Father Rhine ; of the 
 nixies, and of the crystal castle down beneath the green waters, 
 pictures displapng roguish charm, as dreamily lovable as the 
 Rhenish summer night. 
 
 The far stronger and clearer spirit of his friend Achim von 
 Amim found no satisfaction in the world of fable. At an earlier 
 date, in Grdfin Dolores, Amim had manifested high realistic 
 talent ; now, in his romance Die Kronenwdchter, he ventured on 
 to the high seas of historic life, vigorously incorporating with Ms 
 energetic and invincible realism the figures of German antiquity, 
 displaying all the racy frankness, the rough sensuahty of old 
 Germany, the uncultivated rudeness of its camp morals, and the 
 disputatiously defiant spirit of the burghers of its imperial 
 towns, showing these to his readers sharply and clearly, hke the 
 figures of Diirer's wood-cuts. Yet even to this favoured 
 disciple of the romanticist school there was denied that orderly 
 artist-sense which controls the abundance of the matter. In his 
 romances, the simple and the rare pass immediately into one 
 another without transition, as in life ; the narrative is choked by 
 a thick brambly growth of episodes ; sometimes the writer loses 
 
 260 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 all interest, and sweeps the figures from the board like an 
 impatient chess-player. Despite all its greatness of thought 
 and all its depth of feeling, his work lacks the balance and the 
 unity of the highest art. 
 
 Far greater approval was secured among the mass of the 
 reading world by Amadeus Hoffmann, the only novel writer who 
 in fertiUty and resource could compete with the busy httle 
 writers of the pocket-companions. In his extraordinary double 
 life was incorporated the contradictory romanticist moraUty, 
 which wantonly broke down every bridge between the ideal and 
 the real, and disdained on principle the use of art to glorify life. 
 When he had spent the day in cross-examining the arrested 
 demagogues and in the conscientious and thorough study of the 
 criminal records of the Cotirt of Appeal, the time came with the 
 evening for the sun of his dream-world to rise. Not a word then 
 must any longer remind him of the phantasmagoria of Ufe, then 
 he passed his time carousing with merry intimates or extempo- 
 rising with musical friends. Thus inspired, he wrote fantasies after 
 the manner of Callot, such as Die Elixiere des Teufels, and 
 Die Nacktstiicke, weird stories of demons and spectres, of dreams 
 and wonders, of madness and crime — the most uncanny ever 
 produced by an over-wrought imagination. It was as if the 
 devU-faced gargoyles had descended from the gutters of our 
 ancient cathedrals. The hideous spectre came so threateningly 
 close, was so plainly perceptible to the senses, that the reader, 
 as if paralysed by a nightmare, was spellbound, accepting every- 
 thing presented by the bold humour and the diaboUcal charm 
 of the masterly story-teller. Yet ultimately of the crazy sport 
 nothing remained but the dull numbness of physical terror. 
 
 Whilst in the fields of drama and romance so much that was 
 impish was pursuing its restless activities, the lyrical poetry of 
 romanticism attained perfection in Ludwig Uhland. When his 
 poems were pubUshed in the year 1814, the matter-of-fact man 
 was ignored by the critics of this school. This worthy petty- 
 bourgeois seemed the very antithesis of the romanticist itch for 
 genius. In Paris he passed his days in diUgent study of the 
 manuscripts of old French poetry, spending his evenings silently 
 pacing the boulevards in the company of the no less silent 
 Immanuel Bekker, mouth open and eyes closed, quite unaffected 
 by the alluring brilliancy and the temptations by which he was 
 surrounded. Subsequently leading a simple and well ordered 
 
 261 
 
History of Germany 
 
 life in his native town on the Neckar, he did not think himself 
 too good to participate in word and action in the prosaic consti- 
 tutional struggles of Wiirtemberg. Yet it was precisely this 
 healthy naturalness and bourgeois efficiency which enabled the 
 Swabian poet to keep wisely within the limits of artistic form, 
 and to provide for romanticist ideals a lively configuration 
 which was in harmony with the consciousness of the age. A 
 thoughtful artist, he remdned completely indifferent to the 
 literary disputes and aesthetic doctrines of the schools, waiting 
 patiently for the coming of the time of poetic ecstasy which 
 brought to him the blessing of song. He then applied inexor- 
 ably to his own works the critical acumen which other poets 
 dissipated in the literary newspapers ; alone among German 
 writers he exhibited an inflexible artist's pride in retaining in 
 his desk all that was half finished or half successful. His poetic 
 energies were first awakened by the heroic figures of our ancient 
 poetry, by Walther von der Vogelweide, and by those in the 
 Nibelungenlied. In the poems of antiquity he deplored the 
 absence of the profound background which allures the fancy 
 into the distances, but an inborn and strictly schooled sense of 
 form preserved him from the obscure exuberance of mediaeval 
 poetry. This classicist of romanticism presents his figures to our 
 minds in firm and secure lineaments. 
 
 Whereas the earlier romanticists were for the most part 
 attracted to the German primaeval age by the fantastic stimulus 
 of the strange and of the antique, what Uhland sought in the 
 past was the purely human, that which was ever living, and 
 above all that which was homely — the simple energy and 
 cordiaUty of the uncultured Teutonic nature. To him the study 
 of the sagas and songs of old Germany seemed " a real migra- 
 tion into the profounder nature of German folk-life." He felt 
 that the poet, when dealing with matter belonging to a remote 
 period, must give expression to such sensations only as will find 
 an echo in the souls of his contemporaries, and he remained ever 
 clearly conscious of the wide separation between the ages. Never 
 did his delight in the multi-coloured beauties of the middle ages 
 estrange him from the Protestant and democratic ideas of the 
 new century. The same poet who sang so movingly of the 
 heroes of the crusades, sang also with enthusiasm of the Tree 
 of Wittenberg, which, with giant branches thrusting upward 
 towards the light, grew through the roof of the monk's cell ; he 
 gladly associated himself, too, with the martial singers of the 
 
 262 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 Wax of Liberation, and bowed himself humbly before the heroic 
 greatness of the new-risen fatherland : 
 
 " After such heroic sacrifices 
 What are these songs worth to thee ? " 
 
 With vigorous scorn he turned his back upon the pseudo- 
 muse of the sugary romanticist masters, of the tricksters with 
 assonance, and of the sonneteers, holding firmly to the saying 
 of the earUest writers, " Plain speaking and good feeling make 
 the true German song." Vivid popular expressions streamed 
 spontaneously forth from this master of vigorous language. So 
 easily did his unaffected verses seem to run, so freshly and 
 serenely did his figures move, that readers failed to notice how 
 much artist's diligence was concealed behind the purity of these 
 simple forms, how deeply the poet had had to explore the 
 wells of knowledge before Roland and Taillefer, Eberhard der 
 Rauschebart, and Schenk von Limburg could be presented in so 
 famihar and convincing a manner. He chose by preference for his 
 narratives the form of the dramatic ballad, so well suited to the 
 passionate Teuton temperament; on rare occasions, where the 
 nature of the matter demanded it, he employed the quietly-record- 
 ing minutely-descriptive southland romance form. It was not 
 detail which seemed to him important, but its reflection in the 
 aroused human heart. The most intimate recesses of the 
 German temperament lay open to him, and with extraordinary 
 success at times, in a few unpretentious words, he was able to 
 disclose some intimate secret of our people. More simply than 
 in the poem of Der gute Kamarad there has never been given 
 an account of the way in which the contentious Teutons have 
 always been ready for the fray, from the days of the Cimbri to 
 the days of the French wars — eager for battle and devotedly 
 pious, so kind hearted and so loyal. 
 
 Even in his narrative verses the power of sentiment was so 
 strongly displayed that many poems which he himself termed 
 ballads soon became popular as songs. It was on account of his 
 songs in especial that he was beloved of the people, who hailed 
 him io3rfully, at first in his Swabian home, and afterwards 
 throughout Germany, so that he ultimately became the most 
 popular of all our great poets. In the straightforward, pro- 
 foundly felt words describing the joys and the sorrows of love, 
 the happiness of the wanderer and the pain of parting, the 
 
 263 
 
History of Germany 
 
 pleasures of wine and of arms, everyone, whether gentle or simple, 
 rediscovered memories of his own life. The High Germans, 
 more particularly, were reminded of home when from between 
 the lines of the poems there always seemed to greet them the 
 Swabian land with its vine-clad hills and sunny rivers, with its 
 cheerful and song-loving inhabitants. The simple strains, 
 resembling those of folk-songs, involuntarily challenged the 
 reader to sing them ; before long, composers rivalled one another 
 in setting them to music. All the youth of the land followed 
 suit. Uhland's songs were heard wherever German soldiers were 
 marching, wherever students, singers, and gymnasts, assembled 
 in happy festival ; they became a power of blessing in the 
 freshly blossoming and vigorous f olk-Ufe of the new century. 
 The younger generation, steeled in war, pressed forth from 
 the imprisoned chamber air of the good old time, forth into 
 freedom ; the German wanderlust demanded its rights ; old 
 and half forgotten popular festivals were once again honoured. 
 The new folk-songs threw a bridge across the deep chasm which 
 separated the cultured from the uncxiltured, and led the masses, 
 who read nothing, for the first time to an appreciation of the 
 poetry of their own day. Even though that priceless unbroken 
 unity of national civiHsation which had once existed in the days 
 of the Hohenstaufen remained ever unattainable to the learned 
 culture of the modem world, there nevertheless ensued a 
 wholesome return to nature, so that by degrees a portion at least 
 of the finest German poems became dear to the whole nation 
 and comprehensible to all. How fast beat the heart of the Swabian 
 poet when he saw the joy of song newly awakening among his 
 people ; full of confidence he issued to his comrades the 
 spirited exhortation : 
 
 " Sing who can, your song forth-giving 
 In German poets' forest-ground ! 
 Rejoicing all and truly living, 
 When songs from every twig resound ! " 
 
 The homely man could never have too much of the noisy 
 thronging of popular festivals, and he secured at times the 
 highest reward of the poet when upon a journey in the Rhine- 
 land he came by chance in the forest upon young people singing 
 his own songs with their clear voices ; or when a senior 
 student of Tiibingen was taking ceremonial departure across 
 the Neckar bridge, and the parting song Es ziehet der Bursch in 
 
 264 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 die Weite reverberated as far as the vineyard of the poet's house 
 on the Oesterberg. 
 
 It is true that his poems embraced a comparatively narrow 
 circle of ideas ; he sang, as had formerly simg the knightly poet 
 with the golden harp, almost exclusively of "God's love, of the 
 hero's courage, of the gentleness of love, of the sweet may- 
 blossom." In his tragedies, too, he preferred to extol the 
 tenacious loyalty of ancient German friendship ; his plays lack 
 the compelling force of dramatic passion. His patriotic poems 
 do not attain to the vigorous pohtical emotion of his favourite 
 Walther von der Vogelweide ; the fine Promethean impulse to 
 fathom the highest problem of existence, the whence and whither 
 of mankind, rarely touched his peaceful imagination. For this 
 reason, Goethe would hear nothing of the roses and the wall- 
 flowers, the blond maidens and mournful knights, of the Swabian 
 singer ; he failed to recognise that in the writing of songs and 
 ballads no one rivalled him so nearly as did Uhland, and he 
 expressed the acrimonious view that in all this there was nothing 
 which went to the fashioning of human destiny. The Germans, 
 however, had long before tacitly conspired to follow the old 
 master's own precepts, saying to themselves, if I love you that 
 is my own affair. The faithful Swabian knew how impossible 
 it is to convince a master of his error. His own love was 
 unaffected by the old man's injustice. He was never weary of 
 sending Goethe his poet's greeting, and of telling the nation 
 how, long ago, in the golden springtime this king's son had 
 awakened the sleeping princess of German poesy, and how the 
 sculptured foliage of Strasburg cathedral once rustled when the 
 young poet mounted the winding stair of the tower — " the poet 
 who now for half a century has been singing the world of the 
 beautiful." 
 
 Although after the age of thirty the taciturn man pubHshed 
 few and isolated poems, and was content as a talented investi- 
 gator and collector to participate in the great work of the 
 rediscovery of our primaeval age, his reputation as a poet never- 
 theless continued to increase from year to year^ The songs of 
 his youth could never grow old. Highly cultured and yet 
 inconspicuous ; an enthusiast for the ancient glories of the 
 empire and of the Austrian imperial race, and yet a democrat, 
 to whom " the princes' counsellors and court chamberlains 
 decorated with dull stars upon their cold bosoms " always 
 remained objects of suspicion ; in the political struggle fearless 
 
 265 
 
History of Germany 
 
 and loyal, as the motto on the national coat-of-arms demands, 
 to the point of defiant obstinacy— he seemed to the Swabians 
 the typical representative of his country, the best of the tribal 
 fellowship. They revered him, declaring : " Every word which 
 Uhland has spoken has been justified by the event." 
 
 A crowd of young poets followed in the master's footsteps, 
 and soon came to speak of itself as the Swabian school of poets. 
 Here for the first time in the history of modem German poetry 
 was the attempt ventured at the foundation of a separate terri- 
 torial culture, taking, however, the form of a perfectly harmless 
 particularism. Nothing was further from the mind of these 
 poets than the intention to cut themselves adrift from the 
 common work of the nation ; they merely felt cordially happy 
 and proud because they belonged to this cheerful land of wine 
 and song, to this stock which had once borne the war-standard 
 of the Holy Empire, and which was more intimately associated 
 than any other with the great memories of our middle age. 
 Amiable serenity and natural freshness were characteristic of 
 the countless ballads and songs of these poets, they remained 
 German and chaste, and continued to preserve the pure forms 
 of lyrical poetry even at a later date when the new cosmopolitan 
 revolutionary spirit, disturbing nobility of artistic form and 
 innocence of mind, invaded German poetry. Yet the marvellous 
 poetical mood of the songs of Uhland was as inimitable as was 
 the roguish humour which enabled him to depict so happily the 
 vaUant spirit of the German heroic age. Many of the Swabian 
 ballad-singers gradually lapsed into the rhymed prose of the 
 meistersingers ; their dull amiability could offer no ideas to the 
 new century. I 
 
 By far the most distinguished spirit in this circle was 
 Justinus Kemer, a man of thoroughly poetic nature, full of droll 
 humour and profound sensibility. His hospitable home among 
 the vineyards close by the ancient castle of Weibertreu near 
 Weinsberg, celebrated in song and story, remained for years 
 the meeting place of all fine intelligences from the highlands, 
 Whoever had been cordially received there by the poet and his 
 wife " Rickele," whoever had heard him over his Neckar wines 
 telling extravagant anecdotes, or had listened to him reciting 
 his briUiant and intensely felt songs, was hardly smprised to 
 learn that even this thoroughly Protestant and modem man 
 did not remain untouched by the mystical tendency of romanti- 
 cism. Just as Brentano revered the wonder-worker Katherina 
 
 266 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 Emmerich, so Kemer honoured the prophetess of Prevorst, a sick 
 peasant woman of the neighbourhood, believing that through 
 her instrumentaUty he could overhear the harmonies of two 
 worlds. That which drove him into these obscure regions was 
 not the anxiety of conscience of an enchained and unstable soul, 
 but the poetical enthusiasm of a childlike temperament which 
 could find no peace in the dry rationiaUsm of the Enlightenment. 
 Meanwhile the nation first began fully to understand what 
 it possessed in its greatest poet. Ever more powerfully and 
 commandingly did the figure of Goethe rise before their eyes, as 
 the excitement of the war time passed away, and as the three 
 first parts of Dichtung und Wahrheit, which were pubUshed 
 during the years of 1811 to 1814, gradually made their way 
 through wider circles. Among the autobiographies of notable 
 men, this book occupies as isolated a position as does Faust in 
 the realm of poetry. Since St. Augustine's Confessions, no auto- 
 biographical work had described so profoundly, so truthfully, and 
 so powerfully the most beautiful secret of human Ufe, the growth 
 of genius. To the severe saint, the forms of the Ufe of this 
 world seemed to disappear completely in face of the crushing 
 thought of the sinfulness of aU creatures, and in face of the 
 yearning after the living God ; but through Dichtung und 
 Wahrheit there breathes the spirit of a poet who finds joy in this 
 world, who endeavours to contemplate eternal love in the 
 abundant hfe of creation, and who from the highest flights of 
 thought returns ever to the simple faith of the artist : " What 
 can be the use of all this array of suns and planets and moons, 
 of stars and milky ways, of comets and nebulae, of worlds that 
 have been and worlds that are yet to be, if in the end a happy 
 man is not instinctively to rejoice in its existence ? " As 
 honestly as had Rousseau, Goethe recognised the faults and 
 errors of his youth ; but his secure sense of style preserved him 
 from Rousseau's forced and artificial outspokenness which led 
 the Genevese author into shamelessness. Goethe did not, hke 
 Rousseau, lay bare even those half-unconscious and contradictory 
 surgings of sentiment which are endurable only because they 
 are fugitive, and which when subjected to detailed analysis 
 appear grotesque, but gave merely the important essentials of 
 his Ufe, relating how he had become a poet. 
 
 Whilst of Rousseau's Confessions there remains in the end 
 nothing more than the painful recognition of the sinfulness of 
 man, who osciUates unsupported between his archetype and his 
 
 267 
 
History of Germany 
 
 caricature, between God and beast, the readers of Dichtung und 
 Wahrheit attain to the happy feeling that the German writer 
 has in a twofold sense succeeded in doing what Milton once 
 demanded of the poet, namely, in transfiguring his own life to 
 make it a true work of art. Just as he had inherited talent from 
 his mother and character from his father, and now little by 
 little, but with unequalled steadfastness, diffused his energies 
 throughout the entire domain of human contemplation, 
 imagination, and cognition, so at each stage of his development, 
 did his spirit appear healthy, exemplary, accordant with 
 nature, and therewith extraordinarily simple in all its wonderful 
 transformations. The talented Fanny Mendelssohn expressed 
 the feeling of all readers when she prophesied : " God will not 
 summon this man home prematurely ; he must remain on earth 
 until he has attained an advanced age, and must show his people 
 what living means." Reverence for Goethe was a bond of unity 
 between the best men of this distracted nation ; the higher the 
 culture of any German, the more profoundly did he venerate the 
 poet. The tone of the book manifested the feeling which 
 Goethe had once expressed in youth : that he would not have 
 been astonished if people had placed a crown upon his head. 
 Yet he stood far too high to be tainted by those involuntary 
 tendencies to self-conceit which are found in almost all confessions. 
 The mighty self-consciousness which found expression in these 
 memoirs was the serene repose of a spirit perfectly at one with 
 itself, the happy frankness of a poet who all his life had been 
 engaged in writing nothing but confessions, and who had long 
 been accustomed to answer censorious and envious spirits by 
 saying : "I did not make myself." 
 
 Whenever he had intervened in German life he had 
 furnished the highest. Now, too, the figures which he conjured 
 out of memory were illuminated by a spiritual warmth which 
 can be paralleled only by that of the finest of his own free 
 imaginary figures. From the parsonage of Sesenheim there 
 shone a ray of love penetrating the youthful dreams of every 
 German heart, and whoever recalled the happy days of his own 
 childhood, instantly pictured the rambling|old house in the 
 Hirschgraben, the fountain in the courtyard, saw and looked 
 into the deep laughing eyes of Goethe's joyous mother. The 
 poet said in the words of his own old man : " We wander 
 among the shades in the form in which we have left earth." To 
 him another destiny was allotted, for so enthralling was the 
 
 268 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 charm of this book that even to-day when Goethe is named 
 ahnost everyone thinks first of the kingly youth ; his years of 
 manhood, which he did not himself describe for us, are in the 
 shade when contrasted with the sunshine of these early days of 
 his history. 
 
 Just as Rousseau intertwined contemporary history with the 
 narrative of his hfe, so Goethe, with incomparably greater 
 profundity and thoroughness, gave a comprehensive historical 
 picture of the spiritual life of the Frederician age. Flaming up 
 once more in youthful fire, the old man described the springtime 
 of German art, filled with joyful hopes, described how everything 
 was germinating and pressing upward, how the fresh aroma of 
 the soil filled the atmosphere as it arose from the freshly tilled 
 fields, how one tree stood bare beside another which had already 
 burst forth into leaf. How often had Niebuhr and other 
 contemporaries of Goethe refused to admit that the poet 
 possessed the historic sense, taking this view because he was 
 so fond of immersing himself in nature. Now, however, he 
 performed the two highest tasks of the historian, the artistic and 
 the scientific, showing by his work that the two are one. So 
 vividly did he recall the past for his readers that they all felt 
 as if they were themselves living among the events described, 
 and yet at the same time he enabled them to understand what 
 had happened, to recognise the necessary sequence of events. 
 The work was composed in the days of the Napoleonic world- 
 dominion, at a time when the writer seemed to despair of the 
 political re-estabUshment of the fatherland ; and yet from every 
 sentence there spoke the confident and hopeful mood of the 
 Frederician epoch. Not a word showed that after the recent 
 defeats the poet had abandoned faith in Germany's great future. 
 Even now, when all the world gave up the Prussian state for 
 lost, and when even the Teutonising enthusiasts turned away 
 with indifference from the image of Frederick, Goethe showed for 
 the first time in stirring words how intimately the new art was 
 associated with the heroic glories of Prussia : in Germany there 
 had never been a lack of talented men, hut a national strength, 
 a veritable content, was first given to our imaginative hfe by 
 the deeds of Frederick. Thus the poet had never inwardly 
 become unfaithful to his nation. He said once in those weary days 
 that there now remained only one sacred duty, to maintain 
 spiritual mastery, and amid the general ruin to preserve the 
 palladium of our Uterature ! 
 
 269 
 
History of Germany 
 
 It was a terrible misfortune that Goethe had absolutely no 
 confidence in the awakening pohtical life of the nation. Pain- 
 fully enough did he experience the truth of his own saying, that 
 the poet is by nature unpartisan, and therefore in times of 
 political passion can hardly escape a tragical fate. At times, 
 indeed, he had intimations of a happier future. When the 
 grande armee passed through on the way to Russia, and those who 
 were disheartened expressed the opinion that now the world- 
 empire had gained completion, he rejoined, " Wait a while, and 
 see how many of them will return ! " Yet when there did 
 indeed return no more than pitiable remnants of the innumerable 
 host, and when the Prussian nation arose Uke one man, the 
 poet shuddered at the rough enthusiasms of the " undis- 
 ciplined volunteers." He never forgot how little the Germans 
 had in former days imderstood the lofty patriotic sentiments of 
 Hermann und Dorothea, and he did not believe that his fellow- 
 countrymen possessed the enduring energy of political will. 
 From the first he had exchanged ideas with the ancient 
 civiUsation of the west, and now contemplated with sinister 
 forebodings the passage of the peoples of the east across the 
 peaceful land of Central Germany, the coming of the " Cossacks, 
 Croats, Cassubians, and Samlanders, brown and other hussars." 
 He strictly forbade his son to join the army of the allies, and 
 had then to suffer the experience of seeing the passionate youth, 
 ashamed and desperate, undergo a sudden change of sentiments 
 which led him to display in his father's house an idolatrous 
 veneration for Napoleon. 
 
 It was the news of peace which first delivered the poet from 
 his mood of dull depression. He breathed more freely, and 
 wrote for the peace festival Das Epimenides Erwachen, in order, 
 after his manner, to unburden himself by a poetical confession. 
 The masses, who on such an occasion had rightly expected a 
 popular and generally comprehensible work, did not know what 
 to make of this allegorical figure ; yet anyone who was capable 
 of unriddling the meaning of the fable was profoundly 
 moved to hear how the wise dreamer, " who had slept through 
 this night of horror," greeted the victorious fighters, and expressed 
 shame for his long slumber, " for by the sufferings you have 
 endured you have become greater than I." This was an 
 admission which put criticism to shame : but it was by no 
 means an abasement, for at the same time Epimenides thanked 
 the gods who during these stormy years had preserved for him 
 
 270 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 the purity of his feeUngs. Henceforward Goethe looked back 
 upon the War of Liberation with a freer and serener glance, and 
 for the statue which the estates of Mecklenburg erected to 
 Blucher in Rostock he wrote the verses : 
 
 " In tanying and in war, 
 In defeat and in victory. 
 Self-contained and great. 
 He delivered us 
 From our foes ! " 
 
 As soon as arms had been laid down he went " to the Rhine's 
 long lines of hUls and favoured plains." Two happy summers, 
 that of 1814 and that of 1815, were spent by him in the liberated 
 Rhineland whose sunny life made it seem more homelike to him 
 than any other region of Germany. His heart leapt when he saw 
 ever57where reawakening the old Rhenish cheerfulness of spirit, 
 and the old friendly intercourse between the two banks, and when 
 upon the Rochusberg at Bingen, where the French outposts had 
 so long kept watch, he saw the people assembling once more 
 in a cheerful church-festival. In the pages he penned in 
 commemoration of these happy days, the old man seemed to 
 regain the joie de vivre which had formerly characterised him as 
 a Strasburg student. Reminiscences of his Strasburg studies were 
 regained, too, in friendly intercoiuse with Bertram and the 
 brothers Boisseree. He deUghted in visiting the cathedral of 
 Cologne, went to see all the ancient buildings on the Main and 
 the Rhine, and spent a long time in Heidelberg. Here was 
 now to be seen the collection of ancient German paintings which 
 had been made by the brothers Boisseree, with the altar-piece of 
 St. Bartholomew and the great St. Christopher — ^this was a shrine 
 of pilgrimage for all youthful Teutons and the cradle of our new 
 artistic research. The figures drawn by Diirer, " their vigorous 
 Hfe and virility, their inner energy and steadfastness," had 
 powerfully attracted the poet in youth ; what pleasure it now 
 gave him to be able to admire in the works of the old Dutch 
 painters and of those of the school of Cologne, the industry, the 
 rich significance, and the simplicity of our German forefathers. 
 " How stupid we are," he exclaimed ; "we actually imagine 
 that our grandmothers were not beautiful like ourselves ! " He 
 made a point, too, of his admiration for the Nibelungenlied, in 
 opposition to Kotzebue and the other dullards who cracked 
 jokes about the heroic greatness of Teutonic antiquity. To his 
 
 271 
 
History of Germany 
 
 three friends in Cologne, Bertram and the two Boisserees, " who 
 turned back courageously to the past," he sent his portrait with 
 friendly verses. The Christo-Germanic enthusiasts exulted, for 
 now the mountain had come down into the valley, now the old 
 pagan king had paid homage to the cathedral of Cologne ; they 
 already regarded the poet as one of themselves, and hoped for 
 the speedy appearance of a Christian I-phigenia. 
 
 How little did they know the many-sided spirit of the man 
 who at this very moment was saying with quiet self-confidence : 
 
 " Who knows not how for years three thousand 
 To himself account to give. 
 May remain in darkness unenlightened. 
 May from day to day still live ! " 
 
 When Goethe frankly recognised the sound nucleus of German 
 romanticism, it was far from his intention in advanced age to 
 return to the circle of ideas of his Goetz von Berlichingen. He 
 remained the classicist, the man who had translated Benvenuto 
 Cellini, and who in his work on Winckelmann had announced the 
 evangel of the German renaissance. Diirer was so dear to him 
 precisely because this brilliant spirit resembled himself in the 
 combination of Teutonic wealth of ideas with southern beauty 
 of form. The experienced man, who had often humbly described 
 himself as " a man of narrow views," knew only too well how 
 readily the claims of life mislead into an involimtary one- 
 sidedness, and saw therefore with disapproval how the^conscious 
 and deliberate one-sidedness of the Teutonist movement 
 threatened to atrophy in the Germans their best good, their free 
 outlook on the world, their frank receptivity. When the 
 younger generation actually undertook to spoil his beloved language 
 by an arrogant process [of purification, to rob it of fertilising 
 intercourse with foreign civilisation, he broke forth into titanic 
 wrath. The " discontented, opinionated, and rough-shod " 
 methods of the new generation repelled him — ^these clumsy 
 unkempt characteristics, this strangely composed and shapeless 
 amalgam of natural Teutonic roughness and artificial Jacobin 
 insolence. It was especially in the young j painters who had 
 estabhshed their studio in the monastery on the Quirinal, that 
 Goethe speedily noted that inadequacy which is ever characteristic 
 of fanaticism. The fruitful early years of mediaeval enthusiasm 
 were over. Now the watchword was " piety and genius ! " 
 Dihgence was despised, and many of the works of the Nazarene 
 
 272 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 school seemed as bald and empty as were the monastery cells of 
 San Isidoro. This tendency was strongly opposed by the poet. 
 He did not even grant a word of acknowledgment for the 
 illustrations to Faust by Peter von Cornelius, for he felt that the 
 great painter had understood but one side of his poem, and had 
 hardly noticed the classic ideas which were subsequently to be 
 more fully developed in the second part of the work. 
 
 Above all, the free spirit of the old classicist was repelled by 
 what he termed " the baby's pap," by the artificial neo-Catholic 
 characteristics of romanticism in its decay. A momentous 
 influence upon the whole later course of German civiUsation down 
 to our own day was exercised by the fact that Goethe never came 
 into contact with a free and spiritual form of the positive Christian 
 faith. In his youth he had associated for a time with the fine 
 spirits of the pietist movement, but their narrow outlook was one 
 which could not enthral the man of genius. In old age 
 he never came into close association with the adherents of that 
 profound, broad-minded, and highly cultured Christianity which 
 had gradually ripened during the terrible years of suffering 
 and of battle. Had he done so, it would hardly have escaped 
 his keen insight that such men as Stein and Amdt derived 
 their imperturbable hopefulness, their moral superiority, when 
 compared with Hardenberg or Gentz, chiefly from the energy of 
 living faith. Thus it came to pass that the last and greatest 
 representative of our classic age noticed little of the reawakening 
 religious Ufe of the nation, and for several decades a contempt 
 for reUgion was in the circles of highest culture regarded as 
 an almost essential index of the liberal mind. The lath-Uke 
 figures of the painters of the Nazarene school, with their strained 
 simplicity, and the now sugary and now extravagant utterances 
 of the romanticist apostates, necessarily aroused Goethe's anger ; 
 and when he saw the elderly Frau von Kriidener playing the 
 part of the illuminate, of the God-inspired prophetess, his 
 Protestant blood boiled over. The falsification of science by 
 reUgious sentiments and mystical leanings always remained an 
 offence to him, and he hailed with dehght Gottfried Hermann's 
 " critical, hellenistic, and patriotic " campaigns against Creuzer's 
 symbolism. He felt strongly that all our German characteristics 
 would perish should we ever completely abandon our cosmo- 
 politan sense ; he was never weary of speaking of the necessity 
 for a world-Uterature, never weary of commending all that was 
 genuine and good in the works of the neighbour nations ; and 
 
 273 T 
 
History of Germany 
 
 he even found words of approval when Uvaroff, the talented 
 Russian, proposed that every science should be represented only 
 in a congenial tongue, and archaeology therefore in German alone. 
 
 The new constitutional doctrines met with Goethe's approval 
 just as Uttle as did exaggerated Teutonism. In the simple and 
 genial relationships of life he ever preserved a touching kindness 
 and consideration for the common man, and had a profound 
 veneration for the strong and secure instincts of popular senti- 
 ment. He often repeated that those whom we speak of as 
 the lower classes are unquestionably the highest classes to God. 
 While actually engaged in writing his Iphigenia, his kindly heart 
 was continually disturbed by the thought of the hungry hosiery 
 workers of Apolda. But in the state, in art, and in science, he 
 displayed the aristocratic disposition characteristic of every 
 notable intelligence, and vigorously defended the natural 
 privileges of culture. In the popular scenes of his Egmont he had 
 long before plainly expressed his views regarding the political 
 capacity of the masses. " It brings disorder if we listen to the 
 crowd," such was his answer when the spokesmen of liberalism 
 confidently declared that the infallible wisdom of the people 
 would know how to heal all the troubles of German political life. 
 The un-German characteristics of the liberal journalists, their 
 dependence on the doctrines of the French, seemed contemptible 
 to his German sentiments ; their rationalist lucidity reminded him 
 of Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, and at the same time filled him 
 with concern, for he hved in the belief that a culture based 
 upon pure reason must lead to anarchy, since reason possesses 
 no authority. Soon, too, he observed with disgust how the young 
 liberals became infected with the same intolerant spirit as had 
 formerly been exhibited by the heretic hunters of the Berlinese 
 Enlightenment, and how they despised all who held other opinions, 
 regarding them as serfs of princes or of priests. In opposition to 
 these slaves of faction, he maintained that there existed but one 
 true liberalism, that of the sentiments, of the Uving emotion. 
 
 The growth of journalism filled him with unconquerable 
 disgust. He saw how superficialising and stifling was the influence 
 exercised upon general culture by this itch for the news of the 
 day, this unwholesome mingling of idle gossip with political 
 information, how much effrontery and futility would flourish 
 luxuriantly beneath the irresponsible anonjonity of all those who 
 sat here in judgment over men and. things. "A profound scorn 
 for public opinion " seemed to him the only outcome of the 
 
 274 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 highly prized freedom of the press. Shrugging his shoulders he 
 turned his back upon the idols of the day : " Should one who 
 lives in world history concern himself about the passing 
 moment ? " How solitary, too, had the old man become. 
 Herder and Wieland had passed away, and an ignoble humiliation 
 had disturbed the fine relationship between him and his friend the 
 grand duke. The poet could not endure that a trained dog should 
 show off his tricks " where the crowned darling of the Muses had 
 poured forth the consecrated fire of the inner world." The 
 grand duke, however, held fast to his whim ; Goethe had to give 
 way before Aubry's dog, and withdrew from the direction of the 
 Weimar theatre. 
 
 Yet nothing disturbed the free serenity of his nature. With 
 youthful zeal, in his new periodical Kunsi und AUertum, he 
 defended the classical ideals as he had formerly defended them 
 in the Propylden. In this campaign against what he termed 
 " the new cant of non-art " (die neue frommelnde Unkunst) he 
 was supported by many of his artist friends at Weimar. It is 
 true that the poet stood on the dividing line between two epochs, 
 and the proud and confident tone of his polemic concealed at 
 times a sense of insecurity. Just as formerly Winckelmann 
 had simultaneously exhibited an enthusiasm for the classical 
 sculptures in the Villa Albani and for the frosty elegance of a 
 Raphael Mengs, so also Goethe did not break entirely with his 
 old comrade Tischbein, and adorned a stiff painting by his friend, 
 which displayed Uttle or no natural truth, with commendatory 
 verses of his own ! Yet he remained in touch with all the freely 
 aspiring talents of German art, eind greeted with warm praise the 
 first bold efforts of Christian Rauch. 
 
 More effective than this critical activity was the appearance 
 of Die Italienische Reise in 1817. For a long time these memorials 
 of his Italian journey had been circulated by the poet among his 
 friends ; now, collected and revised, they were published with 
 the deliberate intention of throwing light upon Rome, upon the 
 works of classical antiquity, and upon those of the Renaissance. 
 The Germans were to be brought to share the feeling, the uncon- 
 querable yearnings, which had once driven him to the Eternal 
 City, were to learn that he could not tarry even in Florence, how 
 in Assisi he had eyes only for the slender columns of the temple 
 of Minerva, and could not vouchsafe a glance at the " gloomy 
 dome " of St. Francis, the consecrated spot where Giotto's art 
 had once awakened, and how finally beneath the Porta del 
 
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History of Germany 
 
 Popolo he at length felt secure of Rome. Then readers had 
 to follow him through all those rich days, the most beautiful and 
 most fertile of his life : when in the morning the sun rose over 
 the JE^gged summits of the Sabine hills, and the poet walked 
 alone along the Tiber to the springs of the Campagna ; when 
 amid the vestiges of the Forum, as a partner in the councils 
 of destiny, he learned to know history from within outwards ; 
 when in cool and solitary halls he was inspired with the joys of 
 artistic creation, when his imagination was impressed with the 
 figures of Iphigenia, Egmont, Tasso, and Wilhelm Meister ; when 
 at length, beneath the orange trees on the sunny strand of 
 Taormina, he seemed to see vividly wandering before him the 
 figures of Nausicaa and the much enduring Odysseus. Again 
 and again recurs a humble admission from the man who had long 
 before written Goetz and Werther that here he was reborn, 
 that here for the first time he attained to the clarity of vision 
 and the repose of the artist, that here he first learned to 
 work on the grand scale. The ancient Teutonic yearning for the 
 south, the gratitude of the men of the north to the beautiful 
 homeland of all civilisation, had never found warmer expression. 
 The impression was deep and enduring. The poet had the joy of 
 knowing that several of the most talented among the younger artists 
 devoted themselves soon afterwards to the study of the antique. 
 It was not the Nazarenes alone, however, who resented the 
 pagan book; Niebuhr himself and many other men of a worldly 
 and liberal intelligence were estranged by it. This purely 
 assthetic view of the world-order, one which on principle turned 
 away from political life, expressed the sentiments of the 
 eighties. Notwithstanding the recent powerful revival of literary 
 tendencies, such an outlook could no longer suffice for the 
 generation which had fought at Leipzig and Belle Alliance. 
 
 It was only a few years before that Goethe had written 
 some of his most youthful convivial lays, such as the merry 
 student song Ergo bibamus. Gradually, however, as he approached 
 the seventies, there became active in him the sentiments of 
 age, mild contemplativeness, calm resignation, an inclination 
 to the didactic, the symbolic, and the mystical ; and according 
 to his custom he let nature have free play. It was in such a 
 mood that he read Hammer's translation of Hafiz. The impulse 
 towards the remote which the world-voyages of romanticism 
 had awakened among the Germans, seized him also ; he felt how 
 the quiet and serene wisdom of the east corresponded to his age, 
 
 276 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 and how the natural religion of Persia harmonised with his own 
 love of earth. Yet it was impossible for him to " adopt anything 
 immediate " into his works ; he would not and could not, Uke 
 Schiller, forcibly take possession of foreign matter in order to 
 refashion it. Easily and gradually he familiarised himself with 
 the forms and images of Persian poetry, until his own ideas came 
 involuntarily to assume something of the aroma of the land of 
 the morning. 
 
 It was at this juncture that a friendly destiny brought him 
 into contact with Marianne von Willemer, during his journey to 
 his Rhenish home. It seemed as if to him alone the sad words 
 were not to apply which he had written two years before. " For 
 a man must know, be he who he may, a final pleasure, and a last 
 day." His youth revived in those sunny autumn days when he 
 wandered with the beautiful young woman through the avenues 
 along the terraces of the castle of Heidelberg, and scratched the 
 Arabic signature of his Suleika on the basin of the fountain : 
 " Once again does Goethe feel the breath of springtime and the 
 simshine's warmth." What now filled him with happiness was 
 not such an overpowering passion as he had once felt for Frau 
 von Stein, but a warm and deep inclination of the heart for a 
 charming woman, who through the love of the poet became 
 herself an artist. Docilely she entered into the orientaUst 
 conceits of her friend ; in an interchange of songs with Hatem, 
 Suleika wrote those melodious poems full of sweet yearning and 
 3delding humility which for half a century were regarded as 
 Goethe's finest work. His answers were now full of the play of 
 intellect, now lighted up with passion. In glowing and mystical 
 verses he sang the most delightful of all God's thoughts, the power 
 of that love moving between two worlds, and bringing together 
 those who belong to one another : 
 
 " Allah need create no longer. 
 We ourselves create his world ! " 
 
 Thus there gradually came into existence the poet's last 
 great l5nical work, Westostliche Divan, a posy of love-songs 
 and drinking songs, of sayings and observations, of old and new 
 confessions, held together merely by the bond of their oriental 
 form. Contentious words are not lacking, for, as the master 
 himself declared : " I have been a man, and that means a 
 fighter." Unsparingly he described the power of the base among 
 men, and in sharp contrast with the unrestrained love of song of 
 
 277 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the Swabian poets he foresaw that the excessive yearning for 
 song would ultimately disillusionise German hfe : " Who drives 
 the art of poetry from the world ? The poets ! " The key-note 
 of the collection is, however, constituted by a quiet serenity, 
 freely contemplating earthly activity : " Enough remains, 
 remains still thought and love." The artistic prosody of the 
 Divan, in which freedoms hitherto unprecedented were allowed, 
 served as an example for the more thoughtful among the lyrical 
 writers of the succeeding generation. Here and there, it is true, 
 there was lacking that charm of direct inspiration which gave all 
 the youthful works of Goethe their compelling force ; certain 
 stiff and affected turns of phrase appeared elaborately thought 
 out rather than truthfully felt, and many artificial arabesques 
 seemed to be introduced merely to increase the exotic stimulus 
 of the general picture. Nevertheless in the Divan, in Commentar 
 iiher die Orphischen Urworten, and in the countless sapngs of his 
 last years, Goethe unlocked a treasure-house of wisdom which 
 yielded the apt word for almost every vital problem of the 
 emotional life and of culture, a treasure-house which only the 
 present generation has learned to appreciate. Many of the 
 poems of his old age recalled the cryptic runes of Teutonic 
 antiquity over which the heroes might reflect and dream 
 throughout life. At times he ventured into the ultimate 
 mysterious profound of existence, up to the very hmits of the 
 expressible, where the articulate word becomes dumb and music 
 takes its place — as for instance in that marvellous song which 
 ever resounds softly through the soul when a ray of heavenly 
 happiness falls into our poor life : 
 
 " Until thou too canst pass this test, 
 ' Dying, live again : ' 
 Art thou but a gloomy guest 
 On this earth of pain." 
 
 Thus he lived on in solitary greatness, unceasingly contem- 
 plating, collecting, investigating, writing, advancing through the 
 finite in all directions in order to plumb the infinite, rejoicing in 
 every bright day of the springtime and in every gift of the fruitful 
 autumn, and rejoicing no less in every fresh work of art and in 
 every new discovery in the wide domain of human knowledge. 
 Schiller's more delicate frame had been prematurely worn out 
 in the hard service of the Kantian conception of duty ; to the 
 fortunate and thoroughly healthy nature of Goethe, his titanic 
 
 278 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 and many-sided activities seemed merely the natural and easy 
 unfolding of inborn energies. Those who were not in contact 
 with him, hardly suspected how earnestly he had taken to heart 
 his own severe words : " He only can work who always 
 works ; soon comes the night wherein no one can work ! " Still 
 less did they imagine what a firm faith in God sustained the 
 notorious pagan throughout his old age, how carefully he 
 guarded himself against forestalling Providence, and how in 
 every chance occurrence of the day he recognised the immediate 
 intervention of God — for thus only to the artist was the divine 
 governance of the world conceivable. And since he himself 
 continued to grow day by day, as if this Ufe were never to come 
 to an end, youth always remained especially dear to him. Even 
 though the arrogant roughness of the younger generation was at 
 times an offence to him, in the end he could not be angry when 
 he looked into the ardent eyes of the inspired hotheads ; and 
 he expressed the kindly sentiment that it would be fooHsh to 
 demand of them, " Come, be an old man with me." To young 
 poets he knew how to hand on the coimsel which he had himself 
 received from nature ; they should strive in the first place to 
 become men rich alike in heart and in head, and should keep their 
 minds open to every breath of the times. " The content of 
 poetry is the content of one's own hfe ; we must advance 
 continually with advancing years, and must examine ourselves from 
 time to time to make sure that we are reaUy alive ! " 
 
 Certain zealous renegades, such as Friedrich Schlegel, ven- 
 tured to speak of the overthrown old god, but men of nobler 
 natiure knew that to attack this man was to abuse the nation 
 itself. When Baron von Stein complained of Goethe's holding 
 back in the Napoleonic days, he added modestly, " But after all 
 the man is too great to find fault with." Nowhere had the poet 
 warmer admirers than among inteUigent circles in Berlin. Here 
 the veneration of Goethe became a cult ; the ever-enthusiastic 
 high-priestess Rahel Vamhagen continually announced in oracular 
 speeches the fame of the divine poet. The old man regarded 
 from a distance, and with equanimity, the clouds of incense which 
 arose before his altar on the Spree, and from time to time, in his 
 formal, privy councillor's style vouchsafed a civU answer. But 
 he would not permit these worshippers to draw nearer to his 
 person ; he felt that they were making a pretentious doctrine of 
 that which nature had granted to him in the cradle. In the bosom 
 of the elvish httle Rahel there beat a grateful, pious, and kindly 
 
 279 
 
History of Germany 
 
 heart ; amid the artificial ecstasy of this dilettantist adept and 
 demi-artist there was still preserved a woman's secure sense of 
 what is great and strong ; at one time, and for many years, 
 Fichte had been her idol as well as Goethe. But side by side 
 with such amiable characteristics she exhibited a half 
 unconscious and for that very reason immeasurable vanity, so 
 that her admiration for the greatest of German poets was in 
 effect no more than a source of egoistic personal gratification; 
 she consoled herself for her secret sense of barrenness with 
 the sublime thought that the great spirit of Goethe, reaching out 
 towards the infinite, had scorned to confine its energies within the 
 domain of philology ! " Why should I not be natural," she asked 
 naively, " I could gain nothing better or more manifold by 
 affectation ? " Yet how httle real content was there in all the 
 cultured conversation of this aesthetic tea-drinking circle. Much 
 which was there spoken of as talent depended in essentials upon 
 nothing more than the misuse of the German speech, upon the 
 preposterous apposition of unsuitable words. When Rahel spoke 
 of a nobly conceived and ardently executed piece of music as 
 " ein gebildeter Sturmwind," the circle of priests of the higher 
 culture shouted with deUght, and her husband inscribed the 
 foolish phrase in his diary in his most beautiful script. But the old 
 hero in Weimar knew the great gulf that is fixed between 
 knowing and doing. Where among his admirers he encountered 
 creative faculty, he was not slow to thaw. How fatherly was 
 his attitude towards the wonder-child Felix Mendelssohn- 
 Bartholdy ; he rejoiced with the happy parents over the 
 magnificent combination of refined culture and gen\iine talent. 
 
 Whilst poetry had entered the season of autumn, for the fine 
 arts there now came the time of blossoming. As long as the 
 enthusiasm of the years of war lasted, Gothic art was generally 
 esteemed the only veritable German art. Our youth seemed to 
 have turned away for ever from classical ideals, and Schenkendorf 
 exclaimed commandingly : "No more on any German wall 
 must pagan images be seen ! " Many of the volunteers from the 
 east first learned upon the march to the Rhine to know the wealth 
 of form characteristic of our earlier history. It seemed to them 
 that these ancient cathedrals were the only vahd examples for the 
 art of the fatherland, and they hardly noticed that in the 
 churches of detested France they ever3rwhere encountered the 
 same " Old German " style. When they gazed up at the old crane 
 
 280 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 upon the unfinished spire of the cathedral of Cologne, they 
 thought with the knightly singer, " that the conclusion of the 
 work had been postponed until the coming of the right masters ! " 
 The crown prince was utterly overcome at the sight of the majestic 
 pile that was faUing into decay ; at his instigation Schinkel was 
 sent to Cologne, and declared that to preserve such a building 
 meant to complete it. 
 
 King Frederick William was also touched by this mood of the 
 time when, after the first peace of Paris, he determined to com- 
 memorate the German victories by the construction of a 
 magnificent Old German cathedral in BerHn. Soon afterwards, 
 in Old Prussia, the demand was heard on all sides that the 
 beautiful grand master's castle of Marienburg which had been so 
 shamefully mutilated by the rough hands of the Poles and by the 
 prosaic coldness of the Frederician officials, should be restored 
 in its antique glories as a monument of victory for the ancient 
 Ordensland which prided itself on having aroused the other 
 Germans to the holy war. Schon, the zealous representative of 
 Old Prussian local pride, was the leader in this undertaking ; it 
 was his hope that this finest of the secular buildings of our 
 middle ages could be made a Prussian Westminster, and that 
 every member of the nation should take his share in the work. 
 The king accepted the idea of restoration ; the thin partition 
 walls which a Phihstine generation had erected across the 
 gigantic halls were removed ; above the slender pillars of the 
 refectory there could be once more seen rising hghtly and freely 
 the palm-like tracery of the ancient Gothic arches. The 
 decoration of the castle was left to the nation. No money was 
 accepted ; whoever wished to help must himself co-operate in the 
 artistic treatment of a portion of the building. The nobihty, 
 the towns, and the corporations of the impoverished province, 
 rivalled one another in gifts, and patriots from all the territories 
 of the state participated. Soon the stained glass windows 
 displayed pictures from Prussia's older and more recent history, 
 for during these years was revived the art of glass-staining which, 
 with so many other acquirements of civiUsation, had perished 
 amid the storms of the Thirty Years' War. There, beneath the 
 black and white banner, were figured the knight of the Teutonic 
 order and the soldier of the War of Liberation ; the schools of 
 the frontier-land presented a window showing David's sword and 
 harp and bearing the inscription, " He who is no warrior can be 
 no shepherd." All the most intimate secrets of the romantic 
 
 281 
 
History of Germany 
 
 generation came to light in these activities ; how happy did the 
 Germans feel that they were once more entitled to look the 
 heroes of their great past in the face. It was amid universal 
 rejoicing that the young crown prince held high festival in the 
 great halls of the old fortress, and, after his enthusiastic manner, 
 proposed the toast : " May all that is great and worthy rise up 
 like this building ! " 
 
 Nevertheless the Gothic tendency in art was just as little 
 able to gain the upper hand as were the Swabian poets in the field 
 of poetry. The ideas of Winckelmann and Goethe still held sway, 
 and nowhere more than in Berlin. Here the best works of the 
 German late renaissance, the palace, the arsenal, and the 
 Elector's monument by Schliiter, the memorials of a classically 
 cultured and yet national art, were more comprehensible to 
 modern sentiment than were the buildings of the middle ages. At 
 this central point ' of a great but recent history, the return to 
 the architectural forms of the fourteenth century necessarily 
 appeared arbitrary and artificial. Now, too, for the first time did 
 people begin to become famihar with the genuine works of the 
 Hellenes. Winckelmann had formerly learned to know almost 
 exclusively the Roman imitations of Greek art, and had failed 
 to observe what a wide course had been run in antiquity from 
 the Dorian age and the golden days of Pericles down to the 
 second blossoming of the epoch of Hadrian. Since the opening 
 of the new century, the treasures of ancient Greece had been 
 unearthed ; the Elgin marbles found their way to London in 1816, 
 and in the same year the iEginetan sculptures were transferred 
 to Munich. Admiration grew concurrently with the understanding 
 for the antique. At this time too was working in Rome that 
 late-born Hellene who lived as did no other modem in the world 
 of classical forms, and who seemed to have been transferred into 
 this new century by the enigmatical sport of destiny. Yet 
 through Thorwaldsen's mighty spirit ran a strong Teutonic vein. 
 To the hearts of the Germans his art made a direct appeal; 
 they counted the Icelander as half their own ; he had been 
 greatly influenced by the German, Asmus Carstens, the bold 
 rebel against academic art, and from him had learned what was 
 truly living and of permanent value in the works of classical 
 antiquity. 
 
 While the Old German and the classical tendencies were 
 thus still engaged in an undecided struggle, a change weighty 
 with consequence occurred in Berlin. During the difficult 
 
 282 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 years in which the Prussian state was on the verge of bank- 
 ruptcy, the construction of monumental works of art was 
 obviously impossible. There was only one artistic plan which 
 the king could not reUnquish. He desired to erect a worthy 
 monument to his wife, and his sound natural feeUng led him 
 here also in the right path, although he was modestly accus- 
 tomed to speak of himself as no more than a layman in 
 matters of art. He longed for an appropriate memorial of his 
 beloved ; and since he felt obscurely that Gothic, which in 
 any case to his sober sense seemed unduly fantastical, did not 
 do full justice to the majesty of the human form, he would 
 not hear of an Old German mortuary chapel. Schinkel, who 
 during the years of war was still completely absorbed by 
 Teutonising views, vainly assured him that the architecture of 
 paganism was cold, and that the hard religion of destiny of 
 the ancients could not possibly represent the idea of death 
 with the loving and consoUng serenity of Christianity. Frederick 
 WiUiam had a small Doric temple built amid the sombre pines 
 of the Charlottenburg park, to constitute a simple and serious 
 setting for the queen's tomb. Christian Ranch was entrusted 
 with the execution of the actual monument. Ranch who had 
 once been in the queen's service, had been introduced by her 
 to art, and who undertook the work with the enthusiasm of 
 artistic inspiration and of personal regard. Thousands assembled 
 when this mausoleum was opened in the spring of 1815, most 
 of them at first coming only to gaze once more upon the 
 countenance of the beloved princess. But when they saw the 
 recumbent figure, the charming form in its peaceful grandeur, 
 so life-Mke that it almost seemed to breathe, beautiful as a woman 
 of ancient Greece, but pious and peaceful as a Christian, every 
 vein in the hands and every fold of the white marble vesture 
 treated with the highest technical certainty and accuracy, even 
 these northerners, to whom of all the arts sculpture seems most 
 remote, were inspired by a breath from the spirit of the antique. 
 Year by year pilgrims continued to flock to this shrine. 
 Everyone felt that German art had taken one of its great steps 
 forward. The classically trained and strictly formal reaUsm of 
 Rauch gained a decisive success. The enthusiasm for Gothic 
 disappeared from Berhn society; even the romanticist crown 
 prince gradually turned towards classical ideals. 
 
 Meanwhile the statesmen had returned from Paris, 
 Hardenberg greatly influenced by the powerful impressions 
 
 283 
 
History of Germany 
 
 received at the Louvre, while Altenstein and Eichhorn had on 
 the return journey visited the Boisserees' collection at Heidel- 
 berg. All frankly expressed their feeUng that the artistic hfe 
 of Berlin seemed extremely poor when compared with the wealth 
 of the west, and were at one with the king in the determination 
 that the state must never relapse into the banality of the past 
 century. When Altenstein soon afterwards became chief of the 
 educational system he proposed to continue the work which had 
 been begun by Wilhelm Humboldt with the foundation of the 
 Berlin University, and to make the Prussian capital a centre 
 of German art. Frederick I, inspired with the spirit of a 
 Maecenas, had always thought first of the glory of the court ; 
 now, when the Prussian crown devoted itself zealously for the 
 second time to the advance of the fine arts, it had at length 
 become conscious of the great civilising duties of the state. It 
 was now recognised that the cultivation of art was a necessary 
 part of national education ; a lofty idea was held regarding the 
 artist's freedom, and it was considered enough to provide worthy 
 tasks for men of creative intelligence without endeavouring to 
 control them in the exercise of their pecuhar gifts. But the 
 king's admirable sentiments in this respect by no means 
 corresponded with the resources of the exhausted exchequer. 
 Once again, as so often before, Prussia was forced to attempt 
 great things with insufficient means, and at the right moment 
 the right man was forthcoming. 
 
 A universal genius such as German art had not known since 
 
 the days of Durer, at once architect, sculptor, painter, musician, 
 
 and when he took up the pen always sure to use the noblest 
 
 and most efficient words, Carl Friedrich Schinkel kept his gaze 
 
 steadfastly directed towards the loftiest aims : to him a work of 
 
 art was " an image of the moral ideals of the time." Continually 
 
 enga.ged in active creation, despising sloth, he spoke of indolence 
 
 as sinful in times of culture, and bestial in times of barbarism. 
 
 He was whole-heartedly devoted to his Brandenburg home. When 
 
 he saw this state resplendent in the pride of victorious arms, and 
 
 when there came a glorious end to the struggle of hght against 
 
 darkness which had so often occupied his own artist's dreams, it 
 
 seemed to him that the time had arrived for the introduction 
 
 mto Prussian hfe of the charm and fulness of a ripe civihsation, 
 
 and for the transformation of Beriin into a splendid seat of the 
 
 muses. It was his idea that as Palladio had once stamped his 
 
 gemus upon Vicenza, so might he stamp his own upon the 
 
 284 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 Prussian capital. In the centre of the town should be the palace 
 the university, the theatre, and the museums ; round about these' 
 instead of the monotonous lines of lowly houses, there should be 
 grouped stately mansions and charming villas, interspersed with 
 fountains and amid abundant foliage ; magnificent gates in the 
 town wall, and in front of the Leipziger Platz a great Gothic 
 cathedral, a monument of victory of the War of Liberation. 
 But whereas the fortunate Palladio was furnished with inex- 
 haustible means by a race of wealthy seigneurs, and while his 
 native city was placed in his hands hke a lump of potter's clay 
 to be moulded according to his will, the Prussian artist had 
 aU through life to contend with the enforced economy of the 
 monarch and his officials. " We must put a bridle on him ! " 
 said the king with a smile whenever the indefatigable man came 
 forward with fresh proposals. Hardly the twentieth part of his 
 bold designs were carried into effect. What a struggle he had 
 merely to save the dilapidated statues on the roof of the palace 
 which the officials wished to clear away. Instead of the noble 
 freestone which had delighted him in Italy, he was forced for 
 the most part to content himself with glazed brick, and in place 
 of bronze he had to use zinc castings. None the less this poor 
 fraction of his scheme, together with the works of the epoch of 
 Schliiter, served to imprint permanent characteristics upon the 
 architecture of Berlin. 
 
 Schinkel soon freed his mind from the Teutonist intoxication 
 of the years of war. He recognised that the multiform culture 
 of our day cannot be restricted to a single style of architecture, 
 and was willing to employ the artistic forms of the middle 
 ages when their use seemed demanded by the position and 
 significance of the edifice. But for his own intimate ideals he 
 found true expression in a new form of renaissance, which adhered 
 more closely to the works of classical antiquity and above all 
 to those of Greece than had done the art of the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries, and yet always understood how to do 
 justice to the sense and purpose of modem buildings. In his 
 first great work, the new main guardhouse, the warhke function 
 of the building was so vigorously and defiantly expressed by the 
 severe, compact, Doric forms, that the beholder almost forgot the 
 extremely modest proportions, and was involuntarily reminded of 
 Sanmicheli's majestic fortifications. When, soon afterwards, in 
 the year 1817, the theatre was burned, and the frugal officials 
 insisted that the old walls of the building should be utiUsed in 
 
 285 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the reconstruction, he knew once more how to make a virtue 
 of necessity, and soon there arose between the two charming 
 cupolas of the Gendarmenkirche, above a tall perron, a calm 
 and formal Ionic temple, the stonework adorned with rich 
 carving (for Schinkel's designs involved the co-operation of all 
 the arts) — the entire structure a faithful image of this epoch, so 
 rich in intellect, but so poor in financial resources, inspired with 
 brilliant designs, but perforce in many cases narrow and inade- 
 quate in execution. 
 
 Henceforward Schinkel was firmly established in the king's 
 favour, and he assumed the leadership of artistic activity in 
 Prussia, although the wings of his genius were continually clipped 
 by lack of means. Throughout North Germany and as far as 
 Scandinavia his classical tendency prevailed. The designs for 
 the Berlin cathedral had to be abandoned, since funds were 
 lacking. His fine monument of victory was however erected on 
 the Kreuzberg. This was conceived by Schinkel in those Gothic 
 forms which were still regarded as characteristically national ; 
 it was only in the sculptures with which Ranch and Tieck adorned 
 the columns that the new classic style was given free play. 
 But on all the battle-fields where the Prussian army had fought, 
 upon the windmill hUl at Grossbeeren as upon the high tumulus 
 at Planchenoit in the plain of Brabant, everjnvhere the impover- 
 ished state erected the same miserable Gothic columns with the 
 inscription : " The fallen heroes are held in grateful memory by 
 king and fatherland. They rest in peace." Schinkel knew that 
 monumental art leads a hothouse existence as long as the daily 
 life of the people remains unadorned and ugly. He contemplated 
 with pain the bald, barrack style of the dwelling-houses, the 
 wretched furnishing of the narrow rooms. In what a deplorable 
 condition was the craftsmanship of German art, which had once 
 gloriously rivalled that of the Italians ; for every great artistic 
 undertaking it was necessary to summon workmen from abroad, 
 stonemasons from Carrara, engravers on copper from Milan, 
 bronze-founders from France. But he was proud to be the 
 apostle of beauty among the northern nations, and therefore, 
 when in the year 1821 the industrial institute of Berlin had been 
 founded, he issued, in conjunction with the talented technician 
 Beuth, Vorbilder fur Fabrikanten und Handwerker, a collection of 
 standard types for domestic furnishing, which, in numberless 
 imitations, gradually found its way into every workshop and 
 served to reawaken the sense of form in German handicraft, 
 
 286 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 even though some of the designs may to the modern artistic 
 sense appear undiily poor and simple. 
 
 Meanwhile Ranch had estabUshed his studio in the 
 Lagerhaus, the old margravial castle, and there, a strict teacher, 
 trained a succession of devoted pupils and skilled handicraftsmen, 
 so that German art gradually learned how to dispense with 
 foreign aid. Just as he himself, without preliminary scientific 
 training, had first become f amihar with the world of ideas through 
 the work of artistic creation, so in the case of his pupils he 
 looked only to their capabilities ; efiicient tinsmitlK, stone- 
 masons, woodworkers, steady of eye and adroit of hand, 
 were more welcome to him than young men of learning. 
 Thus sculpture was preserved from that overculture which not 
 infrequently led our poets into aberrant paths. 
 
 Ranch advanced with a firm and steady pace in the course 
 he had begun ; Teutonist dreams never led him astray. He 
 felt at one with the Prussian state and its ruhng house, and it 
 was his rare good fortune to be able to incorporate in his 
 poUtical ideals everything that was dear to him in his works of 
 art. How splendid that the whole nation could once again 
 unite in rejoicing over a great achievement. Whereas in former 
 days it was the rulers only who had from time to time erected 
 a memorial, there now awakened among the people the desire to 
 honour the heroes of the nation. First of all, the Mecklenburgers 
 combined, and made Gottfried Schadow execute a statue of their 
 countryman Blucher, the first great work of the revived Ger- 
 man art of bronze-founding. Subsequently money was raised in 
 Silesia, and Ranch was commissioned to design a monument to 
 the commander of the SUesian army, to be erected close by 
 the Ring of Breslau where the volimteers had once assembled. 
 Then the king also demanded monuments for his generals, first 
 of all for Schamhorst and Biilow, dead before their time. A 
 wide field of great and fruitful tasks opened to the artist, who 
 had simultaneously to contribute to the ornamentation of 
 Schinkel's architectural works, and to produce statues in bronze 
 and in marble, materials he knew so well how to use to the 
 best advantage. His statues of the heroes were serious, virile, 
 and noble, at once true to nature and conceived in the 
 grand style ; even that slight tendency to stiffness characteristic 
 of Rauch is not open to serious criticism, for it corresponded 
 to the character of the Prussian army. In his most] power- 
 ful works, the reliefs for the monuments of Schamhorst and 
 
 287 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Bulow, Rauch attained to a heroic height which our sculp- 
 ture has never since excelled, displaying with the simplest 
 means and in a few majestic lineaments the whole course of the 
 struggle from the days when the youths of Prussia cut their 
 lances from the stems of pine trees, down to the proud and 
 victorious flight of their eagle over -the fortresses of the Nether- 
 lands and France. Rauch became the historian of the German 
 War of Liberation, just as in former days Rembrandt and Bol, 
 Van der Heist and FUnck, had handed down to posterity the 
 spirit and meaning of the eighty years' war of the Netherlanders. 
 
 Now also the first steps were taken to realise the design of 
 founding a great museum in the capital. The idea had been 
 conceived in the first years of the reign of Frederick William, 
 and had subsequently been considered more seriously when W. 
 Humboldt was minister of education. The king, in order to 
 spare the state treasury, bought from his private purse Giusti- 
 niani's and Solly's great collections of paintings, and presented 
 them to the state. He instructed the officials to conduct the 
 negotiations for the purchase in strict secrecy, for the designs of 
 his government to encourage the arts at first secured approval 
 only from a small circle of connoisseurs, and it was feared that 
 in the depressed mood of the pubHc, which was inchned to take 
 a pessimistic pleasure in depicting the condition of the state in 
 the gloomiest colours, the monarch would be blamed for extrava- 
 gance instead of being thanked for generosity. It had also been 
 proposed to purchase the Boisser^es' collection, but this could 
 not now be effected, for the rebuilding of the theatre after its 
 destruction by fire monopolised all available means. But the 
 best pieces of the collection were reproduced by the new art 
 of lithography, recently discovered by Senefelder, and were 
 widely diffused ; they constituted the first artistic adornments 
 of the impoverished German households. 
 
 In Rome, meanwhile, the German painters had found an 
 enterprising patron in Bartholdy, a relative of the gifted house 
 of Mendelssohn. He placed at their disposal the walls of his 
 palace in the Via Sistina, for experiments in the art of fresco, 
 which had completely passed into disuse since the time of 
 Raphael Mengs. ComeUus, Overbeck, Veit, and Wilhelra 
 Schadow, encouraged by Niebuhr's approbation, now rivalled one 
 another in the production of finely conceived pictures from the 
 story of Joseph. CorneUus joyfully hailed fresco-painting as 
 " a beacon upon the mountains announcing a new and noble 
 
 288 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 awakening of art," because it once more offered painters a field 
 for monumental works, and because its harsh strength was 
 absolutely incompatible with poverty of spirit or bungling 
 execution. "Art," he exclaimed in the terrorist tone charac- 
 teristic of the young Teutonisers, " art must at length cease 
 to be a lazy handmaiden of luxurious grandees, must cease 
 to be a trader and base feishion-monger." Like Schinkel he 
 foresaw the day when art, adorning the walls of our towns 
 and decorating our houses within and without, would transform 
 and consecrate the whole hfe of the nation. With the assured 
 pride of a reformer of national civilisation, he took his way 
 homeward over the Alps when summoned to Munich by the 
 young crown prince, Louis of Bavaria. 
 
 The heir of the wealthy Wittelsbachs, a race ever fond of 
 architectural exploits, beheved himself foreordained to establish 
 a brilUant court of the muses in Bavaria, which had so recently 
 re-entered the intellectual life of the nation. A pure enthusiasm 
 for art and for the glory of his idoUsed German fatherland 
 inspired the talented but visionary prince. The diplomatic 
 world related with much headshaking how in Rome he had 
 visited the museums and the churches arm in arm with the 
 dangerous demagogue, the poet Friedrich Riickert ; how he had 
 famiharly hailed the German painters in his own uncouth verses, 
 and how at their artists' festivals he had noisily joined in 
 acclaiming the annihilation of philistinism and the unity of 
 Germany. In all his artistic plans there co-operated an unstable 
 d5mastic ambition : he hoped to outbid the Prussian starvelings 
 and parvenus whom he so heartily despised, and by a grandly 
 conceived system of artistic patronage to secure for the Bavarian 
 house the leading position in Germany. What a contrast to 
 the artistic activity in Berlin ! There, what was done was no 
 more than the inevitable outcome of the history and the vital 
 needs of a powerful state richly endowed with spiritual forces ; 
 the works created by great artists in undisturbed freedom all 
 displayed the characteristic of inevitabihty. In Munich, they 
 buUt simply fear the sake of building, upon a soil that offered 
 little in the way of great memories ; the artists summoned from 
 abroad enjoyed the fruits of a royal freehandedness which 
 contrasted briUiantly with Prussian thrift, but they felt them- 
 selves to be in a foreign land and had long to endure the 
 mistrust of the native population ; they were controlled by the 
 capricious and incalculable will of a single mdividual, who leapt 
 
 289 U 
 
History of Germany 
 
 impatiently from scheme to scheme, and who naively regarded 
 what he had bought and paid for as his own work. The 
 peaceful rivalry of the two towns favoured the many-sided 
 development of German art. It ultimately led to the natural 
 result that the chiefly monumental arts of architecture and 
 sculpture attained their greatest successes upon the historic soil 
 of Berlin; whilst painting, freer and less dependent upon the 
 favour of the environment, found its home in Munich. 
 
 The crown prince had for years been undertaking excava- 
 tions in Greece, and in Italy he had purchased everything that 
 could be bought of the best works of antique sculpture. Now, 
 for his collection, which was the finest on this side of the Alps, 
 he had a worthy temple built by Klenze just outside the gates 
 of Old Munich, the Glyptotek, constructed entirely of marble, 
 and exhibiting the massive beauty of southern architecture. The 
 building as a whole cannot rival the brilliant individuality of 
 Schinkel's work, but on the walls and ceihngs of the magnifi- 
 cent halls, Cornelius for the first time displayed the whole 
 wealth of his talent. Here, writing an epic in colour, he pro- 
 duced the first of those great picture-cycles in which the wealth 
 of his restlessly probing spirit could alone find adequate scope — 
 grandly conceived images from the world of Hellenic saga. The 
 mass of the Munichers mocked at the crazy building of the 
 crown prince ; they did not know what to make of the pro- 
 foundly conceived symbolism of this artistry of ideas, which for 
 the most part completed its work in cartoon, and almost com- 
 pletely renounced the stimulus of colour. Men of more serious 
 mind admired the way in which the bold idealist had so faith- 
 fully reproduced the chaste loftiness of the antique, and who yet 
 conveyed in his pictures a power of passion inconceivable to the 
 ancients ; for never had an artist of antiquity created any form 
 so utterly transfigured with misery as was that of the mourning 
 Hecuba. The Christo-Germanic hotspurs of the circle of artists 
 at Rome observed with disgust that their leading representative 
 was approximating in his work to the detested pagans Winckel- 
 mann and Goethe, and that the neo-classicist tendency which had 
 originated in BerUn was everjTwhere gaining the victory. The 
 school of San Isidoro, once so fruitful, gradually broke up ; its 
 members returned home, most to devote themselves to a purely 
 ecclesiastical art which lived - only in anachronisms. Of the 
 notable men among them, Overbeck alone remained on the 
 Tiber, continuing faithfully to observe the old Nazarene principles. 
 
 290 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 So well, however, was he able to illuminate by the depth and 
 the warmth of his faith the narrow world of Christian figures 
 which to him was the only world of real existence, that even 
 the ItaUans ultimately came to honour him as a new Fra 
 AngeUco, and it was a dehght to the pious convert to adorn 
 with his grave pictures the oratory of St. Francis in the 
 Portiuncula at Assisi. Munich, Hke Berhn, must have its great 
 gallery of paintings. The Boisserees' collection, which was too 
 costly for the Prussians, was at length acquired for Bavaria. 
 Its principal works, tc^ether with those of the Diisseldorf gallery, 
 which during the revolutionary years had been illegally removed 
 to Mvmich, constituted the groundwork of the collection of the 
 Mixnich Prnakothek. 
 
 Thus within a few years a multiform new hfe awakened in 
 the domain of the fine arts, and almost all the German courts 
 gradually began to cherish these youthful energies ; it was felt 
 to be a duty to compensate the nation in any way that wels 
 possible for the painful faUure of its poUtical hopes. Even the 
 venerable remnants of ancient German art, which had suffered 
 so terribly during the Enhghtenment mania of the previous 
 century, now found faithful guardians on all hands, and when in 
 the year 1820 the town of Goslar had its cathedral, the richest 
 in memories of all the Saxon land, pulled down, this was every- 
 where considered a piece of almost incredible vandalism. 
 
 During the period of German romanticism no other art bore 
 such ripe and thoroughly sound fruits as music, which had ever 
 been the most closely akin to the German genius. In music 
 the sense of form of the Teutons always displayed its activity 
 with a frank primitiveness, altogether undisturbed by the hostile 
 criticism which in other departments so often interfered with the 
 freedom of creation. Music remained faithful to the Germans 
 even at a time when our intellectual life seemed almost defunct ; 
 even the arid century which preceded the peace of Westphalia 
 enheartened itself by the thrilHng strains of Luther's hynmal. 
 At a later date, when the new national culture had as yet 
 hardly begun, Handel and Bach composed their classic works ; 
 until at length during the blossoming time of our poetry, through 
 the labours of Gluck, Haydn, and Mozart, music was in Germany 
 raised to a height which that of no other nation has ever 
 attained. The most many-sided of all composers came to stand 
 by the side of the most many-sided of the poets. Both owed 
 
 291 
 
History of Germany 
 
 to the mysterious energy of immediate enviromnent a wonderful 
 ease of creation ; but how far simpler and more natural was the 
 lot of Mozart. He produced for an audience which followed 
 him with grateful receptivity, and lived in confidential inter- 
 course with the singers and other musicians whose parts he 
 wrote expressly for them. In this way every one of his works 
 became a well-rounded whole ; he was spared all the fragmen- 
 tary attempts and false starts which Goethe in his loneliness was 
 unable to avoid. Music united even more than Uterature all of 
 German blood in a common joy ; the majority of the great 
 composers belonged by birth or by long residence to those 
 Austrian lands which had so little share in the work of our poesy, 
 and found there, above all, the most happy understanding. 
 
 Even during Mozart's lifetime there became manifest that 
 opposition between the naive and the sentimental which, based 
 upon the very nature of all the arts, must inevitably manifest 
 itself in their periods of richest development. Like, Michel- 
 angelo beside Raphael, Uke Schiller beside Goethe, Beethoven 
 appeared beside Mozart, an emotional genius who with elemental 
 energy pressed forward towards the infinite almost beyond the 
 limits of his art, a singer of freedom, of virile pride, filled with 
 ideas of the rights of man. His Eroica had been dedicated to 
 Bonaparte, the heir of the Revolution, but he tore up this 
 dedication and trampled it under foot when he heard of the 
 arbitrary acts of the despot. Never did he compose more 
 greatly than when he was describing the anciently cherished idea 
 of the free Teutons, the victory of the serene spirit over the 
 obscurity of destiny, as in the Symphony in C minor. The 
 composer himself, the deaf master of sound, was a Uving witness 
 to the miraculous energy of the god-inspired will. He was able 
 to move even the bleisi society of the Vienna congress by his 
 lofty song of faithfulness, Fidelio ; but the ability to follow in 
 its entirety the bold flight of his Symphonies was reserved for 
 a later generation. 
 
 From the very first, the development of our music exhibited 
 a purely national character, and it was therefore impossible that 
 it could remain untouched by the romantic moods and great 
 events of the age. Immediately after the war, Carl Maria von 
 Weber composed music for the Sword Song, Liitzows wilder Jagd, 
 and other poems of Komer whose musical setting first assured 
 their imperishabihty, and kept alive in thousands of youthful 
 hearts the enthusiasm of the War of Liberation. A deliberate 
 
 292 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 advocate of patriotic sentiment and culture, he then undertook 
 the leadership of the newly estabUshed German Operatic Society 
 in Dresden, and succeeded in throwing altogether into the shade 
 Italian opera, which the court, after the custom of the previous 
 century, still favoured as the more genteel ; he even summoned 
 the press to his aid in order to initiate his countrjonen into the 
 the understanding of German art. Bom in Holstein but by 
 blood and temperament a genuine Austrian, he became during 
 his extensive wanderings intimately acquainted with the land 
 and the people of almost every comer of German soil ; it was 
 from the very heart of the nation that he created the first 
 German romantic opera, Der Freischiitz, a work of youthful 
 freshness, describing so ingenuously and faithfully all the atmos- 
 phere and all the haunting charm of the German forest, that 
 we of a later generation find it difficult to realise that a time ever 
 existed when the German woodman did not sing to the strains of the 
 French horn, " What is there on earth like the hvmter's delight ? " 
 At the same time German song attained its highest development 
 through the work of a pious and modest Viennese composer, 
 Franz Schubert ; the entire gamut of the most secret moods of 
 the soul was at his command, and above all he was attracted 
 by the gentle beauty of Goethe's verse. Soon afterwards, 
 Uhland's songs found a congenial composer in the Swabian 
 Conradin Kreutzer. 
 
 Romanticist music remained completely free from the 
 catholicising tendency by which so many of the poets of the 
 romantic school were affected, and this despite the fact that 
 most of our notable composers were members of the Catholic 
 church. It expressed plainly and] straightforwardly that which 
 was common to all ; it realised the ideal of popular art so 
 often praised by the romanticist poets, but truly attained 
 among them by Uhland alone ; and since in no art has dilet- 
 tantism so good a right as in music it soon drew the people 
 also into free co-operation. Already in the seventeen-nineties, 
 lovers of music had assembled in the singing academy of Berlin 
 to act as choir in the performance of Handel's splendid 
 oratorios and similar works. Zelter, Goethe's unpolished and 
 warm-hearted friend, founded in Berlin in the year 1808 the first 
 German choral society, a small circle of poets, singers, and 
 composers, to cultivate the art of song. Several other North 
 German states followed this example. In the Prussian national 
 army there was no end to cheerful singing during the war ; 
 
 293 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Liitzow's volunteers had a trained choir, and their example 
 was, after the peace, imitated by many of the Prussian 
 regiments. 
 
 Then, at the right moment (1817), Nageli, the Swiss 
 musician, published his Gesangbilderngslekre fiir Mannerchor ; he 
 spoke of choral singing as " the one kind of national life of 
 common interest to all that is possible in the realm of the 
 higher art," and summoned the whole nation to participate in 
 it. Seven years later originated the Stuttgart choral society, 
 the prototype of the numerous choral societies of South and 
 Central Germany. In accordance with the free democratic 
 methods of the highlands, they counted from the first upon a 
 greater membership than did the comparatively domestic choral 
 societies of the north, and did not hesitate to give public per- 
 formances and to appear in choral festivals. Music became the 
 social art of the new century, became what oratory had been in 
 the days of the Cinquecento, an indispensable ornament of every 
 German festival, a genuine pride of the nation. The love of 
 song awakened in every district to a degree which had never 
 been known since the days of the meistersingers. There was a 
 vivid sense that with this new and nobler form of sociability a 
 breath of freer air entered the national life, and the boast was 
 gladly made that " before the power of song the ridiculous 
 limitations of class fall to the ground." It was through song 
 alone that countless members of the common people received 
 an intimation of a pure and sublime world, uplifted above the 
 dust and sweat of daily Ufe ; and when this valuable gift is 
 taken into consideration it seems of comparatively little account 
 that the vague enthusiasm which characterless music awakens, 
 confirmed many a German dreamer in the disordered enthusiasm 
 of his sentimental political ideas. 
 
 Yet it was not in vain that the new generation had steeled 
 its energies in a national war, nor was it in vain that subse- 
 quently, at every stage in the development of the new poesy, 
 the return to nature was preached, the return to the simply 
 human. On all sides, the national customs became more manly, 
 more vigorous, and more natural, and everywhere, too, they 
 became unconsciousty more democratic ; the epoch of excessive 
 domesticity, of carefully closed clubs and private circles, was 
 drawing to an end. Since the peace, it had become possible 
 to resume the long interrupted practice of travelling. Whilst 
 rich foreigners undertook the grand tour through Europe, whose 
 
 294 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 principal romantic attractions had been indicated by Lord Bj^on 
 in Childe Harold, the easily contented Germans preferred to visit 
 the modest charms of their native central momitains. The 
 crags of the Meissener highlands, which pastor Gotzinger had 
 recently made accessible, became esteemed under the name of 
 the Saxon Switzerland. Gottschalck's guidebook to the Hartz 
 mountains was the first to give advice to mountaineers, and 
 after Reichard had pubUshed his Passagier, the number of 
 guide-books for travellers continued gradually to increase. The 
 travellers of the two preceding centuries had sought out the 
 works of man, everything that was rare and remarkable ; the 
 new age preferred the romantic charms of picturesque landscape 
 and regions memorable in the history of the fatherland. 
 Travelling on horseback, which had formerly been so greatly 
 preferred, became rare, owing to the general impoverishment. 
 When Amdt in youth wandered through Germany on foot he 
 found for the most part only joume5niien as companions on the 
 road ; now the poesy of foot-travel had become a delight to 
 cultured youth as well, and the true gymnast must be a 
 hardy pedestrian. A new world of blameless joys was 
 opened to the young men of Germany when throughout 
 Thuringia and Franconia, and on the Rhine, happy troops of 
 students or artists went singing on their way through the 
 summer time. Every ruined fortress and every mountain top 
 commanding a fine view was visited ; at night the jolly comrades 
 settled down cheerfully in the straw in peasants' iims, or they 
 quartered themselves on a hospitable pastor. Guitar slung over 
 his shoulder, August von Binzer, the pride of the Jena Burschen- 
 sehaft, wandered happily aU over Germany, and the young 
 people flocked together in all the villages in order to Usten to 
 the pla5dng and singing of the new troubadour. 
 
 Tlie political sentiments of the rising generation were 
 gradually transformed by this joyous life of wandering. The 
 young men became famiUar with the thought of national unity, 
 feeling at home ever5rwhere upon German soil, they learned 
 that the kernel of our nationality is the same throughout 
 Germany, notwithstanding the multiplicity of the forms of life ; 
 and they looked with increasing hostility upon the artificial 
 barriers which political forms had established amid this single 
 people. Unfortunately the recognition was made almost exclu- 
 sively by the North Germans. Since North Germany had little 
 to offer in the way of the romantic glories, which to this generation 
 
 295 
 
History of Germany 
 
 seemed alone worthy of regard, the South Germans seldom 
 left their beautiful native mountains. Whereas in the north it 
 was soon hardly possible to find a man of culture who had seen 
 nothing of the land and people of the south, in the highlands 
 particularist self-satisfaction, the child of ignorance, continued to 
 flourish. For a long time to come South Germany remained 
 the Acropolis of hateful tribal prejudices. In the north there were 
 now to be found, outside Berlin, no more than a few isolated fools 
 who denied understanding and culture to the South Germans. 
 Far more often in the south was to be heard the accusation 
 that the North Germans were lacking in kindliness ; many an 
 excellent highlander believed that the lands northward of the 
 Main were an interminable dreary plain, and was of opinion 
 that under this wintry sky the only things that could continue 
 to thrive were sand and aesthetic tea, criticism and junkerdom. 
 
 § 3. SCIENCE. 
 
 Thejmighty revolution of the general world-outlook which 
 had begun within German science since its entry into historic 
 life, the whole contrast between the old century and the new, 
 found memorable expression in a learned dispute whose profound 
 significance was not understood at all abroad, and even in 
 Germany was understood by very few. The greatly desired 
 re-establishment of the Germanic Empire had been prevented by 
 the rapid course of the war. All the more passionately did the 
 disappointed patriots cling to those hopes whose fulfilment still 
 appeared possible under the Germanic Federation ; and of these 
 ther» was none which seemed so reasonable and so modest as 
 the demand for unification of the national law. Rulers and 
 ruled were at this moment agreed as to the necessity for abolish- 
 ing the enforced code Napoleon. Was the old common law to be 
 reintroduced in place of the French law books, that law of the 
 Roman jurists which the Teutonising zealots regarded as the 
 deadly enemy of general Teutonic freedom ? Was there also to 
 be re-introduced that tangle of local laws whose variegated com- 
 plexity was uncongenial at once to patriots and to philosophers? 
 The hour seemed to have arrived for the simultaneous overthrow 
 of the foreign system and of particularism by the introduction 
 of a national code. The great basic ideas of natural law had 
 long ago been established by the philosophical jurists of the 
 
 296 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 previous century ; if only a wise and vigorous legislator could 
 be found, it ought not to be difficult to apply these ideas to 
 Germany. It was by such views that public opinion was domi- 
 nated when Thibaut, the celebrated teacher of the Pandects at 
 Heidelberg, in a Uttle work full of patriotic fire, expounded the 
 deplorable consequences of the existing dismemberment of the 
 country and " the necessity for a general civil law for Germany " ; 
 he proposed that the future German legal code should be placed, 
 like a state treaty, imder the general guarantee of the allied 
 powers. Almost the entire patriotic press expressed its agree- 
 ment with this view. 
 
 Then, in the autumn of 1814, appeared the opposing work 
 of Carl Friedrich von Savigny, Vom Beruf unserer Zeit fur 
 Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft, the scientific programme of 
 the Idstorical school of law. Its influence was all the more 
 powerful because even those of contrary view could not but feel 
 that this work did not convey the opinion of a single man. but 
 expounded the well-established data of that profounder and freer 
 conception of national life which had first been elucidated in 
 the talented foreshadowings of Herder aud of Moser, and in the 
 anti-revolutionary earUer writings of Gentz and of Wilhelm 
 Humboldt, which had subsequently undergone scientific elabora- 
 tion at the hands of Niebuhr and Eichhom, and had then 
 found practical application in the laws of Stein and Schamhorst. 
 Among the professors of civil law, Gustav Hugo of Gottingen 
 was the first to take up a decisive attitude in opposition to 
 the doctrines of the eighteenth century. His keen understand- 
 ing made it impossible for him to rest in the insoluble duaUsm 
 of the doctrine of natural rights ; it seemed to him unthinkable 
 that a fixed and unchangeable natural law could be opposed 
 to the plastic positive law. Consequently he abruptly expelled 
 from the domain of speculation, law and the state as 
 phenomena of the historic world, and put before jurisprudence 
 the task of pursuing positive law backwards through its transfor- 
 mations up to its ultimate roots, and thus learning to understand 
 it historically. Supported by a thorough study of original 
 sources, such as had long been unknown to arrested German 
 jurisprudence, he began to expound the development of Roman 
 legal history, and showed that the much lamented adoption of 
 Roman law in Germany was to be regarded, not as the outcome 
 of chance or confusion, but as a natural act of the German 
 spirit, as a natural outcome of the civihsation of the German 
 
 297 
 
History of Germany 
 
 renaissance. Hugo the Kantian did not propound the deeper 
 problem, why the configuration of positive law is at once so 
 manifold and so mobile. 
 
 It was here that Savigny set to work, Savigny who was 
 master of the wider outlook of the romanticist philosophy of 
 history. With that convincing calm which made the obscurest 
 matters seem lucid, he showed that the development of law was 
 not determined by subjective ideas, but by the spirit of the 
 nations as manifested in universal history. Law does not exist 
 once for all, but comes into existence and continues to grow, 
 like language, with the nations, with their beUefs, their customs, 
 their whole mental furniture. Consequently the body of the 
 laws comes into existence, not, as had been believed during the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, solely or preponderantly 
 through legislation, but through the continuous co-operation of 
 the people themselves, who actively participate in the establish- 
 ment of customary laws, and, as their culture becomes maturer, 
 in the deliberate work of jurisprudence. It is precisely in the 
 youngest nations that the law-fashioning energy is the most 
 powerful, that the restricted but vigorous individuahty of the 
 law has not yet been atrophied by the indefinite generality 
 which seems characteristic of the law of aging nations. Savigny 
 then shows, referring to analogies in the history of art, that not 
 every time is called to every work, and proceeds to demonstrate the 
 utterly unripe condition of German jurisprudence. How far 
 had German legal science, alike in its richness of ideas and in 
 the development of its terminology, lagged behind the advance 
 of general Uterature, and how clumsy would be a legal code 
 established with the aid of such defective powers ! What we 
 need, said the writer in conclusion, is an organically progressive 
 system of jurisprudence common to the entire nation, based 
 upon a study of existing law traced back to its earliest sources, 
 in order to discriminate between what is still Uving and what 
 belongs to an outworn past ; herein we shall find the temporarily 
 attainable unity of German law. If this unity undergoes such a 
 degree of independent development as to exercise an intellectual 
 control over existing law, the demand for codification (which 
 among the Romans first became manifest in the days of deca- 
 dence) will spontaneously disappear. 
 
 It was owing to this work that the science of positive law 
 became enabled to assume once more an equal standing with the 
 other mental and moral sciences. In the previous century it was 
 
 298 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 only the ideas of the philosophers regarding law which were 
 received with respect ; the study of actual law had been 
 contemptuously left to the formal acuteness of juristic handi- 
 craftsmen. Now the science of positive jurisprudence came to 
 recognise that upon it also was imposed a philosophic task, that 
 it had to teach how the rationale of history is manifested and 
 unfolded in the evolution of legislation, and that it had thus to 
 participate in the best intellectual work of the epoch, whose 
 glory it was to endeavour to awaken humanity to a consciousness 
 of its historic growth and thus to an understanding of its own 
 natmre. In the remoter distance, there at length became appa- 
 rent a still higher task, which Savigny merely indicated, leaving 
 coming generations to deal with it. If it should become 
 possible to demonstrate in every individual case the internal 
 necessity of the configuration of law, to demonstrate its causal 
 interconnection with the national economy and the general 
 civiUsation of the various peoples, then, last of all, the laws of 
 legislation itself must be discovered. The httle book threw a 
 striking light upon many of the most difficult problems of 
 historical science, which to the philosophical century had still 
 seemed incomprehensible. No one had hitherto shown so vividly 
 how the past continues to exercise an influence over the present 
 even without the knowledge and in opposition to the desire of 
 the Hving, how the energy and the will of the individual are sub- 
 ordinated to the mass-acquirements of his epoch, how every 
 growth of civilisation necessarily brings with it a certain loss, 
 and how consequently the proud doctrine which was so easily 
 accepted by the age of the Revolution, the doctrine of the 
 eternal progress of hiunanity, has the value merely of an 
 unproved assertion. No one before had so victoriously refuted 
 the darling illusion of the day, which sought freedom in 
 forms of government. Freedon and despotism, said Savigny, 
 are possible in every kind of constitution : freedom is found 
 everywhere where the state authority respects nature and history 
 in the living energies of the people ; despotism is found every- 
 where where the government proceeds in accordance with the 
 dictates of subjective arbitrariness. 
 
 Eleven years earUer, in his first pubUshed work. Das Recht 
 des Besitzes, Savigny had written a book comparable with the 
 best performances of the great French civil jurists of the six- 
 teenth century. Now, with his GeschicUe des Romischen Rechts 
 im MittelaUer, he entered a domain hitherto entirely unworked, 
 
 2Q9 
 
History of Germany 
 
 disclosing for the first time the intimate connection between 
 ancient and modern law. By the mysterious favour of destiny, 
 which it is impossible to regard as chance, it invariably happens 
 that as soon as definite intimations of a great new discovery 
 are manifested in science, help comes to the hand of the 
 investigator. Thus at Verona in 1816, Niebuhr discovered the 
 palimpsest of the Institutes of Gaius ; the classic age of Roman 
 jurisprudence, which had hitherto been known almost exclusively 
 through the scanty fragments given in the Pandects, came 
 suddenly to Ufe before the eyes of an astonished later generation. 
 The history of Roman law was reconstituted by a long series 
 of thorough individual researches, whilst simultaneously Eich- 
 horn continued his history of German law, and Jacob Grimm 
 and a number of other young men of talent studied the sources 
 of Teutonic law. The Zeitschrift filr geschichtliche Rechtswissens- 
 chaften, issued by Savigny and Eichhom, became the forum of 
 the continually growing historical school of law, a school of 
 which Savigny remained the recognised chief and most efficient 
 exponent The compelling force of academic eloquence and 
 the creative energy of genius, so rarely found united, were 
 united in Savigny. Whilst his somewhat haughty manner 
 seemed at first repellent anyone who came into closer contact 
 with the jurist was soon encouraged by the amiable mildness of 
 his judgments, and learned that in science also modest gifts 
 have their place if they avoid unscientific presumption. Advanc- 
 ing along the paths traced by Savigny, German jurisprudence 
 gradually became at home once more in the field of positive 
 law, and after two generations felt strong enough to comfute 
 the master himself, and to demonstrate in actual practice, " the 
 vocation of our age for legislation." 
 
 The historical doctrine of law ran absolutely counter to the 
 prevailing opinions of the day. The patriots were annoyed 
 because their cherished dream was disturbed, and profound injury 
 was inflicted even upon the self-satisfaction of the philosophers. 
 Hegel spoke of Savigny's work as an affront to the epoch, and 
 Schon, the Hberal Kantian, could never see in the mighty 
 thought-work of the historical science of law anything more than 
 " jottings from chronicles." On the other hand, the bureau- 
 cracy of the Confederation of the Rhine listened with horror to 
 phrases about the law-constructing energy of the national spirit, 
 which left so little scope for the wisdom of the boardroom ; 
 Conner, the Bavarian councillor, went so far in a malicious 
 
 300 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 lampoon as to accuse the adherents of the historical school of 
 being men of demagogic views. In reality, the fmidamentaJ 
 ideas of the new doctrine stood high above the realm of party 
 struggle. If it remained true to itself it would be forced to 
 condemn with equal vigour obstinate adhesion to the established 
 order and frivolous attempts at revolutionary legislation, whilst 
 its critical strength and sobriety had absolutely nothing in 
 common with the mystical dreams of the neo-Catholic roman- 
 ticists. None the less, Savigny could not disavow his romanticist 
 comrades. Just as all the science of that day despised epochs 
 of clear and conscious cultxire in comparison with the twilit early 
 life of the nations, just as the brothers Grimm preferred folk- 
 songs to more highly developed poetry, whilst Amim approvingly 
 exclaimed to them, " You pay respect to that which no one can 
 claim as his own, to spontaneous growth," so also the master 
 of the historical doctrine of law preferred to devote himself to 
 periods of half-unconscious legislation, when law and custom 
 were still but partially distinguished one from another, and when 
 law, like language, seemed to arise by spontaneous growth. The 
 entire epoch was dominated by the aesthetic view of the world, 
 and thus it was that Savigny involuntarily apphed the measure 
 of art to law, dememding from the legislator what the writers of 
 the Xenien had once justly demanded of the artist, that he 
 should be silent if he was imable to realise the ideal. He failed 
 to see that in political life it is determined by the dictates of 
 hard necessity that the statesman must provide, not what is 
 perfect, but what is indispensable Dahhnann repUed to Savigny 
 with good reason when he said : "If the roof falls in over my 
 head, my vocation to reconstruction is decided for me." 
 
 Like aU the romanticists, Savigny had acquired his culture 
 in a struggle with the ideas of the Revolution, and although as 
 a statesman he was never a man of extreme views, he was 
 unable to do historical justice to this most recent epoch, which 
 itself also belonged to history, and took a manifestly unfair view 
 of the code Napoleon. In his detestation of the shallow love of 
 novelty characteristic of the modem world, he failed to recognise 
 that law is ultimately determined, not by the national intelli- 
 gence but by the national will, which in periods of higher 
 civihsation can find expression through the mouth of the state 
 alone. He did not always notice that the great transformations of 
 national life, which to the historian have an aspect of inevitable 
 necessity, were after all rendered possible only by the will of 
 
 301 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the doers, by the choice and the stress of free resolve. One 
 who blindly followed Savigny might readily lapse into a duU 
 fatalism, and be tempted to erase completely from history the 
 most priceless energy of the historic world, the power of the 
 will. The saying " A constitution cannot be made, it must 
 grow," the equivocal praise of " organic development," and 
 similar favourite phrases of the historical school, served those 
 inspired with an unreflective love of repose as a welcome excuse 
 for refraining from all exertion. The consequence was that an 
 achievement of German science which should have filled the 
 whole nation with pride, was soon diverted into the sphere of 
 the petty contentions of the day. The mass of the Uberals long 
 continued to cleave to the obsolete doctrine of natural rights, 
 and nevertheless in individual cases exhibited more historical 
 sense and a better understanding of the signs of the times than 
 their opponents. The conservative parties adopted the ideas of 
 the historical school more or less in good faith, and looked down 
 with the consciousness of scientific superiority upon the super- 
 ficiality of liberal teaching. " Rational law " and " historical 
 law " were the catchwords of the two sides in a fundamentally 
 unmeaning dispute which for decades continued to increase the 
 embitterment of our public life, and which at times lost its way 
 in a hopeless confusion of terminology. The rough experiences 
 of the year 1848 were needed before those of one party could 
 learn to envisage history as an eternal process of becoming, and 
 before those of the other party could recognise that in the life 
 of the state that only is rational which has historical founda- 
 tions. Not until then did the name of the historical school lose 
 the offensive significance of a party label ; not until then did 
 the indestructible nucleus of its doctrines gradually become the 
 common property of all moderate politicians. 
 
 Among the pioneers of the new historic culture, no 
 other commanded so wide a circle of history as Barthold 
 Niebuhr. No one regarded with such incisive contempt the literary 
 arrogance of the old school, whose members were learned in 
 books but knew httle of life, for Niebuhr was a man of almost 
 universal knowledge, who followed with luminous understanding 
 every European movement in politics, science, and art. The 
 unpolitical generation of the last few decades had esteemed 
 Schiller's romantic historical tales and the experiments of Herder 
 and Schlegel in the philosophy of history more highly than 
 Spittler's objective political presentation ; Niebuhr was not 
 
 302 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 merely the founder of the new critical method of writing history 
 (through the briUiant independence of his research, which never 
 failed to investigate the original sources of information), but 
 further, he placed the state in its proper position, in the very 
 centre of the historic stage, carrjdng out in action the opinion 
 of the Greeks that the historian must be endowed before all 
 with a political intelligence. He knew how rapidly the civiUsa- 
 tion and the moral energy of a nation withers when it lacks 
 power to enforce respect from the world, and he described with 
 pitiless severity the atrophy of the German character that 
 resulted from the empty semblance of life characteristic of 
 particularism ; he knew how petty, backbiting, and slanderous 
 this generation had become, to which " honour is a horribly 
 oppressive sentiment." In the narrow worlds of antiquity and 
 of the middle ages, it was possible for petty states to maintain 
 themselves as transmitters of civilisation ; but to-day " only in 
 great states whose structure is homogeneous is a fuU Ufe attain- 
 able." He had formed his views of the state from experience 
 of actual life, from contemplation of the emciently estabhshed 
 peasant freedom of his native Ditmarsh, through journeys in 
 England and Holland and through prolonged activities as a 
 bank manager and as an administrator. Consequently he was, 
 like Stein, a declared enemy of every search for pohtical systems 
 and, once more like Stein, found the comer stone of freedom 
 in self-government, which accustoms the citizen to stand man- 
 fully upon his own feet, and to learn the art of government 
 after the manner of the ancients by laying his own hand upon 
 the tiller. It is of more importance, he said, whether the 
 subjects in individual communes are or are not kept in a state 
 of tutelage, than whether the boundaries between authoritative 
 and representative government move this way or that. Conse- 
 quently he recognised immediately that, notwithstanding the 
 Charte of the Bourbons, France was still a despotic land, because 
 the Napoleonic administrative order persisted unchanged. In 
 order to warn his compatriots against one-sided and excessive 
 esteem for constitutional forms of government, and in order to 
 remind them once more of the sound basic ideas of Stein's 
 reforms, he pubMshed soon after the establishment of peace that 
 treatise by Vincke upon the British constitution which had 
 come into existence under Stein's eyes,^ saying bluntly in his 
 
 ' See Vol. I., p. 319. 
 303 
 
History of Germany 
 
 preface, to the horror of the liberal world, " freedom depends 
 far more upon administration than upon constitution." 
 
 His Roman History, too, was quite as much a work of 
 personal experience, as a testimony to his powers as an investi- 
 gator, and for this reason even his contemporaries counted it 
 among those classic books which never become obsolete, even 
 though it may be refuted in every detail. When calling the 
 past into existence he enjoyed the happiness of creation ; and 
 since he could never engage in activity with but a single energy 
 of his soul, he threw all the intimacy of his own passionate 
 powers of perception, all the earnestness of his moral judgment, 
 into the exposition of those struggles in Rome which to most 
 of his predecessors had been merely the dry matericds of learn- 
 ing ; every turn of the often severe but always noble and 
 original style reflected the profound movements of a great 
 spirit. He tells us himself that he would never have been able 
 to write the initial volvune without an actual first-hand view of 
 the English state ; subsequently, shaken to the soul, he had 
 seen the storms of a titanic epoch break over the country of 
 his election ; through such experiences there had resulted a 
 continued growth of his understanding of Roman history, which 
 had of old absorbed into itself the history of all nations as 
 rivers are absorbed by the sea. Then his diplomatic career led 
 him to Rome. He lived here for years, and although he never 
 overcame his longing for home, his historic imagination, which 
 loved to elucidate the distant and the strange with the aid of 
 the near and the familiar, was continually and powerfully 
 stimulated. The ancient world took form before his senses : 
 in the shape of the fields he could recognise the technical skill 
 of the ancient land-surveyors, in the misery of the modem 
 metayers he perceived the curse of the Roman latifundial system 
 in persistent operation ; and when in the Vatican he saw the 
 ancient sarcophagus with the touching image of the faithful 
 spouses it seemed to him as if he were contemplating himself 
 and his transfigured first wife. 
 
 Thus the slowly maturing re-elaboration and continuation of 
 the work received that characteristically warm tone which gave 
 the charm of life even to dry lists of figures and to circum- 
 stantial critical excursuses. The world of antiquity had hitherto 
 appeared to be something utterly disparate from our own ; but 
 here everything seemed intimate and comprehensible. The 
 historian described the fate of Pontius and of Pyrrhus in the 
 
 304 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 same simply human spirit in which, shortly before, in a masterly 
 
 sketch, he had related the Ufe of his father, the great traveller, 
 
 Carsten Niebuhr. To the orthodox philologists of the old school, 
 
 the bold critic who had disturbed the traditions of the history 
 
 of the Roman kings was for long a thorn in the side. What 
 
 a storm was raised, finsilly, when with statesmanHke insight he 
 
 traced the necessity of that slow revolution which led the plebs 
 
 to dominion, and even demonstrated the justice of the notorious 
 
 agrarian laws. He did not hesitate to apply even to the classic 
 
 poets of ancient Rome the new doctrine of the romanticists that 
 
 national poetry alone is truly hving, and said in plain terms : 
 
 " If form can per se be fatal, this is true above all of a foreign 
 
 form ; and for this reason Roman hterature was in a certain 
 
 sense stiUbom ! " 
 
 Yet, even this free spirit was prone to suffer from a 
 gloomy timorousness which sometimes led him completely to 
 misunderstand the living energies of the time. In his darker 
 hours lie would passionately complain that the epicurean Zeit- 
 geist of these easy-going days ruined all scientific work ! So 
 sensitive was his temperament that he was inspired with horror by 
 the decivilising forces of the Revolution. In his student days, when 
 reading Fichte's defence of the Revolution, he had exclaimed: 
 " What remains for us but death if such principles should 
 become dominant ? " The son of a distinguished father, and at 
 the same time one of those rare juvenile prodigies who fulfil 
 in manhood the promise of childhood, he was accustomed from 
 his earliest days to the admiration of his entourage, and was 
 renowned on his own account even before he had written any- 
 thing ; a man of affectionate disposition, he was throughout Ufe 
 on terms of tender and intimate friendship with such brilliant 
 intelligences as Count Moltke, Dahlmann, and Count Dessere. 
 He could never endure the proximity of the common or the 
 base. Is it surprising that to this aristocrat of the spirit 
 nothing seemed more detestable than the power of broa.d 
 mediocrity which invariably tends to predominate in democratic 
 
 epochs? 
 
 When he contemplated the poUtical immaturity of his 
 nation and the triviality of the current constitutional doctrines, 
 it seemed to him that for the time being Stein's administrative 
 reforms had gone far enough ; and he agreed with the criticism 
 of the stout-hearted Dahlmann, "organisation and administration 
 do not proceed on parallel lines; a moment inevitably comes 
 
 305 ^ 
 
History of Germany 
 
 in which they coalesce, to separate no longer." Although he 
 recognised the worthlessness of the Italian governments, and 
 openly declared that Rome had been far happier under Napoleon 
 than under the restored papal administration, when the ill- 
 treated population first ventured to rise in revolt he was over- 
 come by his hatred of the Revolution, and angrily exclaimed 
 that in this country no one but a fool or a knave could speak 
 of freedom. The far-seeing thinker, who was already with 
 marvellous precision able to foresee the war between the southern 
 and the northern states of the American union, showed neverthe- 
 less in his plan for the constitution of the Netherlands that the 
 most thorough knowledge of the past by no means excludes a 
 complete misunderstanding of the present. He knew the extra- 
 ordinary state-structure of the republic of the seven provinces 
 down to its remotest comers and recesses, and he knew why it 
 had crumbled to pieces. But when, in November. 1813. the 
 prince of Orange asked him to write proposals for the recon- 
 struction of the Netherlands, the enemy of the Revolution could 
 not make up his mind to recognise as an accompUshed fact the 
 notable transformation which had taken place in the country 
 since the year 1794. The unified state, created by French 
 arms, but for which the way had long been prepared in history, 
 seemed to him to display a revolutionary imiformity; in 
 all earnestness he proposed to reanimate the utterly defunct 
 federaUsm, and demanded the re-establishment of the old federa- 
 tion of states. Thus historical reverence led him to put forward 
 a scheme which, notwithstanding its profoundly learned character, 
 was just as impossible, and in its essence no less unhistorical 
 than were the hastily conceived constitutional structures of the 
 Jacobin benefactors. 
 
 Through Niebuhr's researches the uncritical and uncondi- 
 tional veneration of antiquity became undermined ; the antique 
 world was reintroduced into the current of time. Simultaneously 
 a new conception of mediaeval history began to prevail. By the 
 philosophical century, the civilisation of the middle ages had 
 been passionately assailed, whereas by youthful romanticism it 
 had been blindly admired; now the attempt was made to 
 understand it. Public sentiment was, indeed, still profoundly 
 influenced by the old rationalism ; a considerable lapse of time 
 was yet needed before a scientific judgment of the detested and 
 obscure middle ages became endurable. When young Johannes 
 Voigt wrote his Hildebrand as Pope Gregory VII and his 
 
 306 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 Epoch, he was severely criticised in the press ; this faithful 
 Protestant was reproached for the display of CathoUc sentiments 
 because he had honourably recognised Hildebrand's personal 
 greatness. Meanwhile Friedrich von Raiuner was engaged in 
 the preliminary work for his History of the Hohenstaufen ; and 
 just as Schon was working at the restoration of the Marienburg, 
 Stein was devoting the best energies of his old age to the 
 collection of the sources of our primitive history. In the new 
 year of 1819 he fovmded the society for the pubHcation of the 
 Monumenta Germaniae. The distinctive motto of the great 
 undertaking was Sanctus Amor Patriae dat Animum. Gradually 
 it produced a Hne of historical investigators, and thus laid a 
 secure foundation for the knowledge of the German middle ages. 
 But all this was still in its inception ; during the first years of 
 peace it was in Niebuhr alone that the political treatment of 
 history found a classic representative. 
 
 All the more extensive was the success of the philologists, 
 who now first gained a clear imderstanding of their historic task. 
 Boeckh's saying, " There is no philology which is not history," 
 was in everyone's mouth. The philologists fulfilled what the 
 romanticist poets had promised. The time now really came 
 whose coming NovaUs had once prophesied, " when in fables 
 and poems there is recognised the imdying course of world- 
 history." That bold saying, too, of Friedrich Schlegel, in which the 
 historian had been termed a " skilful prophet whose gaze is directed 
 backwards," now found its justification; for suddenly the remote 
 youth of the Indo-Germanic peoples, which had hitherto been 
 inaccessible to research, was illuminated by science, and from 
 this in turn was diffused a reflected Ught upon the foimdations 
 of contemporary European civiHsation. The same tendency of 
 the age which dominated the historical school of political science 
 and the historical doctrine of law, led the philologists also to 
 conceive of language as a continuous growth. They too, Uke 
 Niebuhr and Savigny, opened a campaign against the abstrac- 
 tions of the previous century, preparing the way for a less 
 presumptuous and consequently freer view of the universe. 
 The, arrogant illusion that the great objective course of historic 
 life proceeds from the free preferences of individual men, the 
 beUef in natural rights and the universally vaUd rehgion of 
 reason, collapsed hopelessly as soon as philology showed that 
 which can most readily be proved from the history of lan- 
 guage, that the human being Uves only in and with his nation. 
 
 307 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Wilhelm Humboldt, in one of his brilliant minor essays, had already 
 given expression to the pregnant thought that the formation of 
 language, like folk-poesy, is completed by the instrumentality of 
 individuals, and yet proceeds always from , the whole. To this 
 truth, which in its ultimate profundity unquestionably involves 
 an ever-insoluble enigma, Jacob Grimm continually returned. 
 He showed how the higher forms of poetry issue from the folk- 
 song, " which is of spontaneous origin," and he found in the 
 ancient folk-epic a content which was neither purely mythical 
 nor purely historical, but one exhibiting a fusion of divine and 
 human history. 
 
 Here, strangely enough, he was opposed by A. W. Schlegel. 
 The old romanticist could not break completely loose from the 
 rationalism of the previous century, which sought throughout 
 history for evidence of calculation and purpose. Just as he 
 struggled against Niebuhr's critical boldness, so also he main- 
 tained in opposition to Grimm that the folk-epic was the 
 conscious work of poets who endeavoured in artistic rivalry 
 to outbid one another by remarkable productions. There was, in 
 fact, danger that youthful German science might succumb to 
 that mythical tendency which dominated the younger school of 
 romanticism. Delighted by the great discovery of the creative 
 energy of the folk-genius, Grimm followed with such joy the 
 dominion of the unconscious, of the spontaneously natural, in 
 intellectual creation, that he almost completely lost sight of the 
 free activity of artistic genius. Weaker heads became utterly 
 immersed in foolish fantasies ; von der Hagen imagined that in 
 the Nibelungenlied he could rediscover the myths of the Creation 
 and the Fall. 
 
 Yet the clear spirit of Jacob Grimm, Protestant to the core, 
 could not long linger in the dreamy borderland of science, and 
 he soon turned to a province of research which promised incom- 
 parably more definite results. In the year 1819, with his 
 Deutsche Grammatik, he founded the science of historical gram- 
 mar. Others had philosophised about language or endeavoured 
 to establish its laws ; he contented himself with studying its 
 growth step by step, and since he had already recognised 
 the primitive unity of the Teutonic languages, he utilised for 
 comparison all the subdivisions of this group of tongues. Here 
 also, influenced by a briUiant suggestion of Wilhelm Humboldt, 
 he estabhshed the important difference between the accented 
 root-syllables which contain the sense of words, and the purely 
 
 308 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 fonnal constituents of the vocabulary. Thus law and life were 
 soon given to the study of the development of our language, 
 which had hitherto seemed so enigmatical and so much a matter 
 of chance. In the iimocent, poetic, physically fresh youth of 
 the nation — thus wrote Grimm with artistic vividness — Slanguage 
 also displays a sensual energy and obviousness. It loves form 
 for form's sake and luxuriates in the sound of euphonious inflec- 
 tions. But as civilisation matures, language becomes more 
 intellectual and abstract, and aims at clearness and brevity ; 
 the ear is more obtuse and has lost pleasure in form ; the 
 soberer understanding is no longer concerned about the sensuous 
 images which imderlie the words, and gradually everything is 
 rejected or polished away beyond what is immediately necessary 
 to make the meaning clear. It will be readily imderstood that 
 Grimm's poetic sensibihties made him give the preference to the 
 older speech, characterised by formal richness, and that his own 
 style, as the years passed, became continually more sensuous 
 and figurative. Yet he did not fail to recognise that a com- 
 pleted evolution cannot retrace its steps, and he therefore 
 strenuously resisted those meddlesome attempts to " purify " 
 the language which the Teutonising zealots advocated on 
 patriotic grounds, for this, he considered, would be to treat 
 our ancient speech as if it had been a chance product of 
 to-day. 
 
 A year after the appearance of the first volume of his 
 Grammaiik, Grimm discovered the law of consonantal change, 
 and thus at length secured for etymology, which had hitherto 
 been insecurely based upon the recognition of similarity in 
 sounds, a firm scientific foundation. Meanwhile the unresting 
 workings of his intelligence had led him to recognise the primi- 
 tive kinship of all the Indo-Germanic languages, and he regarded 
 with delight the unending prospect which was opened from this 
 newly attained attitude. If the identical word could be dis- 
 covered in Sanscrit and in aU the yoimger languages of the 
 aUied nations, the proof was afforded that the object which this 
 word was used to denote must already have been known to the 
 enigmatical primitive nation of the Indo-Germans. Thus it 
 became possible to withdraw from the darCness the mysterious 
 national cradle of India. It was possible to ascertain by 
 research what stage of civiUsation had been reached by the 
 peoples of Europe before their dispersal, before their westward 
 migration began ; to discover what was common to them from 
 
 309 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the first, and what they had subsequently acquired in their 
 separate courses. The historical sciences were immediately 
 faced by an interminable series of new tasks, involving the most 
 intimate spiritual life of all nations and epochs. In the two 
 generations which have elapsed, httle more than the fringe of 
 the subject has been touched. 
 
 Whilst Jacob Grimm, a most fortunate investigator, thus 
 advanced from discovery to discovery, his brother Wilhelm 
 found satisfaction in quieter courses. It was his delight to offer 
 the new generation the works of our ancient poetry in graceful 
 editions with a thoughtful commentary ; after the poet's fashion 
 he loved at times to lose himself amid the yearnings of happy 
 dreams ; it was through his gentler pen, too, that the fairy 
 tales secured their amiable form. In the two brothers there 
 were incorporated two equally valuable tendencies of science. 
 The elder cared only for learning and research as a form of 
 poietic activity ; the younger did not scorn to provide for the 
 intimate needs of those thirsting for knowledge by exercising the 
 function of teacher. It was through their collection of fairy 
 tales that the Grimms secured from the populace that affection 
 which is so rarely accorded to the severe investigator. Through- 
 out the country everyone knew good-natured anecdotes of the 
 two brothers, who needed only to strike the ground with their 
 magic wand in order to bring to light the rich treasure of 
 ancient sagas. People told one another about their deep and 
 tranquil mutual affection : how they walked through life 
 uprightly and serenely side by side, and how, notwithstanding 
 their great love for the fatherland, they would never abandon 
 their snug Hessian home, would never leave the red mountains 
 of the Fulda valley. Both were so unpretentious, and yet 
 were so severe in their opposition to the fashionable idolatrira 
 of the day, so clear in their condemnation of all vanity, arti' 
 ficiality, and untruth. It was told how their work-tables stood 
 side by side in the same room, and how with an innocent joy 
 they shared every new discovery. No riddle, no old wives' 
 tale, and no child's lullaby, was too trifling for them ; every- 
 thing derived from the sacred shrine of German speech gained 
 life under their eyes ; Jacob was profoundly moved at the sight 
 of any old fragment of the kind. But while engaged in their 
 arduous labours they never interrupted their cordial intercourse 
 with men of worth ; no conflict of opinion ever disturbed the 
 faithfulness of their friendships ; how charmingly did Wilhelm 
 
 310 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 know how to converse in his letters with the strictly Catholic 
 Haxthausens, while occasionally Jacob would chime in with his 
 deeper tones. It was a moving picture of simple greatness 
 which afforded even to the uncultured some indication of the 
 moral force of living science. 
 
 Jacob Grimm valued words only on account of things. 
 His work found a fortunate complement in that of Can Lach- 
 mann of Brunswick, the classically trained and strict represen- 
 tative of formal philology, who valued things only on account 
 of words, and who imposed upon the still rambUng youthful 
 science the strict discipUne of method. Equally at home in 
 classical and in Teutonic tongues, he was the founder of Old 
 German textual criticism and prosody, an editor of unequalled 
 acumen and accuracy. What F. A. Wolf had once taught 
 regarding the origin of the Homeric poems, Lachmann applied 
 to German epic poetry, and endeavoured, not without some 
 violence, to dissolve the Nibelungenlied into a series of indepen- 
 dent poems. When August Zeune had presented to the volun- 
 teers of 1815 his Zelt- und Feldausgabe der Nibelungen [Tent and 
 Field edition of the Nibelungen], a superficial study of Old German 
 poetry became a passion of Teutonising youth. It was fortu- 
 nate for science that Lachmann frightened away the immature 
 by the seriousness of his pitiless criticism, and thus before long 
 completely expelled dilettantism from the domain of German 
 philology. Meanwhile Benecke undertook his lexicographic 
 labours, and the unassuming Friedrich Diez was quietly collect- 
 ing the first materials for the majestic structure of his grammar 
 of the Romance languages. Diez, like Lachmann, had been a 
 volunteer, with the German army in France ; in Giessen he had 
 often sat at board with Follen and the wildest hotheads of the 
 Teutonist movement, and had yet remained so free in spirit 
 that just as well as a bom Provengal was he able to see into 
 the heart of the beautiful language of the troubadours. 
 
 The unequal mental equipment of different generations is 
 not explicable by the varying favour of external circumstances 
 alone ; the times educate the genius, but do not create him. 
 Whenever a great transformation of spiritual life has been 
 preparing beneath the surface, a mysterious dispensation, whose 
 counsels no human eye can fathom, gives rise to a highly gifted 
 generation. At the right moment the right men emerge, dis- 
 covery follows discovery, one keen spirit provides materials for 
 another to work upon, though the former knows nothing of the 
 
 3" 
 
History of Germany 
 
 latter. Thus was it nowj when a great hour had struck for the 
 philosophico-historical sciences. 
 
 Whilst the brothers Grimm were still engaged in indefinite 
 speculations regarding the common origin of the European 
 tongues, Franz Bopp of Mainz, working quite independently, had 
 already laid the foundations of the new science of comparative 
 linguistics. For many years Wilhelm Humboldt had lived in 
 the belief that the philosophy of language and the philosophy 
 of history must mingle in the profoundest depths of humanity. 
 How often in his letters to Schiller had he declared that 
 language is a living organism intimately associated with the 
 personality of the speaker. He had long known that the 
 peculiar character of individual languages may be chiefly recog- 
 nised in their grammatical structure ; it was only the burdens 
 of his diplomatic career which had prevented his following up 
 these ideas. Influenced by similar intimations, young Bopp had 
 early acquired a knowledge of the classic tongues and of most 
 of the languages of modem Europe ; he hoped to discover a 
 hidden harmony in the Unguistic treasury of our race. The first 
 thing was to estabhsh beyond dispute the genealogical relation- 
 ship of severa;l languages, and this could be done only by means 
 of the precise examination of a very ancient language which 
 had preserved the character of the lost primitive tongue in a 
 condition of comparative purity, so that in case of need it 
 might itself be utilised in place of the primitive tongue. 
 
 Bopp therefore resolved to start from Sanscrit, for the high 
 antiquity of Indian Hterature was indisputable, and since the 
 pubHcation of Friedrich Schlegel's brilliant amateur work Die 
 Weisheit der Inder, the kinship of Sanscrit with the Persian, the 
 classical, and the Teutonic languages had generally been assumed, 
 though proof was still lacking. In 1816 appeared Bopp's 
 booklet upon the verbal conjugations of Sanscrit. In a detailed 
 consideration of the grammatical structure of this oldest of 
 languages, it was shown how the future was formed by the 
 combination of an auxiliary verb with a root syllable, and so on, 
 and the author went on to show incontrovertibly the essential 
 identity of the forms and roots of the verb sein in Sanscrit 
 and in the ancient Teutonic tongues. The fortunate discoverer 
 recognised in the Gothic language the link between the Old 
 Indian and the German : " When I read the Venerable Ulfilas 
 I fancied that I had Sanscrit before my eyes." Thus was the 
 ball set rolling, for in questions of this nature it is the first 
 
 312 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 blow which is decisive. A definite starting-point had now been 
 won for the dehmitation of the boundaries of the Indo-Germanic 
 group of languages, for the ascertainment of the closer or more 
 distant relationships between each individual member of this 
 group and its oldest sister, and hence for the establishment of 
 the genealogical tree of the nations themselves. Thus in the 
 circle of the historical sciences comparative Unguistics gradually 
 came to occupy a similar position to that acquired by comparative 
 anatomy among the natural sciences. The next step was to 
 subject other famihes of language to comparative study, and to 
 reduce words to their simplest elements ; in this way an ascent 
 might be made to the great problem of the origin of language 
 itself, and an approach to those limits which the wisdom of 
 nature has imposed upon all human enquiry. 
 
 In the philology of the classical languages a freer life became 
 awakened as early as the year 1795. Shortly before, in his 
 Prolegomena ad Homerum, Friedrich August Wolf showed that 
 the Homeric poems had arisen out of rhapsodies, works of 
 popular poesy which had been handed down and developed 
 during the centuries. Goethe rejoiced, saying that the Homeric 
 light was rising with renewed vigour. But Wolf's permanent 
 significance was found, less in this particular h3^othesis (which 
 still left much in obscurity, and subsequently gave rise to 
 numerous tasteless aberrations of an over-refined and over- 
 learned acumen), than in his completely new views regarding 
 the nature and aims of philology. He rescued classical Utera- 
 ture from the hands of the aesthetes, and transferred it to the 
 domain of historical criticism ; he demanded of philology that 
 it should become enlarged to constitute the science of antiquity, 
 that it should endeavour in all directions to render vividly 
 realisable the entire hfe of the classical world. Language and 
 literatmre were to be conceived as no more than isolated mani- 
 festations of this general life. In his masterly lectures at Halle, 
 Wolf showed how this problem was to be solved. 
 
 Among the younger men who adopted this historical concep- 
 tion, August Boeckh of Carlsruhe, the universally loved and 
 outspoken teacher of the students at BerUn, occupied the first 
 place. In the BacchanaUa of the romanticists of Heidelberg 
 he had not lost his thorough-going diligence, but had merely 
 enlarged his outlook and developed his understanding for all 
 that is himian. For many years he had been occupied with 
 the design of presenting in a comprehensive work, Hellen, the 
 
 313 
 
History of Germany 
 
 unity of Greek life in all its manifestations. Unfortunately 
 this grandly conceived structure never attained completion. 
 A fragment merely was published in the year 1817, Die Staats- 
 haushaltung der Athener, the first successful attempt to compre- 
 hend Greek history (following Niebuhr's example in respect of 
 the history of Rome) as life that had been actually Uved. His- 
 torians rejoiced when from forgotten and overlooked sources the 
 complicated activities of Attic home life and political economy 
 were displayed in their intimate interconnection ; but the 
 economists did not yet understand how to derive advantage 
 from the inductive methods of the talented philologian. Among 
 all the historical sciences, political economy had remained 
 the most backward. It still reposed upon the misunderstood 
 theories of Adam Smith, and still fancied that, after the manner 
 of the doctrine of natural rights, it could harness the historic 
 life of the nations in the yoke of eternally vaUd abstract rules. 
 
 A similar relationship to that occupied by Lachmann to 
 Jacob Grimm, was occupied towards Boeckh's circumstantial 
 historical tendency by the school of formal classical philology, 
 which maintained a fruitful centre of cultivation for nearly half 
 a century at Leipzig in Gottfried Hermann's Griechische Gesell- 
 schaft. Here flourished grammatical study, prosody, and 
 strictly methodical textual criticism. In their distinguished 
 teacher was found a union of everything characteristic of the 
 old Upper Saxon learning : thorough knowledge and penetrating 
 acuteness, unflagging diUgence and urbane tolerance, but also a 
 jejune rationaUsm which refused on principle to recognise the 
 enigmatical night-side of historic Ufe. Both schools had learned 
 from Wolf and had much in common ; Immanuel Bekker of 
 Berlin had also grown up under the eyes of Wolf, Bekker, the 
 taciturn master of criticism, who ably revised the text of so 
 many of the Greek clcissics without troubling himself to offer 
 interpretations. 
 
 Independently of both these tendencies, the high-romantic 
 school of the symbolists, led by Friedrich Creuzer, pursued its 
 strange career. Creuzer's lively imagination was from the first 
 strongly attracted towards the world of the supersensual and the 
 mysterious. At the beginning of the seventeen-eighties, long 
 before the rise of romanticism, this born romanticist was filled 
 with enthusiasm at his home in Marburg when contemplating 
 the lofty Gothic pillars of the Elisabethkirche ; he formed a 
 friendship with Novalis, with Gorres, with the Heidelberg circle 
 
 314 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 of poets, but also with Savigny and Boeckh, and advanced into 
 the dream-world of natural philosophy farther than any of the 
 professional experts. Like Schelling, he prided himself upon 
 the inborn miraculous gift of "immediate intuition," which can 
 neither be taught nor learned. This faculty, he imagined, 
 would enable him to discover that natural speech which mani- 
 fests itself among all nations in mysterious religious s5mibols, 
 and he fancied that this would reveal a bond of unity between 
 the myths of all ages. His symbolism offered numerous 
 briUiant hints for subsequent investigators ; even the theologians 
 owed him thanks, for he showed them the importance of the 
 forgotten neo-Platonists. He was the first to disclose what a 
 world of misery and horror was concealed beneath the beautiful 
 myths of antiquity ; and he immersed himself with such zeal 
 in these sinister mysteries that httle was left to him of the clear 
 joy of life which was the dominant characteristic of the Greek 
 national faith. He also was the first to detect the vestiges of 
 ancient oriental priestly wisdom in the beginnings of Hellenic 
 culture ; but his airy bridge between the east and the west was 
 constructed before the soil for its foundation on either shore had 
 been adequately explored. Notwithstanding the wealth of his 
 learning, the brilMant enthusiast never attained secure results, 
 because he alwa5rs approached historical facts with a preconceived 
 opinion ; he loved especially to dwell upon the Pelasgians and 
 other unknown primitive peoples, for here the briUiant caprices 
 of "immediate intuition" found free play. 
 
 The mysticism of his doctrine aroused the hostiHty of the 
 enUghtened world. First of all, Gottfried Hermann attacked 
 Creuzer's Symbolik with his customary dignified calm ; next, 
 old Johann Heiiuich Voss rushed into the fray, his fierce battle- 
 cry sounding Hke a voice from the tomb. How wonderfully 
 swift had been the Ufe of this generation ; how remote now 
 seemed the day when Voss's translation of Homer had been 
 justly celebrated as a pioneer work ! All the new ideas which 
 had since then been given forth by German genius, had passed 
 over the hard-shelled old rationalist without leaving a trace. 
 His culture was still rooted in the Wolfiian philosophy, which 
 ■imagined that the world-all could be comprehended through the 
 principle of sufficient reason. He had already entered the fists 
 against Herder and Wolf; Kant himself was not immune from 
 attack, for the philosopher of Konigsberg had admitted a justi- 
 fication for intuitive beUef, and considered that the scientific 
 
 31S 
 
History of Germany 
 
 explanation of the world in the end explained nothing. Now. 
 in Heidelberg, in the world of the romanticist enthusiasts, this 
 prosaic reason seemed to have been betrayed and sold. All 
 the talk about the unconsciously creating energies of the popular 
 spirit was to Voss empty fantasy ; and who was to speak to 
 him of dogmas and sjTmbols, when it had been proved that 
 morality alone contains the nucleus of all religions? He was 
 convinced that Germany was threatened by a great conspiracy 
 of priests and junkers, that the two red-headed rascals, Gorres 
 and Creuzer, desired to lead Luther's children back to Rome. 
 All who boasted the name of enUghtened and liberal shouted in 
 joyful chorus when the angry man launched his rough polemics 
 against the symboUsts. It was Voss who first accustomed the 
 Hberals to the hateful tone of a terrorism of opinion, which 
 behind an opponent's views sought always for evidence of base 
 designs. In this dispute, right and wrong seemed as strangely 
 mingled as in the simultaneous struggles of the political parties. 
 Whilst Voss and Hermann could boast of clearness and definite- 
 ness, Creuzer unquestionably displayed more genius ; whilst the 
 two former proved themselves keener critics, the latter manifested 
 an incomparably profounder understanding of religion, of the 
 hidden emotional hfe of the nations. Upon many of the paths 
 along which the symbolists first hastened with fantastic 
 leaps, the better equipped science of to-day is now advancing 
 with steady stride. 
 
 Thus the philologists wrangled one with another, hardly 
 noticing the growth of an enemy common to them all, the 
 mercantile spirit of the business world. Since the exclusively 
 classical education given in the gymnasia was no longer adequate 
 to the growing needs of economic life, after the war a demand 
 for reform speedily arose. To the fanatics of utilitarianism that 
 only seemed worthy of study which was immediately utilisable 
 in business and conversation ; the modern preference for super- 
 ficial polsmiathy, and the " enlightened " hatred of tradition, 
 played their part. In Baden, a demand for the restriction of 
 classical education soon became one of the principal items of the 
 liberal party-programme. In Prussia, Schon was the zealous 
 advocate of this movement, which threatened the very founda- 
 tions of German culture, and which was not to undergo mitiga- 
 tion for many years to come. 
 
 The fertiUty of the new generation of men of learning 
 seemed inexhaustible Almost at the very moment when the 
 
 316 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 historical doctrine of law, historical grammar, and comparative 
 linguistics, came into existence, Kari Ritter created the science 
 of comparative geography. Notwithstanding the great dis- 
 coveries of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, geography 
 had hitherto been nothing more than an abundant collection of 
 statistical, historical, and physical items, lacking all internal 
 unity. No one asked any longer what Strabo could have meant 
 when he demanded for geography a philosophical treatment, and 
 when he expressed esteem for " multiform Europe " in compari- 
 son with the simpler coast line of Asia. Not until these days of 
 a growing historical sense did the insight also awaken that the 
 earth is the school of htmianity and the theatre of human 
 activities, and that the first aim of geographical science is to 
 learn how the configuration of the globe has exercised a deter- 
 minative influence upon human history. When Ritter, in the 
 year 1817, expounded these new ideas in the first volume of his 
 comparative geography, he raised geography to the rank of an 
 independent science. There was at work in him the same 
 impulse towards the recognition of the determinism of historic 
 life which finds expression in the works of Savigny and Bopp ; 
 and like both these writers he frequently referred to the example 
 of comparative anatomy. The forms of the earth became 
 animated imder his eyes as did word-forms to Jacob Grimm. 
 In the different continents he saw the great individuals of the 
 earth ; and he taught that every country represents a moral 
 energy, supervises the education of its inhabitants, lives out 
 its necessary history. With enormous diligence, he brought 
 together everything which natural philosophers, travellers, and 
 historians had ever reported about lands and peoples, in order 
 to display, first as regards Asia, the eternal mutual interaction 
 of nature and history. If his work were ever to attain to its 
 goal (and when an old man he continued to speak of geography 
 in modest terms as a youthful science), the entire evolution of 
 humanity would be represented as a locally conditioned natural 
 phenomenon. Men of weaker intelligence engaged in so difficult 
 a path could readily have been misled into a materialistic con- 
 ception of history, but Ritter was not exposed to this tempta- 
 tion. As a grown man he remained at heart the simple and 
 pious child who formerly at Schnepfenthal had sat at the feet of 
 the good Salzmann. It was not blind natural laws, but the will 
 of the living God, which he hoped to reveal by his researches; 
 a sacred feeling of devotion overpowered him whenever he had 
 
 317 
 
History of Germany 
 
 an intimation of the profound significance of this sublime 
 undertaking, and he frequently spoke of his book as his " hymn 
 of thanksgiving to the Lord." 
 
 Few sciences are so intimately connected as geography with 
 the power and the wealth of the nations. In the dawn of 
 history this science follows always in the footsteps of the con- 
 queror and the venturesome trader ; and even in more civilised 
 times the geographer is dependent on royal patronage. To the 
 Germans alone has it been possible on two separate occasions to 
 acquire a leading position in geographical science by the unaided 
 force of. genius. When the Spaniards and the Portuguese were 
 dividing the domain of the two Indies and the old commercial 
 greatness of Germany collapsed, Copernicus came to take equal 
 rank with Columbus. How many circumnavigators and dis- 
 coverers had since then secured free-handed support from the 
 state-authorities of England, France, and even Russia. In 
 Germany, the land without colonies and almost without inter- 
 national trade, nothing of the kind happened. The nation and 
 its governments hardly looked beyond the poor Umits of their 
 quiet home-life. Alexander von Humboldt and Leopold von 
 Buch had to undertake their bold journeys at their own expense. 
 When Adalbert von Chamisso retimied in those days from his 
 voyage round the world, and at the sight of the lighthouse of 
 Swinemund was moved to the depths of his soul, feeling he had 
 become a German, and that here his beloved home was welcom- 
 ing him, it was the Russian and not the Prussian flag which 
 waved over his head. Yet it was a son of this inland nation 
 who now rebuilt the foundations of geographical science ; seldom 
 indeed has German idealism secured a more astonishing success. 
 
 Hitherto in the historical sciences Germany had moved far in 
 advance of the neighbour nations, but natural science lagged 
 correspondingly far in the rear of the achievements of the 
 French and the English. For a long time after this date Paris 
 was with justice regarded as the home of the exact sciences. 
 It is true that a few men of leading intelligence, influenced by 
 the teeming poetic and philosophic culture of the previous 
 generation, were enabled to recognise the highest aims of nature- 
 study, to grasp nature as a unity, as a cosmos. In his Meta- 
 morphosis of Plants, Goethe had given a concrete demonstration 
 that the idea can permeate and illuminate natural phenomena 
 without arbitrarily distorting them. Alexander Humboldt 
 
 318 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 always gratefully acknowledged that through Goethe he was first 
 equipped with new organs for the understanding of nature ; it 
 was only because he had once drunk deep draughts at the 
 source which flowed from Jena and Weimar that he was able 
 to display such an astonishing many-sidedness in his researches 
 in natural science. Ritter, too, would never in the absence 
 of natural philosophy have arrived at the idea of uniting in his 
 geography all the branches of historical and positive research 
 in a joint creative work. But to the mass of those who were 
 less highly endowed, the venturesomeness of philosophy proved 
 disastrous. 
 
 Not in vain had Schelling uttered the bold saying that since 
 the nature of light had been understood, Newton's purely empirical 
 theory of colour had become obsolete. Not in vain had the 
 volatUe Hendrik Steffens, still more audaciously, demanded that 
 nature-study should rise to the level of speculation, and in all 
 sensuous experience should recognise straightway nothing but 
 the spiritual. Every young puppy in whose head a new idea 
 was fermenting now considered himself justified in putting the 
 world to rights in accordance with some preconceived plan ; 
 Lorenz Oken was only in the fourth term of his medical studies 
 when he pubUshed his Grundriss der Naturphilosophie. Respect 
 for reaUty was lost, the chemist must not dirty his hands, the 
 physicist scorned to test the data of " apperception " by experi- 
 ment. Confused images replaced clear conceptions. In the 
 tones of the prophet, Schelling spoke of the two principles of 
 darkness and light, whose pivot is fire. The diamond was a 
 flint become conscious ; forests were the hair of the earth- 
 beast ; and at the equator was displayed the swollen belly of 
 nature. It is true that amid these saturnalia the good 
 Oken continued to preserve his deUght in observation and com- 
 parison, and that he enriched science by thorough investigations 
 into the developmental history of mammals ; but many a fine 
 talent succumbed completely amid the play of these extravagant 
 fancies. How much of his youthful energy had young Justus 
 Liebig to waste before he at length mastered his romanticist 
 pride and made up his mind to approach the world of reality 
 frankly as an ignoramus. 
 
 Natural philosophy saw in nature, unconscious spirit ; in 
 the forces of nature, the organs of obscure powers of the will ; 
 and endeavoured therefore to demonstrate everywhere the 
 mutual interplay of conscious and unconscious life. Here, in 
 
 319 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the enigmatic borderland of natural science, natural philosophy 
 came into contact with the religious enthusiasm of the time, and 
 with the esoteric doctrines of those thaumaturges and swindlers who 
 since the days of Swedenborg had throughout the eighteenth 
 century busily pursued their activities at the courts. Down to 
 the year 1815 old Mesmer still lived in Switzerland, the wonder- 
 worker whose doctrines Lavater had once diffused through the 
 circles of the awakened. He knew the secret natural energy of 
 the magnetic universal fluid, the veritable vital principle, which 
 was to cure all diseases and even to prevent their occurrence. 
 Wohlfahrt now brought into renewed circulation this half for- 
 gotten " evangel of nature." Everywhere appeared sleepwalking 
 women and magnetic healers ; everywhere in the drawing-rooms 
 of the fashionable world esctatic gentlemen and ladies formed a 
 magnetic chain. Huf eland and several other physicians of note 
 were friendly towards the new revelation, but the fashion of the 
 day stormed blindly over and beyond these moderates. 
 
 The grain of truth which the doctrines of animal magnetism 
 concealed soon disappeared in the turbid sUme of vulgar 
 superstition. A morbid impulse towards the imsearchable led 
 the science astray before it had really made itself at home 
 in the searchable ; fantastical books disclosed the secret of 
 " vital force," which was regarded as a specific substance. 
 Gall's doctrine of the skull also regained numerous supporters, 
 especially now that the court natural philosopher Cams knew 
 how to advocate it in the fashionable world. When young 
 officers entered the military academy of BerUn, General 
 Miiffling regularly had their heads examined by a phrenologist 
 in order to discover their special talents. If a portrait painter 
 became fashionable, he ornamented his figures with unnaturally 
 high foreheads, in token of genius. An English admirer once 
 sent Goethe a bust whose head strongly suggested water on 
 the brain; it seemed to the poet as if the sculptor, from a 
 study of the principles of the doctrine of the skull, had had 
 an infalUble a priori knowledge what the prince of poetry 
 looked like. Men of all parties became immersed in this dream- 
 life. The clever Jewish physician Koreff lured the aging 
 Prussian chancellor into the labyrinth of mesmerism ; and 
 Wangenheun, too, the leader of the liberals in the Bundestag, 
 was one of the high priests of natural philospohy. Rationalism 
 predominated, however, in the hberal world ; the faith in 
 wonders found most of its disciples in the ranks of the conserv- 
 
 320 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 ative parties. In France also the two most zealous apostles 
 of somnambulism, Bergosse and Puysegur were numbered among 
 the hotspurs of legitimacy. The academic teaching bodies 
 could never completely overcome their mistrust of the fantastic 
 caprices of the natural philosophers : the university of Berlin 
 obstinately refused an appointment to the talented enthusiast 
 Steffens ; and for the first time a serious dispute broke out 
 between the state authority and the yoimg university when 
 Hardenberg despotically appointed his favourites Koreff and 
 Wohlfahrt as ordinary professors. Quite undisturbed, meanwhile, 
 about the approval of the great world, Heinrich Schubert 
 pursued his modest way, the most lovable and most guileless 
 of the students of natural philosophy, traditionally pious, 
 as was the custom at home in the parsonage in the Erzgebirge, 
 a worthy example of Christian love and tolerance. When in 
 his thoughtful and amiable manner he wrote about the 
 Symbolism of Dreams and the Night-side of Nature, the pious 
 were greatly edified. ^| 
 
 The figure of Alexander von Humboldt rose like a moun- 
 tain peak out of the fog-laden sea of romanticist natural science, 
 a peak already illuminated by the sunshine of a new day. 
 When still quite yoimg, pressing forward far in advance of his 
 time, he had spontaneously moved from the aesthetic to the 
 scientific view of the universe. The genuine precision of 
 inductive research, which the natural sciences had altogether 
 lost, and which was first regained by historians through the 
 work of Savigny and Niebuhr, was in Hmnboldt's blood. So 
 strong was his tendency towards objective knowledge that 
 from the first to him facts alone were vaUd. He sharply 
 distinguished that which had been proved from that which was 
 merely hypothetical, and nothing distressed him more pro- 
 foundly than the arrogance of the speculator who will never 
 admit ignorance, who will never modestly leave a phenomenon 
 unexplained. Consequently in the circles of the aesthetic 
 idealists, where reaUty was despised as a burdensome restriction 
 imposed upon the free spirit, he appeared at first like a stranger 
 from another world. Schiller regarded the brother of his 
 beloved Wilhehn as a mere collector, and complained that this 
 naked, incisive inteUigence, utterly devoid of imaginative power, 
 shamelessly supposed itself to have taken the measure of nature. 
 Since that time the Germans had long recognised what a 
 power of imagination animated this genius of empirical science. 
 
 321 Y 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Alexander Humboldt was not indeed capable of masterly predic- 
 tion of the course of research, but his mind was one which 
 could combine thousands of carefully investigated details to 
 constitute a living unity, so that with fraternal pride Wilhelm 
 Humboldt exclaimed to his younger brother : " From that 
 which you have so brilliantly observed, you weave a magnifi- 
 cent girdle encompassing the world-all I " Moreover, Alexander 
 Humboldt stood far nearer to Wilhehn's ideahsm than Schiller 
 had believed, for the younger, like the elder, found the only 
 genuine content of universal history in the evolution of the 
 human spirit, the sole difference being that, in Alexander's 
 estimation, contemplation, construction, and imaginative repro- 
 duction were of less importance than research. Alexander, too, 
 like Wilhehn, could boast of "a free spirit, never restricted 
 by the present," a spirit which ever worked on great Unes, 
 and which amid the laborious investigation of details never 
 lost sight of the whole. " He really endeavours," said Wilhelm 
 Humboldt of his brother, " to comprehend all solely in order to 
 search out one thing which is accessible only from all sides 
 at once." Knowledge seemed to him the highest of all goods ; 
 all the energies of his soul were dominated, absorbed, as it 
 were, by the one comprehensive impulse for knowledge. Neither 
 love nor any other strong personal passion ever disturbed his 
 investigations ; he never chose anyone for a friend who could 
 not collaborate with him in the great work of his hfe. 
 
 Thus the fine and intimate relationship between the brothers 
 remained rather a community of spirits than a league of hearts. 
 Their mutual confidence increased with the years, in proportion 
 as Wilhelm passed from his aesthetic labours to the study of 
 comparative philology, and thus approximated to his brother's 
 circle of ideas. In the friendly alliance between the two, the 
 idea of the universitas literarum gained flesh and blood ; this 
 alliance displayed to the world the indestructible unity of the 
 exact and the historical sciences, of the enmity between which 
 petty minds are accustomed to prate. Alexander could not 
 probe so deeply into the hidden abysses of the spiritual Hfe as 
 could the weightier and more strongly equipped genius of Wilhelm, 
 nor could the younger brother climb so boldly to the heights 
 of speculation as could the elder, whilst pure mathematics were 
 remote from the direction of Alexander's mind. On the other 
 hand he excelled his brother and all his contemporaries in the 
 wonderful mobility and receptivity of a restless intelligence, 
 
 322 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 which was able to adopt and assimilate everything which men 
 had ever studied and thought. 
 
 In Alexander Humboldt the cosmopolitan tendency of the 
 German spirit foimd fuller expression than ever before except 
 in the case of Leibnitz. He regarded it as his vocation to 
 store up and to master the entire intellectual content of the 
 epoch, to serve all nations as an intermediator of modem 
 culture, as a teacher of humanity. No one understood so 
 perfectly how to discover and encourage men of talent. With 
 unwearied and amiable zeal he gave to all out of the abundance 
 of his ever living and ever ready knowledge. Goethe compared 
 him to a fountain with many jets, under any one of which a 
 vessel may be held to secure an immediate, fresh, and inex- 
 haustible supply. Even the weaknesses of character which he 
 shared with Leibnitz were advantageous to his vocation as 
 intermediator. When Uke a supple courtier he agreed with 
 everyone, overwhelming all without distinction with a flood of 
 adulation, he unceasingly acquired thereby new well-wishers 
 and assistants for the cause of universal culture, which could 
 thrive only through the work of all. When he enjoyed and 
 fostered his own world-wide reputation with Unconcealed vanity, 
 his brilliant name served him as a means to direct the attention 
 of the great ones of the earth to the value of the innumerable 
 scientific imdertakings he supported with cordial advocacy. In 
 case of need he intervened on behalf of the threatened free- 
 dom of research far more courageously than had Leibnitz, 
 and whilst the whole world paid him homage, at heart he 
 always remained a German. No one knew better than he the 
 defects of our young civilisation, our poverty and pettiness, and he 
 watched with quiet joy how step by step the Germans approximated 
 more closely to the older civilisation of the neighbour peoples. 
 
 Like all great travellers he began in early childhood to 
 yearn for the immeasurably remote. When in the palm-house 
 at Potsdam he looked up at the magnificent expanse of fans, 
 the wonder-world of the tropics rose alluringly before his vision. 
 The boy's dreams were gloriously fulfilled by the man. Accom- 
 panied by his faithful comrade Bonpland, he wandered during 
 five rich years through the interior of South and Central 
 America ; the friends climbed Chimborazo, and passed many 
 months, cut off from the world, in the untrodden primasval 
 forest of the Orinoco. When Humboldt returned, he was the 
 one and only German who in those Napoleonic days acquired 
 
 323 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the undivided admiration of the foreign world. Even among 
 the French conquerors his reputation maintained the honour of 
 the Genrian name ; Bonpland's fellow countrymen could find 
 no higher praise for their compatriot than to describe him as 
 the collaborator of the German investigator. Humboldt now 
 settled in Paris, where intercourse with Laplace, Arago, Cuvier, 
 and Gay-Lussac offered him a fruitful exchange of ideas, such 
 as a student of nature could as yet find nowhere in Germany. 
 AU thronged round the bewitching conversationist, when he 
 appeared in the salon at the close of a laborious day, and when 
 by brilliant observations, anecdotes of travel, novelties of the 
 day, and mischievous jokes, he entertained the company far 
 into the night. 
 
 His repute rose still higher when intercourse between France 
 and Germany revived after the war. He was now regarded by 
 the Parisians as the natural representative of German science ; 
 on the Seine all his fellow countrymen sought his protection, and 
 his favourable word was often of more account than that of the 
 official diplomats. In twenty-nine great volumes he gradually 
 communicated to the world the results of his American travels. 
 The record of his journey was an unrivalled specimen of strictly 
 scientific descriptive work. Here were first demonstrated the 
 geognostic differences between the two hemispheres; here first 
 was taught the drawing of geographical sections displaying 
 elevation, and how to determine the mean altitude of continents, 
 the astonished readers being shown how trifhng is the elevation 
 of the mountains in comparison with the general elevation of the 
 mainland. Humboldt founded the science of the geography of 
 plants, and by the recognition of isotherms (1817) he opened the 
 road for the new science of meteorology. In discovery and 
 inventive genius Humboldt was rivalled by some of his Parisian 
 friends, but not one of them could command so wide an outlook. 
 The same man who astonished experts by the detailed pre- 
 cision of his barometrical observations of altitude, was the 
 first to give historians an insight into the civiUsation of the 
 American aborigines, and also a clear picture of Spanish colonial 
 policy ; and, like Boeckh, he put the poHtical economists to shame 
 by a masterpiece of comparative statistics, his investigations 
 mto the available supply of the precious metals. To Humboldt's 
 example and personal instruction, Ritter, too, owed his first 
 intimations regarding the true task of geography. 
 
 Like Humboldt, his fellow countryman Leopold von Buch 
 
 .324 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 had amid the philosophical intoxication of the time retained 
 desire and energy for the observation of reality. He also was 
 an aristocrat, preserved by great wealth from the pettiness of 
 the life of German learning, but was of an utterly different 
 disposition from the brilUant conversationist of the Parisian 
 salons — an untutored genius, candid, solid, blunt, a plain-spoken 
 junker of the Mark. The vigorous pedestrian was at home in 
 all the mountainous comers of Europe from Lapland to "the 
 Abruzzi ; the minute ramifications of the mountains alongythe 
 much indented fiord of Christiania stood up as clearly before his 
 eyes as the modest sand-hills of his native Flaming. Through 
 his work and that of Humboldt geology was completely trans- 
 formed : they refuted the Neptunian theory of their common 
 teacher Werner, and proved the Plutonic origin of the highest 
 mountains. Goethe was distressed to see how his beloved 
 " realm of Poseidon " was thus demolished by the " mad 
 inrush " of Plutonism. The poet's love of earth was rooted in 
 his emotions. High as he stood above the fantastic imaginings 
 of the great mass of natural philosophers,] it was his poetical 
 view of the tmiverse which impelled him to the study of nature. 
 Not wholly without preconceptions did he approach geology and 
 the theory of colour, and however faithfully he observed every 
 natural phenomenon, ultimately he could accept nothing as 
 proved which conflicted with the fundamental conceptions of his 
 imperturbable wisdom of life. The Plutonic theory seemed to 
 him sinister, for he felt that the vesture of earth must have 
 been slowly formed, without any sudden cataclysms, out of the 
 moisture of life. ^ 
 
 If German nature-study could but succeed in restraining 
 philosophy within its proper bounds, it might well hope to over- 
 take the science of the neighbour nations. There was now no 
 lack of men of talent. Meckel of Halle had in comparative 
 anatomy now advanced far beyond Cuvier; Soemmering of 
 Munich had as early as 1810 maintained the possibility of the 
 electric telegraph ; whilst in Gottingen the mathematician Gauss 
 was already at work — despising the drudgery of teaching, 
 completely immersed in the ultimate problems of pure theory, 
 one to whom even Humboldt [looked up [with profound respect, a 
 man of all time, one of those' thinkers whose work first secures 
 full appreciation in the Ufe of subsequent generations. He knew 
 that mathematics was the queen of the sciences and that his 
 theory of numbers was the queen of mathematics. 
 
 325 
 
History of Germany 
 
 When in those days Hegel gave utterance to the saying that 
 philosophy brings forth ideas suited to the epoch, he had 
 at any rate rightly understood the character of his own time. 
 The powerful influence of the ideas of Schelling is displayed in 
 almost all the intellectual work of his day, alike in the fantastic 
 aberrations of natural science and in the fruitful discoveries 
 of the historian. His philosophical doctrines continued to 
 dominate German thought until in the twenties they were 
 dethroned by Hegel's system ; even the pecuUarly dignified 
 demeanour of this generation of learned men recalls the example 
 of the proud philosopher who so masterfully expelled the profane 
 from the threshold of the temple. In fact for the thinkers' 
 pride of the Germans it was hardly possible to furnish greater 
 satisfaction than was furnished by the teaching of this ever 
 impressionable spirit who maintained the identity of the real 
 and of the ideal, explaining nature as spirit made visible, and 
 spirit as nature invisible. The great problem of German philo- 
 sophy seemed to have been solved, the identity of being and 
 thinking to have been finally established. Fichte had seen in 
 nature no more than the stage for the ego, without elucidating 
 nature's independent life ; Schelling undertook to show the 
 twofold revelation of God in the concurrent spheres of nature 
 and history. In this way everything that was and is to be 
 became to him a living unity ; in the endless succession of 
 phenomena, the divine self-consciousness was unfolded. " From 
 the first wrestling of obscure forces down to the outpouring of 
 the highest juices of life there is at work an energy, a mutual 
 interplay, an unceasing impulse towards higher life." When 
 compared with Fichte's one-sided ideaHsm, this all-embracing 
 system seemed to exhibit the same magnificent superiority as 
 ^d the figure of Goethe beside that of Schiller — so long as the 
 observer failed to notice that the great edifice of thought was 
 not based on any secure foundation of proof, but reposed merely 
 upon the bold assumptions of a brilliant intelligence. 
 
 With Schelling began that morbid insolence of speculation 
 which was subsequently carried to a climax by Hegel, and 
 which was to become extremely deleterious to the austerity of 
 our science and even to the probity of our nation. Rejoicing 
 in its brilliant success, philosophy soon overstepped the secure 
 boundaries which the Kantian criticism had established. 
 Scorning to restrict itself to the province of enquiry and 
 examination, not content, as the love of wisdom, to occupy the 
 
 326 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 domain allotted to it by the ancients, philosophy now main- 
 tained itself to be one with its own object, with primal know- 
 ledge, to be one with morality, one even with poesy, from 
 which it had sprung, and to which it would ultimately return. 
 Whoever had attained to this lofty conception of the universe 
 no longer needed those proofs which the men of atomistic 
 learning had laboriously excavated from the mine-shafts of the 
 empirical world ; from the contemplation of this conception he 
 gained energy for the direct creation of nature, for the animation 
 of its mechanism with freedom. 
 
 During his stay in Jena, Schelling had for a long time 
 devoted himself entirely to the development of his system of 
 natural philosophy. It was not until in the year 1803 he 
 delivered his brilliant lectures upon The Method of Academic 
 Study, that he tinned to consider the second revelation of God, 
 the world of history. A happy instinct held him in harmony 
 with the general movement of the time. He now recognised 
 " that religion, the pubhc behef, hfe in the state, is the point 
 roimd which everything moves " ; and subsequently, in Wiirz- 
 burg, Erlangen, and Munich, he worked at the foundation of his 
 " historical philosophy." Natural philosophy was henceforward 
 left to his pupils, and soon degenerated completely into 
 mystical and magical trifling. Ennemoser, the thaumaturge, 
 foresaw the speedy coming of the day when the priests, the 
 fortunate and exclusive possessors of the magnetic art of 
 healing, would once more rule the people body and soul. The 
 master himself, however, entering the historic world, attained to 
 the most fertile and soundest idea of his life ; to his artist 
 spirit there truly came moments of illumination in which the 
 nature of things became directly manifest to his eyes. 
 
 From the contemplation of the eternal development of 
 historic life he derived with definite assurance that of which 
 Herder had had no more than a shadowy intimation, the 
 knowledge that law and religion are to be understood as mani- 
 festations of the world-constructive intelligence, and therefore 
 as necessary growths. The completed world of history was found 
 by him in the state, the great work of art which, Ufted high 
 above the individual will, was an end in itself, reaUsing the 
 harmony of necessity and freedom in the external life of reality. 
 Many valuable sa37ings enable us to recognise how profoundly he 
 had entered into the inner life of history. To his century, 
 proud of its culture, he uttered the warning : " An enlightened 
 
 327 
 
History of Germany 
 
 nation for which thought has become a universal solvent, when 
 getting rid of obscurity foregoes also strength, and loses that 
 barbaric principle which is the basis of all greatness and beauty." 
 But his philosophy of history was never completed. The early 
 acquirement of fame had in youth frequently misled him into 
 hasty production, and now that he had attained to maturity 
 this inclined him to a cautious silence. His proud spirit could 
 satisfy itself and a wondering world in no other way than by 
 the production of a perfect work. Again and again, amid the 
 scornful cries of his liberal opponents, he exclaimed, " No^ 
 will be seen what I have to say" ; again and again was his 
 great work upon the epoch announced but it was never 
 completed. For in the long run the hard facts of history were 
 uncongenial to his restless imagination. Of aU the epochs in 
 world-history that of " the future," which gives such free scope 
 for foreshadowing and prophecy, attracted him far more power- 
 fully than did the world of actual history. More than all, he 
 loved to devote himself to the contemplation of " the primaeval 
 age," describing, in sharp contrast to the absolute faith in 
 progress displayed by the apostles of " enUghtenment," how in 
 that epoch of primitive innocence fortunate mankind had 
 absorbed the secrets of religion from the instruction of lofty 
 spirits. Before long the inconstant man thrust history aside to 
 lose himself in the theosophical problems of the philosophy of 
 revelation. His ideas upon the history of philosophy lived on, 
 however, in the works of Savigny, Ritter, and Creuzer. 
 
 Sdielling, even when his fancy roamed into the infinite, 
 could never completely repudiate the mentality of the Swabian 
 Protestant. In the " Christian philosophy " of the Bavarian 
 Franz Baader, on the other hand, was revived all the bondage 
 of mediaeval scholasticism. The brilliant eccentric accepted 
 Catholic dogma as at once the precondition and the goal of his 
 thought, and yet attacked the papacy and the Jesuits just as 
 passionately as he attacked liberaKsm, the enlightenment, and 
 the omnipotence of the state ; he considered that he had 
 discovered the mystical triangle, the true Catholicism, in the 
 union of the Roman, the Greek, and the Protestant churches. 
 He thought out a dynamic philosophy which was to replace 
 what he regarded as the mechanical systems of his predecessors. 
 For the ethics of Kant, not based upon the teaching of the 
 Saviour, and therefore ncapable of bringing salvation, he pro- 
 posed to substitute a new system of ethics, based upon physics 
 
 328 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 and religion ; and although he refuted with apt phrases many of 
 the aberrations of superficial hberal reasoning, he involved 
 himself in such a tangle of magic ideas, that even Steffens, most 
 enthusiastic and faithful of romanticists, found it impossible to 
 accept the grotesque imaginings of the Munich mystagogue. 
 Just as at one time he had incited Czar Alexander to found the 
 Holy Alliance, so throughout life he sought salvation for the 
 nations in an obscure mingling of religious and poUtical ideas ; 
 his ideal of the state was " genuine theocracy." From Kant, 
 most German of philosophers, romanticist extravagance turned 
 away in alarm. In place of Kant, Jacob Boehme was once 
 again honoured as the philoso-phus feutonicus, Boehme, the 
 thoughtful theosophist enthusiast, who had long before preached 
 to the disorderly generation of the Thirty Years' War his 
 mystical " Everywhere canst thou see God ! " In the spring 
 campaign of 1813, when Fouqu6's regiment was engaged in a 
 skirmish near Landskrone, the romanticist poet exclaimed in 
 ecstasy : " Here it would be sweet to die, in view of this 
 sacred mountain upon whose summit God Almighty first appeared 
 to the shoemaker of Gorlitz. 
 
 Whither had they vanished, those days of the all-powerful 
 enhghtenment, when the conflicting creeds seemed about to 
 expire, when all ecclesiastical life seemed overgrown by temporal 
 culture, and when the possible disappearance of Christianity was 
 discussed with philosophic unconcern by its friends and its 
 enemies alike ! The shattering experiences of the epoch of the 
 Revolution had reawakened the reUgious sentiment slumbering in 
 every nation ; but together with the living faith there 
 reawakened hierarchical aims which had long been supposed 
 extinct, and the gloomy passions of rehgious hatred, fanaticism, 
 and superstition were revived. With each successive year, the 
 new century proved to be in sharper contrast with its prede- 
 cessor, to be an epoch of unending religious contentions, 
 confused and riven asunder to a degree which had hardly 
 been exceeded by any other century in religious history. 
 It was rich in healthy spiritual Hfe, but was no less rich in 
 unbelief, worldly-mindedness, indifference, and despair ; it was 
 full of quiet yearning for a purer form of Christianity, and 
 yet was at the same time incompetent to effect a reconcilia- 
 tion between the embittered religious and anti-religious 
 parties, which were held within bounds only by the sense of 
 
 329 
 
History of Germany 
 
 their own weakness and by the imperious need for repose in 
 'Civic life. Nowhere was the confusion of these rehgious contrasts 
 •so motley and multiform as in the homeland of the Reforma- 
 tion, which had of old been used to treat questions of faith 
 with serious earnestness, and to express conscientious convictions 
 ^with perfect freedom. The German nation became divided into 
 two camps of straightforward believers and straightforward free- 
 thinkers ; in this country the number of deliberate hypocrites 
 remained small. 
 
 Since average culture invariably lags a few paces behind the 
 advance of science, among the mass of Protestant pastors and 
 among the cultured laity there still prevailed that easy-going 
 philanthropic rationaUsm which, with a rigidly working intelli- 
 gence, simply discarded from the realm of dogma everything 
 that was " irrational," and which in its self-complacency failed 
 to observe that in throwing away the husk it had also thrown 
 away the kernel of the Christian faith, had thrown away even 
 the profound doctrines of sin and redemption which had ever 
 been dear to the Germanic temperament. It was through this 
 doctrine of salvation that in former days Christianity had made 
 its first appeal to the hearts of the Teutons, who alone among 
 all the pagan peoples already believed in the coming rebirth of 
 the sinful world. When Luther undertook the purification of 
 the secularised Church, he started from the contrite recogni- 
 tion of personal sin ; in what definite terms, too, had Kant 
 spoken of the essential sinfulness of the human race. Ordinary 
 rationalism now hardly remembered these fundamental ideas of 
 Christianity, but cherished an ingenuous belief in the goodness 
 of human nature, finding satisfaction in a mundane doctrine of 
 salvation by works, salvation through bourgeois business honesty. 
 Yet this rationalism was devoid alike of the courage and of the 
 scientific energy requisite for advance along the steep path which 
 had once been indicated by Lessing and the Wolfenhuttel Fragments, 
 and for the assimilation of the critical methods of the new 
 philological study of saga ; it did not venture a serious examina- 
 tion of the historical origins of the New Testament, but took the 
 Bible for granted, and contented itself with the reinterpretation 
 of texts in such a way as to make them exhibit a specious 
 harmony with the laws of nature. 
 
 The loudest and most intolerant representative of this ten- 
 dency was Paulus, professor at Heidelberg. Born some years 
 before Schelling, in the parsonage at Leonberg in Swabia, 
 
 330 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 Schelling's own birthplace, he was the deadly enemy of his 
 countryman, and of all doctrines which in any way transcended 
 plain reason. What a delight it was to him as a free-thinker 
 to explain the Resurrection as the awakening from an apparent 
 death, and the miracle of Cana as the successful practical joke 
 of a froUcsome wedding guest. Many rationaUstic teachers even 
 called to their aid the esoteric doctrines of the natural philo- 
 sophers, describing the Saviour as a physician with magnetic 
 powers, for to minds of this order the natural miracle always 
 seems more endurable than the supernatural. The old faith- 
 inspired hymns alarmed their jejune faintheartedness ; these 
 hymns were weakened by fooUsh modifications, or cut altogether 
 out of the hymnal. How much more decent than the forceful 
 " eternity, thou thunder-word " sounded the new and well-bred 
 rationaUst h5min, " Death ends not all, this reasons prove ! " 
 From the first the Protestant church had neglected ritual for 
 doctrine. Under the dominion of rationalism, religious service 
 lost everything which quickened the emotions and roused the 
 imagination, and at the same time spiritual teaching sank to the 
 level of mere secular instruction. The pulpit orators no longer 
 understood how to fortify and uplift burdened consciences, how 
 to provide consolation from the wealth of scriptural promise ; 
 they devoted themselves to broad moral considerations, elucidat- 
 ing what the rational Christian mtist think about individual 
 dogmas, and did not even despise the use of consecrated buildings 
 for giving well-meant advice on the cultivation of potatoes and 
 the breeding of sheep. The churches were deserted, men of 
 inteUigence could no longer breathe in this thin atmosphere. 
 The duty of caring for souls was neglected ; upon any trifling 
 excuse the enUghtened pastors and consistories would grant 
 permission for divorce. The old supematuralism with its faith 
 in revelation, which had flourished especially in Wiirtemberg 
 under the leadership of the prelate Bengel, also became infected 
 with the arid rationalism of the day. Both schools Uved on 
 terms of false peace with science, tacitly assuming the existence of 
 a necessary harmony between faith and knowledge. Both con- 
 tinued to move in a circle of ideas which the Uving forces of 
 literature had long since abandoned. The barren dispute regard- 
 ing the rationality of individual dogmas touched the externals 
 only of religion, not its essence. 
 
 Meanwhile Schleiermacher educated a new school of 
 theologians who learned from the master how to keep pace 
 
 331 
 
History of Germany 
 
 once more with the young scientific life of the nation. He had 
 formerly uttered the rousing call which summoned the cultured 
 despisers of religion back to the faith, and which Hfted the con- 
 sciousness of God into the world of feeling, above the domain 
 of knowledge and activity. Now, furnishing a scientific equip- 
 ment for this fruitful basic idea in numerous writings and in his 
 masterly lectures at Berhn, he became the renovator of theology, 
 the greatest of all our theologians since the century of the 
 Reformation ; and even to-day no German theologian gains 
 internal freedom unless he has first come to terms with the 
 ideas of Schleiermacher. 
 
 The secret of enduring spiritual efficiency is found chiefly 
 in the harmonious conjunction of apparently conflicting gifts, 
 and rarely indeed has a creative mind been at once so multi- 
 form and so harmoniously constructed as that of this Proteus 
 who in three fundamentally diverse epochs, the aesthetic, the 
 patriotic, and the scientific, faithfully reflected all the transforma- 
 tions of Berlin life, and yet never sacrificed his own individuality. 
 He received his first decisive impressions among the contemplative 
 enthusiasts of the Hermhut Brotherhood, and to the end of his 
 life he enjoyed the consciousness of personal communion with 
 the Saviour; but his religious fervour was kept within bounds 
 by an incisive understanding which was master of all dialectic 
 arts, and was prone to manifest itself in the form of sarcasm. 
 At one time, when he wrote his Letters upon Schlegel's Lucinde, 
 he had wandered far afield in the false sentimental enthusiasm of 
 romanticism, but had none the less preserved a piirity of heart 
 which as the years passed gradually came to illumine his entire 
 nature, and made the inconspicuous little man seem Uke a 
 patriarch. The translator of Plato was at home in all the 
 depths of speculation, and was consequently in a position to 
 fight philosophy with its own weapons, as soon as it was auda- 
 cious enough to substitute the derivative for the primary and to 
 base its explanation of the world of sensation upon the world 
 of concepts. Everything that is human he endeavoured to 
 treat from the religious outlook, and to utilise on behalf of 
 theology all the science of the age; and yet he could not live 
 without fulfilling the popular function of the preacher. Around 
 his pulpit there continued to assemble the best society of Berlin, 
 but his heartfelt oratory edified even the poor in spirit. How 
 admirable did he seem to everyone when he personally delivered 
 the funeral oration over the coffin of his little son Nathanael, 
 
 332 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 so profoundly afflicted concerning the fragment of his own life 
 which lay before him, and yet so strong in the consolation 
 which alone consoles. Whoever read his profoundly moving letters 
 to the good Gass, the Breslau theologian, or whoever saw him 
 in personal intercourse with his numerous friends, so lovingly con- 
 siderate of each one's pecuUarities, could readily beheve that this 
 impressionable nature demanded nothing more than the intimacies 
 of private intercourse ; and yet Schleiermacher could not do 
 full justice to his powers anjrwhere else than in public Ufe, and 
 in the days of poMtical lassitude his sense of the state remained 
 just as keen as it had been in the period of patriotic enthusiasm. 
 His opponents, and those unfamiliar with his personality, cen- 
 sured him for his chameleonic changes of colour, and yet when- 
 ever it seemed to him that some sacred possession of the nation 
 was in danger he showed himself a man true as steel, perfectly 
 consistent in character, as with thoughtful candour he tranquUly 
 took his place in the arena. 
 
 The fundamental thought of the Reden iiber die Religion was 
 closely akin with the ideas of the new historical science. If the 
 roots of religion were to be sought in the emotional life, it 
 inevitably followed that the manifestations of the consciousness 
 of God must be manifold. Consequently dogmas assumed the 
 aspect of subjective emotional truths, of utterances of the pious 
 emotional sensibiUty regarding its conceptions^ of God. Upon 
 theology was imposed the new task of comprehending in their 
 historical necessity these configurations of Christian sensibility. 
 Theology wels no longer to engage in a hateful polemic, contest- 
 ing and condemning individual creeds of Christendom, but was 
 to endeavour to understand them all as higher or lower forms 
 of Christian self-consciousness — for Schleiermacher also after his 
 own maimer, and independently of ScheUing and Savigny, had 
 acquired an understanding of historical development, and had 
 drawn a sharp distinction between that which had come into 
 existence through human nature, and that which man himself 
 had made. 
 
 Therewith he effected in the domain of theology a similar 
 rectification of frontiers to that which Kant had once effected 
 in the domain of philosophy ; he secured for theology a ground 
 upon which it could acquire no less incontestable scientific 
 results than were acquired by all the other historical disciplines. 
 He conceived Christian freedom in a spirit as wide as that 
 exhibited by Luther in his first writings, for he held that the 
 
 333 
 
History of Germany 
 
 living consciousness of God had nothing to fear from free historical 
 and philosophical research. Christian sentiment was to him 
 nothing else than humanity in full perfection, and it was there- 
 fore impossible that this sentiment could come into conflict with 
 any justified human aim. Just as emphatically did he insist on 
 the truth that all reUgion is positive, and that the pious sense 
 of dependence can be kept alert only in the community of the 
 faithful. In ethics, with a freer spirit than Kant's, he allowed 
 personaUty its full rights : it was not suppression of nature 
 which to him seemed moral, but the enhghtenment of nature by 
 the living spirit ; nor did he conceal his opinion that the virtue 
 of Christian self-denial must be supplemented by the classical 
 virtue of self-assertion. The weaknesses of his teaching were 
 displayed as soon as he endeavoured to demonstrate which of 
 the facts of sacred history are necessarily contained in the 
 Christian consciousness ; then he was betrayed into subtleties, 
 and had to learn how impossible it is to deduce positive dogmas 
 directly from the abstract idea. Yet how little significance for 
 him had dogmas and ritual when compared with the blessing of 
 reUgious community ! When the struggles about evangelical 
 union broke out he was the most valiant defender of a free 
 ecclesiastical constitution and of the alliance of the Protestant 
 confessions. 
 
 Among the laity also, signs of a more active Christian Ufe 
 showed on all hands that the dominion of rationaUsm was 
 passing. It could not be forgotten how thoughtfully in the 
 days of the great news of victory the German army had listened 
 to the words of the poet : " Canst grasp the word of blessing 
 that comes from near and far ? Art not thereby overwhelmed, 
 thou people of the Lord ? " Even the children of this world 
 had then felt to the depths of their souls the simple truth that 
 pious nations alone are free and vaUant. The spirited hjrnins to 
 " the old German God " did not anjrwhere breathe a definite 
 religious party spirit, but they displayed a profound joy in the 
 consciousness of God which had nothing in common with the 
 inner poverty of rationahsm. In most of the men who with a 
 clear consciousness had lived through that epoch of God's judgment 
 there remained for all time a heightened religious feeling, equally 
 whether, hke Stein, Amdt, Savigny, and Aster, they found peace 
 in the faith of their fathers, or, like Niebuhr, sought longingly 
 for faith. Martial-minded youths, finally, wore silver crosses 
 in their Teutonic caps, and were overwhelmed by enthusiasm 
 
 334 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 for Christianity ; since the days of the Reformation the German 
 universities had not seen any generation of students so seriously 
 concerned about questions of religion. It was true that the 
 Christianity of the ardent Teutonisers was free neither from 
 disagreeable boasting nor from a Puritan lack of good taste : 
 the prayer at the opening of the evening wine party did not 
 always prevent the meeting so reverently begtm from degenerat- 
 ing into a wild carouse ; and with full justice did the Berlin 
 pubHc take forcible measures against the young barbarians when 
 the students on the occasion of a representation of Zacharias 
 Werner's Weihe der Kraft, greeted the appearance of Martin 
 Luther with the loud cry, " The reformer of the stage ! " To 
 many of the noisy Christo-Germanic enthusiasts reUgion served 
 merely as a pohtical catchword now that Germanism and 
 Christianism were regarded as synonymous ; while to some it 
 was simply a cloak for the hatred of the Jews which was now 
 in fashion. 
 
 Nevertheless there was a sound kernel to the reUgious. 
 enthusiasm of the younger generation. The Germans at length- 
 recognised how intimately their entire civilisation Wcis linked; 
 with Christianity, and the effects of this recognition were so far- 
 reaching that frankly pagan sentiments like those which had! 
 formerly been cherished by Winckelmann soon became impossible 
 to the children of the new time. Young men thronged round 
 the teachers who displayed an understanding of the yearn- 
 ing for religious emotion. In Heidelberg, Daub, a "pious and 
 brilHant mystic and an intimate friend of Creuzer, endeavouring 
 to re-estabUsh dogma through speculation, soon had more 
 adherents among the students than had the rationalists. His 
 followers compared him with Hamann, and spoke of him as the 
 " Magus of the South." In Jena, Fries, a philosopher devoid of 
 acuteness or profundity, nevertheless won the hearts of the 
 students because with honest patriotism and scientific 
 earnestness he combined a no less upright piety. For some 
 years his dialogue Julius and Euagoras remained the favourite 
 work of edification of the Teutonising students, for here the 
 philosophy of Kant and the religious fervour of the Hermhut 
 Moravians were juxtaposed with the same innocence and imme- 
 diacy as in the heads of the youthful readers. 
 
 Almost in every German province there still existed a few 
 strictly reUgious communities which adhered faithfully to their 
 thoroughly orthodox pastors, opposing a passive but insuperable 
 
 335 
 
History of Germany 
 
 resistance to the ill-favour of the rationalistic consistories. This 
 was^the case especially in the Wupper valley and among the 
 pensive Swabians, but also in Saxony, Pomerania, and Old 
 Prussia. In Breslau, those of strict reHgious views assembled 
 round Hendrik Steffens, the worthy but unstable enthusiast who 
 knew how to fuse the rigid Lutheranism of his Norwegian home 
 with the imaginative pictures of German romanticist philosophy. 
 In the fashionable society of Berlin, certain gifted young men, 
 who formerly as officers " had in war been led to the Lord," 
 founded a private circle of behevers : this numbered among its 
 members the brothers Gerlach, LancizoUe, Le Coq, Thadden, 
 Senfft-Pilsach, Goetze, and Carl von Roeder. Here the crown 
 prince passed edifying hours which were to prove momentous 
 in the formation of his rehgious and pohtical views ; here he 
 secured assistance for his imwearying works of benevolence; and 
 here also the plan for the foundation of the Berlin missionary 
 union was first mooted. In all works of Christian charity 
 the rehgious tendency showed itself far superior to a flabby 
 rationalism ; strongly religious was Oberlin the Alsatian, the 
 never-to-be-forgotten benefactor of the Steintal, and a religious 
 man was Falk of Weimar, who was the first to open a home 
 for orphan children. Nor was there any lack of Mghly gifted 
 preachers ; in Holstein, the memory persisted for decades of 
 the vigorous eloquence with which Clause Harms, the fiery 
 Lutheran zealot, discoursed to his peasants in the local dialect. 
 In the north, the " Wandsbecker Bote," the tender-hearted old 
 Claudius, and on the Upper Rhine the devout Jung Stilling, 
 were regarded as the leaders of the pious. Both of these men 
 died at the very beginning of the years of peace, but their 
 words and example continued to exercise a powerful influence. 
 Pietism and the strict religious parties gained ground more and 
 more, especially in the country districts, until at length the 
 authorities of the Church were forced to take these new powers 
 into account. 
 
 The natural reaction against the superficiahty of rationalism 
 had begun, but even in this first stage of a vigorous religious 
 life there were manifest certain morbid tendencies which must 
 inevitably prove injurious to the religious peace of our nation 
 with its parity of creeds. While many of the orthodox encoun- 
 tered the free manifestations of Protestantism with unchristian 
 severity, and passionately opposed evangelical union, they were 
 attracted, consciously or unconsciously, towards the Roman 
 
 336 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 church. In 1818, Beckedorff of Bemburg, tutor in the princely 
 family, and one of the most notable of the Lutheran pietists, 
 published letters upon the reunion of the Christian Churches, and 
 although Roman Catholic sentiment was expressed in every line 
 he secured the warmest approval of his co-religionists — until, a 
 few years later, he went over to Rome. The convert Friedrich 
 Stolberg wrote a Geschichte der Religion Jesu ChrisH, Catholic 
 through and through, but it was loudly praised in the conven- 
 ticles of the Evangelical pietists, and the bookseller Perthes, a 
 faithful Protestant, son-in-law of the " Wandsbecker Bote," 
 zealously circulated the work. Max von Schenkendorf, singer 
 of the War of Liberation and an intimate friend of Jung Stilling, 
 went so far as to voice the glories in enthusiastic poems of the 
 fanatical leader of the Catholic league, " the firm and faithful 
 Max of Bavaria." In addition, now in one place and now in 
 another, people were disturbed by the ghost-seeing, the second 
 sight, and the prophetic ecstasies, of all kinds of enthusiasts. 
 Most of them were connected in some way with the Moravian 
 Brethren ; they flourished luxuriantly where the soil had been 
 aptly prepared by rationalism. The vague excitement which in 
 periods of great and fateful transformation always seizes the 
 mass of the people, co-operated with the follies of the natural 
 philosophers. Just as, after Luther's appearance, the peasants 
 dreamed of the millennium, so, after the overthrow of Napoleon, 
 revivalist preachers spoke of the fall of the black angel and of 
 the beast with seven horns. In all German-speaking lands, from 
 the Upper Rhine to Livonia, a few mysterious exorcists and 
 pious sleep-walkers made their appearance ; in many instances 
 the emotional enthusiasm increased to the point of lunacy. 
 Frau von Kriidener travelled through Switzerland, Alsace, and 
 Baden, exhorting the people to repent and to feed the poor. 
 Although her sermons were as futile and maudlin as had been 
 her romance Valerie, she found adherents among the masses ; 
 Mettemich complained to her friend Czar Alexander that she 
 was disturbing the public peace, ' and the Badenese police had 
 ultimately to expel her as a demagogue. A lust for the miracu- 
 lous was in the air and thoughtful natures succumbed to it 
 most readily. Even Schleiermacher's excellent wife could not 
 do without edifying intercourse with a wonderful female 
 somnambulist, and her husband himself was not altogether 
 immune from this woman's influence. 
 
 » Krusemark's Report, Vienna, October 4, 1817. 
 
 ■ 337 ^ 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Just as rich' in contrasts was the life of the Catholic church. 
 The majority of Protestants 'were under the delusion that the 
 power of the Jjapacy had now been completely broken. How 
 was the Roman See ever to resume its designs for wofld- 
 dorhinion?' Oiily a few years before, the CathoUfc church in 
 France had been Restored solely by the power of the secular 
 arm, and it was by the grace of the allies that the sovereign 
 pontiff had so recently regained the heritage of Peter. The 
 much-tiried pope Pius Vll was generally regarded With good- 
 natured compassibri; not unhiixed with contempt ; the con- 
 servative parties hailed him as a useful ally in the struggle 
 with the 'revolution. Not even the protest of the Curia against 
 the decisions of the Vienna congrbss disturbed the unsuspecting 
 security of the governments. In all seriousness the question was 
 being discussed Whether after the death of PiUs VII another 
 pope would ever be elected! 
 
 In fact the well-bred mildness of the distinguished prelaltes 
 of the [eighteenth century lived on in a certain section of the 
 clergy. Whoever mdved in these crcles might readily imagiiie 
 that the antagonism of the creeds would by degrees spontaneously 
 disappear. Thfe Bible^societies of Kreuinach and NeuWied 
 were vigorously Supported by many Catholic priests of the 
 bishopric of Treves.^ In Breslau the members of each of the 
 two theological fkculties were accustomed to attend the disputa- 
 tions held by the'* sister chtiith,'" and as late as the year 1828 
 the prize ill a competitiotl instituted by the Catholic faculty of 
 Tiibingen Was won by the Protestant theologian David Friedrich 
 Strauss.' Amongst priests and laity Hoiitheirn's dream of a 
 German natioiial church continued to gain ' numerous adherents] 
 and there was frequently voiced a demand for the intrdductioii 
 of a German Hturgy- and for the abolition of the celibacy of the 
 priesthood. ' Many defenders of the omnipotence of the state 
 wished to apply to the Catholic church the territorial system of 
 Thoma^ius, and to treat priests as nothing mbre than "most 
 honourable state^servants." Heinrich Wessenberg, the spokes- 
 man of the movenien^ for a national church, had already intro- 
 duced German hyrrins into his diocese of Constance ; he regarded 
 the Protestants tolerantly as " the church of the left." Sailer; 
 the excellent prelate who *by example and precept reawakened a. 
 living piefty in the Catholic church of Bavaria, was more guarded 
 
 ^ Report of President von Ingersleben upon the state of affairs in the grand 
 duchy of the Lower Rhine, July '26, 1817. 
 
 338 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 in his dealings with the Roman See. But he also did not 
 hesitate to appeal pubUcly to the writings of Protestant theo- 
 logians. He lived on terms of intimate friendship with many 
 Protestants, sharing with them a veneration for Thomas a 
 Kempis, a knowledge of whom was revived in German Catholic 
 congregations through Sailer's traiislation. Overberg, too, the 
 Catholic pedagogue of Miinster, secured Stein's respect by his 
 apdstoHc gentleness ; and the no less strongly religious Boisser^es, 
 who looked upon art as merely the daughter of religion, continued 
 to keep in touch with the works of Protestant science. Just as 
 these men stood near to the views of the EvangeHcal pietists, 
 so on the other side Hermes, the theologian of Bonn, had 
 adopted the methods of Protestant rationalism, and attempted 
 the impossible task of upholding CathoUc dogma by the rational 
 demolistra:tions of the Kantian philosophy. His adherents 
 dominated the educational institutions on the Rhine, and 
 honourably endeavo^lred to preserve rehgious peace. 
 
 What a gulf between the ideas of these peace-loving men 
 and the plans of dominion which animated the Roman See. 
 HarcHy had Pius VII returned to the holy city when in the 
 buU of August 7, 1814, Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum, he 
 re-established the Jesuit order, and personally read the mass 
 In nomine J esu at the altar of St. Ignatius Loyola, where the 
 chisel of Le Gros had celebrated in boastful sculptvure the 
 triumph of the church over heresy. ^ When subsequently Czar 
 Alexander invited him to join the Holy Alliance, the pope 
 rejected the proposal, which could hardly have been seriously 
 meant, with all the pride of the rightful ruler of the world. 
 Soon afterwards, the Inquisition and the Index of prohibited books 
 were reintroduced, and the Bible-societies were declared to be 
 the Work of the devil. In the days of revolutionary oppression 
 the ancient church had displayed marvellous moral courage, 
 and had learned by experience that its most powerful energies 
 sprang from suffering. Now it shone with all the glory of 
 martjrrdom ; the romantic yearning of public opinion, and the 
 dread Which the courts felt for the revolution, were to her 
 advantage. In anti-papal England, for jthe first time since the 
 days of James II, a cardinal was able to appear in jfull canonicals. 
 The pleasing illusion of those enlightened persons who beheved 
 thdt the hew century had outgrown the passions of the religious 
 wars had just been plainly refuted by the Spanish War of 
 LibeMtion ;" and now, while the monarchs were still in Paris. 
 
 339 
 
History of Germany 
 
 there broke over southern France the madness of the White 
 Terror : the CathoHc mob stormed the houses of the Protestants 
 and murdered the heretics to the cry of, " Let us make black- 
 puddings of Calvin's blood ! " 
 
 With such a favourable wind, the bark of Peter was once 
 more in full sail. By the nature of things, the Roman See was 
 compelled, despite the pope's tender-heartedness, and despite the 
 prudence of his secretary Consalvi, to return step by step to the 
 ideas of the epoch of the counter-reformation. Quite incon- 
 spicuously the first Jesuits insinuated themselves once again into 
 Germany ; and the two-edged influence of secularisation was 
 soon manifest. The increasingly plebeian clergy had neither 
 possessions nor home, and was no longer, as had been the 
 wealthy and noble cathedral chapters of old, bound to the 
 fatherland by poUtical interest. When, at the Vienna congress, 
 Helfferich and the two other orators of the Catholic church gave 
 expression to their ultramontane views, they secured but little 
 support from the German clergy ; but since then, unnoticed, the 
 clerical party had grown from year to year. This party still 
 proceeded with cautious steps, for in all the German states the 
 officialdom regarded it with mistrust ; even Emperor Francis 
 and Mettemich, although they looked on militant Catholicism 
 as the natural ally of the Austrian party in the German realm, 
 were still, as strict absolutists, unwilling to listen to a word 
 about the independence of the church. The Jesuits, in order 
 to curry favour with the courts, now refurbished those Jacobite 
 doctrines which had once led the House of Stuart to destruction : 
 the Reformation, they said, was the ultimate source of all 
 revolutions, whereas the church was the fortress and support 
 of kingship, for the church taught passive obedience, and by her 
 mystical consecration she released the king-by-God's-grace of all 
 duties towards his subjects. 
 
 The most zealous adherents of the ultramontane party were 
 the numerous proselytes whom romanticism had led into the 
 Roman camp. Among these were numbered the talented 
 brothers Schlosser in Frankfort ; Count Stolberg in Holstein, 
 who was in close relationship with the clericals of the Miinster 
 region; and all the members of that powerful group of converts 
 who from Vienna despatched vigorous envoys into the German 
 realm. What a lamentable picture of intellectual decay was 
 now exhibited by Friedrich Schlegel ! In the days of his 
 aesthetic pride he had once said boastfully : "I think of 
 
 340 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 founding a new religion ; it is time ! " This same aesthetic 
 intoxication drove him, when he had given up the idea of 
 founding a new religion, into the arms of the Roman church, 
 accompanied by his brilliant wife Dorothea Mendelssohn and her 
 son Veit the Nazarene painter, and he was now fast-fixed in 
 the shackles of a complete system which had an answer ready 
 for every question that could be proposed. Wilhelm Humboldt 
 observed with disgust how this once open mind had become 
 tightly closed to everything ; how Schlegel could now discern 
 nothing but heretics on the one hand and faithful disciples on 
 the other, and could no longer take part in a free conversation, 
 modestly searching for truth. Owing to his increasing slothful- 
 ness Schlegel was of little use to the ultramontane propaganda. 
 Far more effective work was done by the Pomeranian Klinckow- 
 strom, an amiable romanticist enthusiast ; his school in Vieima 
 became the nursery of the clerical Austrian nobility. His 
 brother-in-law, Pilat of Augsburg, Catholic by birth, and married 
 to a convert, was editor of the Oesteneichischer Beobachter, 
 Mettemich's official journal. But in talent, activity, and 
 fanaticism, Adam Miiller excelled all the rest ; it seemed as if the 
 brilUant but fundamentally false sophist desired to wipe out the 
 stain of his Berlin origin by his raging fury against heretics ; 
 his hand was at work wherever there was evidence of Jesuit 
 intrigues throughout the north ; most of the pens which 
 defended the German policy of the Hofburg, belonged to this 
 circle of converts. Gentz alone could not make up his mind to 
 go over to Rome (although his detestation for Luther, the arch- 
 revolutionary, became ever more violent), for the nucleus of 
 his culture was too intimately associated with the Kantian 
 philosophy. 
 
 Enlightened Protestants had long become accustomed to these 
 numerous conversions, and they were first startled out of their 
 thoughtless indifference when it was reported that C. L. von 
 Haller of Berne had gone over to Rome. Who could take it 
 amiss in the case of the valiant publicist, the passionate enemy 
 of the Revolution, that as a logical outcome of his political 
 views he should be forced to a change of faith ? But Haller 
 kept his conversion secret, with the approval of the bishop of 
 Fribourg. Subsequently, as member of the council of Berne, he 
 took the official oath which pledged him to the protection of the 
 Reformed Church ; and when the unsavoury secret was at length 
 disclosed by others, in an open Leiter to my Family (1821) 
 
 341 
 
History of Germany 
 
 he declared unashamedly that he had remained silent on excel- 
 lent grounds, in order that his new vplume, , Die Geistlichen 
 Staaten, might exercise ^a stronger influence upon its readers, 
 "because it was appeirently written by a Protestant"! Seldom 
 have the moral principles j^of Jesuitry been more impudently 
 enimciated. A fine prospect now opened for religious peace, 
 when the apostate, amid the acclamations of the French legiti- 
 mist press, triumphantly declared that the world was now 
 divided between Cathohcs and the godless, that this one con- 
 version would be followed by thousands of others, until humanity 
 would be completely dehvered from the powers of the 
 ecclesiastical and of the political revolution. A flood of polemic 
 writings appeared. The gentle pulpit-orator Tzschimer. of 
 Leipzig, the rationaUst philosopher Krug, and other Protestants, 
 expressed their naive astonishment in straightforward words. 
 People beg£in to recognise upon how weak a foundation had 
 been estabhshed the. dominion of the much-vaunted "rational 
 Christianity," 
 
 The Catholic chmrch, like the Protestant, was afflicted with 
 the extravagances of crude superstition. Munich was the 
 acropolis of the CathoUc Magians. , In Bavaria, the, exorqisms 
 of the deceased Gassmer were still remembered ; now Baader 
 could boast of a daughter possessed of the devil. In Franqonia, 
 a cardinal of peasant origin made a progress through the villages 
 accompanied by a girl who was about to give birth to the 
 Saviour ; in the Black Forest, in Alpgau, among the rough 
 Hotzeners, the fanaticism of the Saltpeterers once more 
 became active ; out of Austria the fanatical sect of the Posch- 
 lianers invaded Bavaria, a disorderly rout which did not shrink 
 from rehgious murder and which could be controlled in no other 
 way than by severe pimishments. Among the crowd of pious 
 sorcerers a priest of distinguished origin. Prince Alexander 
 Hohenlohe, made himself conspicuous by impudent self-assurance. 
 When Pius VII was informed that by the power of prayer the 
 prince could heal those who were sick unto death, and that the 
 Franconian country-folk came to him in crowds, the pope, who 
 knew his man, said, shrugging his shoulders : " Questo far' dei 
 miracoU ! " In a boastful appeal, the miracle-monger informed 
 the princes of the Holy Alliance that it was not by force of 
 arms that the revolution would now be conquered, that educa- 
 tion must be reformed, that youth must be led back into the 
 bosom of the church. Here pious illusion proved no less irre- 
 
 342 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 sistibly infective than among the Protestants; even Sailer once 
 prayed devoutly at the bedside of the miraculous mm of Diilmen. 
 The irreconcilable harshness of religious contrasts, the utter 
 lack of peace characteristic of oiur religious Ufe, was displayed 
 with terrible clearness when a Uterary quarrel once more broke 
 out upon _the fervid soil of Heidelberg. . So many notable 
 representatives of fundamentally diverse teiidjencies Hved^in close 
 contact in this Uttle town, where differences of, opinion were 
 always fought out with deplorable bitterness. , In order to make 
 head against his opponents, . Daub and Creuzer, Paulus had 
 founded the periodical Sophronizon ; it was ably edited, and 
 soon attracted attention by its frank criticism of numerous 
 defects in state and church. Particularist Hberalism, which 
 divined nothing of the conditions of national power, and 
 rationalism, which would never take into aqcount the religious 
 sentiments of the believing temperameUjt, b9th found l^ere a plat- 
 form. When now Count Friedrich Stolberg published in ^dara 
 Miiller's ultra-conservative Staatsanzdger an incisive essay upon 
 the aberrations of the Zeitgeist, Voss, ^yriting in Sophronizon in 
 i8ig, gave vent to his feelings against thp conipanion of his 
 youth. "How did Fritz Stplberg come to put MmseU on the 
 side of slavery?" he fiercely demanded. As an old man he 
 wished to bear witness against the old man, because he wouM 
 soon have to answer for himself on the ; other , shore " where 
 neither knight nor parson | rules." Consequently he considered 
 himself discharged from all loyalty, [ffom all olsligatfon?, towards 
 the old friend to whom forty years earlier he had dedicated his 
 translation of the Odyssey; and with heartless roughness, 
 shamelessly disclosing the details of domestic Ufe, he described 
 how the count, even in the days when they had together been 
 youthful and enthusiastic njembers of the Hainbund [Poets' Club] 
 at Gottingen, had secretly inclined towards " hierarchic and 
 aristocratic coercive rule," until at length his, pride of nobility 
 and his disordered imagination had driven him into the wilder- 
 ness of Hildebrandian uncleanliness, " for the black barbarism 
 of the junkers, raging more fiercely than the Turk of old, now 
 threatens the enlightened nations." Apt observations upon 
 the futility of conversions, and upon ihe pious self -admiration 
 of the Stolberg circle, were lost in a sea of false accusations. 
 For beyond question Stolberg had been attracted to the Roman 
 church, not like Haller from the force of political conviction, 
 but through the reUgious impulsion of a weakly temperament, 
 
 343 
 
History of Germany 
 
 which could never find support in its own strength. The 
 keen insight of Goethe had long ago led him to regard the 
 soft-hearted man as an unconscious Catholic. 
 
 Like most of his contemporaries, Voss had formerly been 
 an enthusiast for the rights of man championed by the Revolu- 
 tion. Now, after the overthrow of the foreign dominion, the 
 old man's revolutionary sentiments, which during the War of 
 Liberation had not been openly displayed, flamed violently forth 
 once again. He mockingly spoke of Napoleon as the destroying 
 angel of the high-bom, and addressed to the friend of his youth 
 the question : 
 
 " Nobler the sons of the long sword whom in the ages long vanished 
 Virtues of dogs then adorned, shall we say virtues of wolves ? " 
 
 With this fanatical hatred of the nobility was associated the 
 mistrust of the rationalist for every form of religious life which 
 was not characterised by a limpid clarity. The grand inquisitor 
 of rationalism could account for the reawakening of the religious 
 sentiment in no other way than by regarding it as the result 
 of reckless agitation on the part of a secret society of parsons 
 and nobles. Not even the death of his old friend Stolberg, 
 which occurred shortly afterwards, softened his mood. Fierce 
 rejoinders from the intimates of the man he had attacked, and 
 new blusterous polemic writings by Voss, Paulus and Schott, and 
 Vamhagen, showed how impossible was any adjustment of 
 this disorderly dispute. Goethe found once more the right word 
 when he said : 
 
 " I feel confined, sadly I muse, 
 'Twixt flame and wave I dwell. 
 Like feelings as when I peruse 
 Dante's account of Hell." 
 
 This detestable feud had a profound and disastrous influence 
 upon German liberalism. Voss and his associates on the 
 Sophronizon were the first to maintain the opinion that tradi- 
 tional religious belief is intimately connected with belief in the 
 value of a hereditary nobility, that the free man respects only 
 " the truth which his mind has acquired for itself, and merit 
 which is won by personal service." Although the folly of this 
 proposition must have been manifest to everyone who knew the 
 religious fervour of the North American democracy, among the 
 Germans, with their love for systematised thinking, it secured a 
 
 344 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 considerable amount of support, and there gradually ensued a 
 morbid confusion of speech which has continued to fadsify 
 German party-life down to the present day. People began to 
 beUeve that which immediately after the holy war no one had 
 ventured to maintain, that rationaUstic or even auiti-reUgious 
 sentiments were the immistakable index of poUtical Uberalism ; 
 the two were simtdtaneously designated by the fine-sounding 
 name of free thought and in this way the governments, being 
 by nature conservative, were forced into close approximation to 
 the strictly religious parties. Even more deplorable in its 
 effects was the unfortunate example of a spirit of " enlightened " 
 intolerance, which discovered ever5rwhere priestly t5T:anny, blue- 
 blooded arrogance, or servile obedience, and which subsequently 
 secured its natural response in the animosity displayed in the 
 prosecution of the demagogues. 
 
 Hie most influential publicists of those days were likewise 
 animated by this spirit of narrow-minded intolerance. For 
 twenty years Carl von Rotteck was the highly esteemed 
 poUtical teacher of the South German bourgeoisie, simply 
 because he had neither energy nor desire to rise above the 
 average middle-class outlook. Although the honest man did 
 not woo popular favour, his views never failed to exhibit a 
 spontaneous harmony with " the imperious Zeitgeist." He took 
 the word from the mouths of the well-to-do townsmen and 
 peasants of the south, and with invincible courage, with the 
 fervent eloquence of conviction, armounced what all were 
 obscurely feeling. To his mother's French blood he owed 
 a facihty of expression rare at that time among German men 
 of learning; never wearjdng, he turned this way and that his 
 extremely modest provision of ideas, until to his readers every- 
 thing he alleged seemed luminous and incontestable. The 
 democratic ideas which had found their way into High Germany 
 in the days of the taking of the Bastille had since then under- 
 gone a quiet process of invigoration and had been widely diffused ; 
 the whole traditional ordering of the state had been destroyed 
 by the princes' revolution of the Napoleonic epoch, while among 
 the middle classes, resentment of the arbitrary rule of the Rhenish 
 confederate officials increased from year to year. Out of such 
 ideas and wishes, Rotteck, at a remarkably early date, immedi- 
 ately after the conclusion of peace, constructed his finished 
 ideal picture of an exemplary constitutional state. He believed 
 
 345 
 
History of Germany 
 
 himself to stand in the fqremost front; of time, and did not 
 suspect how strongly his own doctrine was influenced by the 
 .traditional, ideas which continued tp live on in the na,tion with 
 wonderful tenacity; like the feudal npbility in the good old 
 days, he regarded the centralised authority of the state as the 
 natural enemy of hberty. .AH who. did not share his views were 
 numbered among those " to whom a smile from a powerful 
 minister, a ribbon and a star, or a comfortable appointment, 
 are dearer than the common weal." When cpmpared, with 
 Savigny and .Niebuhr, Rotteck had the aspect of a scieintific 
 reactionaiyr, for, the .fundamental , ideas of, his theory belonged 
 essentially to ,the eighteenth century ; but with gfeat adroitness 
 he deduced from these antiquated prppositipns certain conse- 
 quences which; did in fact correspond with the practical needs 
 of the day. A partisan from top to tpe, accustomed from the 
 first to measure men and things solely with the foot-rule of 
 political doctrine, he had. Uved; .through; the, great age of our 
 literature .entirely without understanding it; to him Marquis 
 .Posa's enthusiasm for freedom was still, the, crown, of German 
 poesyr-what could Goethe, the, ;prince's lackey, show, to equal 
 this ? 
 
 Nevertheless, even ,this pohtical zealot could nqt, deny the 
 literary, origin of German Uberalism, for he too was irresistibly 
 attracted to tha;t Frenchman whp among the predecessors of the 
 Revolution had had the weakest pohtical intelligence, but had 
 at the same time been^ the most moving artist, and who was 
 therefore the most intimately akin, to German , culture. , From 
 Rousseau he learned the doctrines of popular soyereignty, and 
 universal equahty, and, also the childlike behef, in the^natural 
 innocence of man. , With the aid qf the Kantian natural law, 
 which approximated very closely to the views, of the Geneyese 
 philosopher, he then endeavqured to incorporate these ideas into 
 a system, although he regarded, philosophy as no more than the 
 interpreter of the healthy human, understanding. The third 
 source of his doctrine was the work upon the Umits of papal 
 authority written by Hontheim under the pen-name of Febronius. 
 Here Rotteck found a remarkable .mixture of zeal for enlighten- 
 ment and faith in Cathohc doctrine, one which was in conformity 
 with his own sentiments; here too he found the prototype for 
 the method , of his artificial. pqUtical demonstration, i Just as 
 Hontheim, a well-meaning precursor of the advocates of a 
 national church, simply, ignored the last centuries of ecclesiastical 
 
 346 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 history, , ascribed to the pope no more thaA a few modest 
 honorary rights, and yet was. by no means inclined to .attack 
 the papacy as an institution, so Rotteck deprived kingship of 
 all its important prerogatives, and yet believed that he was not 
 anti-monarchical. In all innocence and without any revolution- 
 ary arriire pensee, he preaqhed a revolutionary theory which was 
 utterly irreconcilable with the characteristics, of the German state 
 system. 
 
 The son of a loyal Austrian, he grew to manhood in the 
 beautiful district of Breisgau, during the days when the reforms 
 of Joseph II aroused enthusiasm among the enlightened Upper 
 Austrians. The system of making people happy by force always 
 remained for him the true expression of liberal policy. Subse- 
 quently he had had to endure, the painful , experience of seeing 
 his homeland united to Baden, and he now lived imder a 
 government which he long continued to regard . mistrustfully 
 as semi-foreign, in a state without a history, a state whose 
 institutions seemed the outcome of chance or caprice. Even 
 under the pressure of .the\ Napoleonic censorship, he had 
 continued manfully to express his love for the German father- 
 land; when the Uberators^ entered Baden, he immediately took 
 over the editorship of the Teutschen Blatter, and placed: the 
 paper at the disposal of the alhed headquarters. But he felt 
 qiiite at home only among his Alemannic i fellow-countrymen ; to 
 them were primarily devoted all his energies of tongue and pen, and 
 with genuine deUght he dedicated one of his books " toi all the 
 worthy , citizens, of Freiburg." When.the homely little man, in 
 the afternoons, as soon as his >york at , the university was 
 finished, climbed vigorously up the foot-hills of the Black Forest 
 to his httle vineyard of Schonehof , and thenqe looked down over 
 the charming valley and the beautiful towers, of. , the minster, 
 he felt that the. pearl of Germany lay beneath his eyes. Now 
 that this magnificent coimtry was blessed with the long-desired 
 rational constitution, he could think only with contempt ol the 
 distant north, which naturally, after the manner of his country- 
 men, he had never taken the trouble , to visit. He asked with 
 pride whether sunny Rhineland could rest content with 
 pohtical rights which might indeed suffice for gloomy Pome- 
 rania. The Alemanni of Baden found in Rotteck, as the 
 Swabians found in Uhland, all the characteristics, of their 
 own I nature : hardy candour, democratic obstinacy, Josephan 
 enlighteimient, but also provincial , limitations, naive ignorance 
 
 347 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of all the conditions of political power, and the self-satisfaction 
 of ingenuous particularism. " We must go and see Rotteck 
 about it," said the peasants of the Black Forest, when 
 complaints made to the officials proved unavailing. 
 
 Rotteck's reputation was first established among the middle 
 class by his Allgemeine Weltgeschichte. The book began to 
 appear in i5i2, and the sale increased with each successive 
 volume ; in the bourgeois houses of many small southern towns 
 the entire Ubrary consisted of Bible, prayer book, and Rotteck. 
 To the profoundly dissatisfied and yet politically helpless peoples 
 of the petty states, what could sound more agreeable than the 
 self-satisfied triviaUty of this historical wisdom, which knew 
 absolutely nothing of the determinism of historic life, but 
 deduced all the misfortunes of the nations solely from the 
 wickedness and the blindness of their rulers, and which frankly 
 declared that its highest aim was " to give expression to that 
 public opinion which is now manifesting itself with such force, 
 and whose manifestation affords such promise of ssdvation." 
 The arid rationalism of the eighteenth century historians was 
 here fused with the party passion of the new age. Rotteck 
 regarded the state only from beneath, with the eyes of the 
 ruled. He never asked himself how human affairs appear from 
 above, what ideas determine the actions of rulers, and what 
 obstacles rulers have to overcome. To him every prince, every 
 person in authority, was an object of suspicion. Even in 
 personal intercourse, the inveterate bourgeois could not endure 
 men of noble birth, and the sight of a uniform or of a 
 decoration made him uncomfortable. As Rotteck admitted in 
 one of his letters, his sympathies were alienated from Blucher 
 as soon as the old hero came to bear the princely title. 
 
 Never before had a German book voiced so bluntly the 
 worst weakness of modern democracy, the envious hatred of 
 everything that transcends vulgar mediocrity. In set terms, the 
 popular historian reproves Alexander the Great because this 
 " man of dust and clay made crushed nations the pedestal of 
 his fame " ; he angrily demands of the heroes of the crusades, 
 " by what right was Palestine conquered ? " To him the entire 
 course of universal history displayed in detestable monotony 
 the same painful tragedy : the ever-innocent people had all 
 through the centuries been maltreated by bloody tyrants, and 
 misled into wars to their common hurt ; then came the middle 
 ages to afflict mankind, " ten centuries of barbarism, savagery, 
 
 348 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 and gloom, a period equally lacking in charm and interest " ; 
 imtil finally the darkness was lightened by the popular heroes 
 of the American and French revolutions, and the imperious 
 Zeitgeist came into its own. 
 
 The frank self-complacency of the philosophical century was 
 here revived, but now it indued a poUtical dress. In Rotteck's 
 Universal History, the republican ideal of the state was for the 
 first time preached to the German middle classes. During 
 the American War of Independence, enthusiasm for the 
 youthful repubUc of the west had been restricted to the narrow 
 circles of cultiued youth, and during the storms of the Napo- 
 leonic days America had been utterly forgotten. Now Rotteck 
 directed the gaze of the discontented once again towards the 
 west. " In the west," he exclaimed, " in the youthful New 
 World, natural, rational right is building its chosen realm." It 
 is true that as a law-abiding citizen he appeasingly added : 
 " But it is not the republican form which we regard as the sun 
 of this day, but the repubUcan spirit " ; he even went so far 
 as to maintain that in a rational monarchy the repubhcan 
 spirit can get most vigorously to work. But since his exem- 
 plary state was based upon the repubUcan idea of popular 
 sovereignty, the impression was left in the minds of his readers 
 that the republic alone was the rational state, was alone the 
 " free state " (for these two expressions were already used as 
 practically synonymous). This doctrine found acceptance all 
 the more readily, because everyone had now begun to learn at 
 school the philologists' fable of the wonderful freedom of the 
 republics of antiquity. 
 
 Just as misleading was the partisan description of the recent 
 past. How powerful was still the mythopoeic faculty of the 
 popular inteUigence, even in this century proud of its cultural 
 attainments. Immediately after the conclusion of peace, the 
 image of the experiences so recently hved through became 
 distorted and confused in the popular memory. Just as the 
 French universally beUeved that they had been conquered only 
 by a force ten times as strong as their own, so among the 
 discontented of Germany there soon became current a whole 
 world of strange partisan fables. Rotteck expressed the heart- 
 felt feelings of the southern liberals when he confidently main- 
 tained that of all the European powers it was the two constitu- 
 tional states of England and Spain, miraculously strengthened 
 by the freedom of their institutions, which alone had been able 
 
 349 
 
History of Germany 
 
 to withstand the Napoleonic world-empire. ' Nobody alluded to 
 thefact that Russia had disf)layed the same power of resistance', 
 for after th^' foundation of the Holy Alliance this state, but 
 now so loudly praised, became the ' object of the Uberals' 
 passionate hatred, and Rotteck exhorted Prussia to devote her- 
 self tb the iask of servirig the baufee of Europeah freedom by 
 constituting' herself a bulwark against the threatening Muscovite 
 slavery. On the other hand; praise was showered upbn the 
 Cortes constitution of 1812, wMch' was supposed to have inspired 
 the Spanish nation for its heroic struggle ,' for a whole decade 
 this constitution remaineid the ' ■ favourite' child of ' the ' liberals, 
 because, ha'Vdng come into existence in the absence' of th^ 
 mdnafch, it imposed extreme restrictions upon the power of the 
 crowni 'and Sfeemeid therefdre to approximate to the highest ideal, 
 that of American freedom. ' 
 
 A still more extraordinary story was soon in circulation 
 regarding the German War of Liberation. It was said that by 
 the appeal of Kahsz and the promise of a Prussian constitution 
 the allied priiiceS had filled the German people ■with false hopes. 
 " Allured" by a flattering tale " (it was thus that Rotteck spoke 
 of the Kaiisz proclamation), they had hastened by hundreds of 
 thonsands to take up a'rms ! The inveracity of this ■view could 
 be sufficiently proved by an appeal to " the calendar. The ordin- 
 ance respecting th6' future constitution of Prussia was signed on 
 May 22, 1:8x5, and was not piiblished until July 8th, when the 
 last waf against Napoleon was already drawing to a close; As 
 regairis the appfeal bf Kalisz, the 'mass of the men of the 
 Prussian Landwehr had known little or nothing about it. Yet 
 this paftisata fable found' credence, at first in the south;, and 
 subs6qu6litly; ' When discontent became more rife, even in 'PruMa. 
 People ielt' they had been betrayed and sold ; it seeiiied impos- 
 sible to explain the deplorabld'state of Germany after such enoi:- 
 mous sacrifices as the outcoine of a great deception. Soon every- 
 one was regarded as a reactionary who continued to fecogiusb 
 othen^isfe than th^ truth, that ' the Prussians had simplj^ 
 risen Up, in response to 'their king's appeal, to free the soil of 
 their homeland frolH the enemy and to re-establish the honour 
 of their old royal' flag. Those thus bUnded, no longer' noticed 
 how insulting their allegatiorts were to the Prussian nation. 
 
 Even in Prussia, the performances^^ of -th^ Landwehr' were 
 overestimated. The liberals of the highlands at length came to 
 recount miracles of Lutzo'W^s yagers and of the other volunteers, 
 
 350 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 although these had contributed but Httle to the victories of the 
 allies. Those, indeed, who had a first-hand knowledge of the 
 art of war held other views. Speckbacher, one of the brave 
 leaders of the T5nrolese instirgents of 1809, remarked to York's 
 aide-de-camp Carl von Roeder : " Among us peasants there was 
 a vigorous spirit, but no discipline ; among the Austrian 
 imperial troops, it was the other way about; with Blucher and 
 York, the soldiers had both, discipline and courage — I wish I 
 had been there!" The morose party-feeling of the Uberals 
 deprived them of all ear for this language of the straightforward 
 human reason ; the name of volimtary army {Freischar) was to 
 them as irresistible as that of free state {Freistaat). The 
 insignificant Prussian volunteer corps were compared with the 
 Spanish guerillas, and the " holy volunteers" were regarded as 
 the true conquerors of Napoleon. The fiery verses oi Lutzows 
 wilde verwegene Jagd, which young Komer had unreflectingly 
 composed in the fulness of his inspired heart, gradually acquired 
 the sense of a partisan song. The poem was repeated in a 
 challenging tone, as if to brin^ the f egulair troops into conteihpt ; 
 and before long King Frederick WiUiam could not endure the 
 vigorous strains, because they seemed to him to convey an 
 affront to his valiant artty- This discontented generation 
 seemed no longer able to take an innocent dehght in the great 
 deeds of German history. 
 
 All the embitterment of liberalism found expression in 
 Rotteck's work, published in 1816, Uier sUUende Heere und 
 Nationcdniiliz [Standing Armies and a National Mihtia]. What 
 a contrast to Riihle von Lilienstem's patriotic book Vom Kriege ! 
 The Prussian ofiicer, with statesmanlike mdderation, had 
 proposed to nationalise the army and' to mihtarise the nation 
 as well; whereas Rotteck, the partisan, propounded a revolu- 
 tionary alternative/asking whether the nation was itself to be 
 made an army, or whether the soldiers were to be made citizens. 
 This, he said, was the grealt question of a momeritous hour. 
 Hardly a year after the army of the Une and the Landwehr 
 had fought together so gloriously at Belle AUiance, he atta:cked 
 the Prussian Army Law with fanatica:! rage, declaring with 
 arrogant -eonfidence : " Any state which endeavours to gain strength 
 through a standing army, renotinces the J)osSibility of a vigorous 
 Landwehr." He described a stattding army as the bulwark of 
 despotism. He declared : " When aU bur young men are 
 summoned to the army, the entire nation will be permeated 
 
 3SI 
 
History of Germany 
 
 with the sentiments of the hireling." In conclusion, he bluntly 
 demanded the abolition of standing armies, so that in time 
 of peace no more than a small force of recruited troops should 
 be maintained, and the Landwehr was to have a scanty training 
 lasting a few weeks. Whilst thus flourishing revolutionary 
 catchwords, he demanded with ingenuous class-selfishness that 
 the system of substitution should be introduced into his Landwehr ; 
 entire groups were to be liberated from service, and above all 
 the students. He ends with the proud prophecy : " What- 
 ever prince carries out this idea will shine by the light of his 
 own glory, and should he be a German he would be the 
 leader of his race ! " 
 
 Such was the blindness displayed even in its first beginnings 
 by the excessive self-esteem of particularist liberaUsm. The 
 princes of Germany, rivalling one another in Uberal deeds, were 
 to compete humbly for the gift of the crown of the future 
 empire at the hands of the sole representatives of the masterful 
 Zeitgeist. When, about this time, Duke Charles Augustus dis- 
 banded the army of Weimar, and contented himself with an 
 armed watch, praises were -showered upon him, and the Allge- 
 meine Zeitung wrote with delight : " Here, in the most exquisite 
 manner was the action performed, whilst there was its glorifica- 
 tion uttered, each unconsciously of the other." It is true that 
 another leader of Badenese liberalism, Baron von Liebenstein, 
 opposed his Freiburg comrade in a thoughtful work, but now as 
 always Rotteck had spoken for the great majority of the party. 
 Need for peace and economic stringency, provincial ignorance of 
 the relationships between the European powers, mistrust of the 
 courts, and, not least, subconscious doubt of the miUtary 
 efficiency of the isolated petty contingents in the minor states — 
 all these things combined to make liberal sentiment more and 
 more definitely adverse to the army. Rotteck's angry declama- 
 tion against the hireling spirit of the soldiery awakened loud 
 echoes, although everyone must have known that the German 
 soldier was removed from civic Ufe only for a brief period by 
 the compulsion of the military law, and that he had to content 
 himself unwillingly enough with his poor pay of two groschen a 
 day. Fervent abuse of the mercenaries was regarded for an 
 entire generation as an unmistakable sign of sound liberal senti- 
 ments, and the inevitable result was that the officers' corps 
 inclined more and more to rigid conservative views. 
 
 The mistrust of the army felt by the liberals was closely 
 
 352 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 associated with their fierce hatred of the nobihty, which found 
 expression in all the periodicals and pamphlets of the parties of 
 opposition. The particularist spirit of the various territorial 
 areas and estates had been the ancient curse of Germany ; all 
 classes, and by no means the nobility alone, had shared in this 
 ancient national sin. Just as at the close of the middle ages 
 the defiant spirit of the great communes contributed to destroy 
 the prestige of the imperial authority, and throughout the 
 sixteenth century to frustrate all attempts at imperial reform, 
 so now the bourgeoisie was certainly no less to blame than the 
 nobility for the reawakening of a detestable class-hostility. In 
 this matter also the literary origin of German Uberalism had 
 to be atoned for. Since very few men of noble birth had 
 co-operated in the rise of the new art and science, in the cultured 
 middle classes, side by side with justified feelings of self- 
 complacency, there came into existence a sentiment of 
 deplorable contempt for the nobility, and people talked as if 
 nature had denied understanding to noblemen. Many of the 
 literary leaders of the nation, in the humiliating circumstances 
 of a poverty-stricken youth, had learned to know and to loathe 
 pride of caste, for not a few of them had been tutors in noble 
 houses. Detestation of the high-bom found expression, above 
 all, in many of the works of the new poesy, such as Emilia 
 GaloUi, and Kabale und Liebe. Among the members of the 
 Hainbund this feeling was deeply rooted. Whoever read 
 The. Pastor's Daughter of Taubenheim and similar poems by 
 Burger, might well believe that the seduction of poor girls was 
 the principal occupation of the German nobleman. Voss, the 
 issue of Mecklenburg serfs, cherished from childhood an 
 inextinguishable hatred of the junkers, and with unconcealed 
 ; satisfaction, in one of his IdyUen, made Michel the peasant say 
 of the nobles : " Rascals are they ; the best place for them to 
 idle is under the gallows-tree." 
 
 In our literary circles the night of the fourth of August, 
 and all the other blows which the French Revolution directed 
 against the aristocracy, were hailed with delight. Since then, 
 the power of the German nobility had been profoundly shaken. 
 By the principal resolution of the Diet of Deputation the nobles 
 had been completely despoiled of their share in the government 
 of the empire ; while by the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg 
 and by the laws of the Confederation of the Rhine they had to 
 a large extent been deprived of their dominant position in the 
 
 353 2 A 
 
History of Germany 
 
 country districts. But they yet retained many privileges which 
 were offensive to the pride of the bourgeoisie. In the feudal 
 minor states of the north, Saxony, Hanover, and Mecklenburg, 
 the nobles still controlled the government and the diet; here 
 for the most part the nobles' benches of the supreme court of 
 justice were still in existence ; and in the Old Prussian provinces 
 patrimonial jurisdiction and the manorial pohce served in 
 addition to maintain the power of the nobility, since landowners 
 of bourgeois origin were still in the minority. In the army 
 and in the civil service, the nobleman everywhere, in actual 
 practice, received the preference. The personal entourage of 
 the princes consisted exclusively of nobles, and Voss scornfully 
 exclaimed : " The nobleman is the bom curator of the royal 
 stud, the royal chase, the royal board, and the royal pleasures." 
 After the overthrow of the crowned plebeian, the arrogance of 
 the nobility often assumed ah extremely provocative form ; 
 even Niebuhr complained that never for forty years had the 
 nobleman treated the bourgeois with such contempt. In official 
 usage, the tasteless title of demoiselle was obstinately retained in 
 ■speaking of bourgeois girls. The rules of precedence of the 
 petty courts also gave expression to a ridiculous caste pride. 
 Not even the highest state official could take his wife to court 
 if she was of bourgeois origin ; in Hesse, the ministers could 
 gain audience of the sovereign only through the instrumentaUty 
 of an aide-de-camp of noble birth. The theatre in Weimar had 
 its special boxes for the nobility ; and in the banqueting hall 
 of the castle of PiUnitz there were separate galleries for the 
 nobles and for the bourgeois who attended as spectators at the 
 king's banquets. In the eyes of the pure-blooded junker, the 
 only seemly occupations were those of military officer, court 
 chamberlain, equerry, and forest ranger. A nobleman coUld 
 interest himself in science and in art only as an amateur ; there 
 was immense excitement in Breslau when a gnddiger Herr 
 appeared on the boards of the town theatre among the ordinary 
 players. Marriages between men of noble birth and well-dowered 
 bourgeois girls were common enough ; but very rarely, and only 
 in defiance of much opposition from her class, did a girl of the 
 quaUty throw herself away upon a man of the bourgeoisie. 
 
 These vestiges of an obsolete social order were naturally 
 grievous to the bourgeoisie ; but it was rank ingratitude to 
 forget how brilhantly the talents, the loyalty, and the bravery 
 of the Prussian nobility had been manifested during recent 
 
 354 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 anxious years. The great majority of the commanders and states- 
 men to whom Germany owed her hberation were men of noble 
 birth. Whilst the French aristocracy, enraged at the loss of 
 their cIelss privileges, had during the war made common cause 
 with the enemies of their fatherland, the Prussian nobles, 
 although they had vigorously opposed Hardenberg's legislation, 
 had magnanimously forgotten their ill-feeUng directly the king 
 issued his summons, and had sacrificed everything for the rescue 
 of the country. Had it not been for the devotion of the 
 landed gentry it would have been impossible to provide the 
 Landwehr with officers or to make use of this force in the 
 open field. Nevertheless these patriotic soldiers were by the 
 Hberal press compared to the emigres ; Beranger's mischievous 
 verses je suis vilain et tres-vilain found an echo on this side of 
 the Rhine as if they had been equally apphcable to Germany. 
 In the speeches and writings of the hberals, the Prussian state 
 of 1806 was invariably described as the embodiment of all 
 possible political sins. Before long it was repeated everjrwhere 
 that the junkers had led Prussia to destruction, and that seven 
 years later the country had been rescued by " the people." 
 After the war, the nobiUty endeavoured to recover a portion of 
 its ancient power. The mediatised besieged the Bundestag and 
 the courts with their grievances ; in Prussia the feudal party 
 closed its ranks. Proposals for the reconstitution of the 
 influence of the nobles' order were voiced on all hands. During 
 the congress of Vienna, the plan to form a " league of nobles " 
 {Adelskette) was much discussed. This was to be a great 
 association which throughout Germany should safeguard the 
 interests of the titled class and should keep alive the sentiment of 
 knightly honour, but the proposal came to nothing, and a later 
 plan of the same kind, mooted by the nobles of East Prussia, 
 had a similar fate. Many of the romanticist authors broke out 
 into extravagant laudation of the nobility. According to 
 Friedrich Schlegel this class was the foundation of civil society, 
 the foundation upon which all the other classes had been built. 
 A defiant little poem of Schlegel's exhorted noblemen to 
 stick to the sword and the plough and to shun the babble of 
 the towns. 
 
 ■■ These endeavours, and in addition the foolish intrigues of 
 the French emigres after their return home, increased the anger of 
 the middle classes. People relapsed into those views of unmiti- 
 gated class-envy which at the time of the peace of Tilsit had 
 
 355 
 
History of Germany 
 
 been promulgated by the Bonapartist Friedrich Buchholz in his 
 Researches concerning Hereditary Nobility. How incontrovertible 
 it seemed when this political Nicolai showed that virtue was not 
 transmissible by inheritance, and that a nobiUty of service like 
 the French Legion of Honour was the only rational form of 
 nobility. " It is impossible," said Buchholz," to be at the same 
 time a patriot and a feudal aristocrat." Von Diericke, an old 
 Frederician general, modestly undertook the defence of his order, 
 and in his A Word concerning the Prussian Nobility (1818) showed 
 how many sons of the despised junkerdom had co-operated in 
 camp and council to consolidate Prussia's greatness. His book 
 aroused all the more anger because his facts could not be con- 
 tradicted. In many learned circles the childish hatred of the 
 aristocracy rose to such a height that even students took it 
 into their calculations. In Breslau, when young Carl von Holtei 
 was writing his examination paper, and did not feel quite sure 
 of his knowledge, he shrewdly omitted the " von " from his 
 signature, and was then delighted to observe how the professors 
 put their heads together, showing to one another with satisfied 
 smiles this admirable product of the young bourgeois intelligence. 
 The discreet phrases in which, in his letters Concerning the Nobility, 
 Perthes expressed his opposition to Fouque the enthusiast 
 for the knighthood, now seemed to incensed public opinion 
 as little adequate as had at an earlier date the writings of 
 the bourgeoisphile but conservative Rehberg. 
 
 Thus by its great Hterary successes the German bourgeoisie 
 was misled into excessive self-esteem such as formerly in France 
 had actuated the third estate, the only difference being that in 
 the case of Germany, bourgeois arrogance still remained entirely 
 restricted to the field of theory. Liberal newspapers asked 
 with a hght heart what it would matter if by general bank- 
 ruptcy the entire nobility should lose its territorial possessions, 
 and its place be taken by a new class of landowners. 
 Rationalism had no understanding of the moral energy proper 
 to an independent aristocracy intimately associated with the 
 history of the land. These revolutionary ideas were voiced with 
 especial openness by Voss and Rotteck. Consciously or uncon- 
 sciously, behind such notions there lurked particularist anger 
 against Prussia, for hardly had Prussia with its national army 
 liberated the fatherland, when from South Germany were once 
 more raised the old false accusations against " the classic land 
 of junkerdom and the corporal's cane." 
 
 356 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 Animated with such views, Rotteck, in the year 1819, 
 when the Badenese diet opened, penned his Ideas concerning 
 Representative Institutions, the scientific programme of the new 
 liberalism. The idea of deducing demands for the future from 
 the nature and history of the existing state, was all the more 
 remote from the minc^ of the liberals because their culture was 
 still entirely dominated by abstract philosophy, and because 
 every publicist had a proud sense that he was tribune of the 
 people for all Germany. Amid the anarchy of the Germanic 
 Federation, little was left of the common German constitutional 
 law ; no one could find permanent satisfaction in the contem- 
 plation of any single one of the nine-and-thirty separate sove- 
 reign states ; hence it resulted that all poUtical writers 
 involuntarily lapsed into the abstractions of the so-called 
 " general constitutional law." Yet no one else spumed the 
 historic world so presumptuously as did Rotteck. The 
 enlightened man distinguished a threefold law, that of the past, 
 the present, and " the future." The law of the future was 
 without preamble esteemed as " the noblest of the three, and in 
 essence the only vaUd law," whilst historic law was lightly dis- 
 missed as historic injustice. Consequently rational law must be 
 the only rule for the state, rational law meaning the personal 
 preferences of the Freiburg professor and his French teachers; 
 but of course, he modestly added, reality can never be more 
 than an approximation to philosophic theory. 
 
 Just as Sieyes had combined the fire of Rousseau's theory 
 of popular sovereignty with the water of Montesquieu's doctrine of 
 tripartite authority, so Rotteck tried to dilute the doctrine of 
 the Contrat Social with some of the ideas of monarchical con- 
 stitutionalism. Briefly and clearly, in Rousseau's manner, 
 he explained that the people is the natural possessor of the 
 authority of the state, while the government is the artificial 
 organ of the general will, its powers being the outcome of 
 delegation. Consequently, in all circumstances, legislative 
 authority is vested in the people, whose personality is otherwise 
 lost ; hence diets can exercise all the rights which the people, 
 when delegating governmental authority, may be reasonably 
 conjectured to have tacitly reserved for itself. Therefore the 
 bi-cammeral system is unjust even when the upper chamber 
 represents, in capital and landed property, just as much share 
 in the state as does the lower chamber. Naturally the people 
 always knows what it desires, and always desires what is best : 
 
 357 
 
History of Germany 
 
 " where the popular will rules, it is impossible for conditions to 
 arise which conflict with natural rights." With these republican 
 ideas, certain feudal conceptions are then combined. For 
 instance, the representative represents nothing but his own 
 constituency, since he has received no mandate from any other. 
 All such contradictions are explained by the one dominant 
 thought, by the intention to transfer the centre of gravity of 
 political hfe ever downwards. Faithful to the views of his 
 Breisgau peasants, Rotteck was willing, in case of need, to make 
 a distinction between freeholders and copyholders, but 
 unquestionably universal suffrage was the logical deduction from 
 his theory. Indeed, the Berlin historian Woltmann had voiced 
 this last demand as early as the year 1810, in his Sfirit of 
 the New Prussian State Organisation. 
 
 Thus powerful was the influence of abstract doctrine upon 
 this loyal and obedient populace, as yet completely untouched 
 by revolutionary greed. When barely out of its cradle. South 
 German liberalism was already advocating the very same ideas 
 which in France had created the ephemeral constitution of 1791, 
 and soon afterwards had actually destroyed the monarchy ! 
 The only thing peculiar to the good-natured Freiburger, in 
 contradistinction with his French predecessors, was his hum- 
 drum innocence, owing to which he had absolutely no con- 
 ception of the consequences of his teaching, and his clear 
 understanding of the municipal foundation of the organisation 
 of the state. The ideas of the Prussian towns' ordinance arising 
 from the depths of the German spirit, had long since quietly 
 made the round of Germany ; even Rotteck could imagine the 
 establishment of his constitutional splendours only upon the 
 basis of local autonomy. Nevertheless it was impossible to over- 
 look the French origin of his doctrines. For him also, the whole 
 hfe of the state subsisted entirely in the forms of the constitu- 
 tion ; he also regarded equahty, not Hberty, as the highest of 
 political goods, and therefore took a far more lenient view of 
 the pseudo-constitution of the kingdom of Westphalia than of 
 the Old German feudal order. 
 
 For this reason, his teaching also secured approval from the 
 rigid Bonapartists in Munich. Here the Alemannia of Aretin and 
 Hermann continued to preach a shameless particularism. It 
 asseverated : " Sooner will Uons and eagles mate, than 
 southerners and northerners unite." It instanced conversations 
 between a " genuine Bavarian " and a preposterous soldier 
 
 358 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 of the Pomeranian Landwehr who could hardly speak German. 
 It mocked and calumniated everything that was North German, 
 and bluntly declared that the general name of deutsch was 
 utterly unmeaning. But the Old Bavarian particularism was 
 now adorned with new feathers. Adroitly mingling true and 
 false, Aretin described the Alemanni (for thus he termed all the 
 South Germans) as the sole representatives of constitutional 
 freedom, whereas the north was the land of feudalism — and this 
 in the year 1816, long before the new South German constitu- 
 tions had been promulgated. Subsequently he wrote a text- 
 book of constitutional law, in which he endeavoured to fuse the 
 principles of the new rational law with the views of the Rhenish 
 Confederate bureaucracy ; and when Aretin died while the work 
 was in progress, Rotteck brought the old Bonapartist's book to 
 completion. 
 
 Very different was the mental atmosphere surrounding the 
 beginnings of North German hberahsm. Here the concatenation 
 of the times had not been completely interrupted ; many of the 
 ancient feudal institutions still persisted ; a cordial sentiment of 
 historic piety was active almost everjnvhere among the people. 
 In this region the ideas of the Revolution had never struck such 
 deep roots ; the liberals did not propose to remodel the state 
 completely in accordance with the abstractions of rational law, 
 but demanded merely the revitalising and l^e progressive develop- 
 ment of the old feudal order. The Kieler Blatter was the organ 
 of this moderate tendency. Nowhere was the intimate relation- 
 ship between the new liberalism and the idealistic enthusiasm of 
 our classical literature so admirably displayed as in the circle of 
 refined and amiable men who thronged round this journal, the 
 most vigorous in the German north. At the hospitable board 
 of Countess Rentzau on the Seeburg, and at that of Frau 
 Schleiden on the Ascherberger See, there assembled the leading 
 men of the university of Kiel, Dahlmann, Falck, Twesten, C. T. 
 Welcker, with the physician Franz Hegewisch, the briUiantly 
 witty hotspur, and the leaders of the Schleswig-Holstein nobility, 
 Reventlow, Rumohr, Baudissin, and Moltke. They were all 
 Goethe enthusiasts; it was a matter of pride to them all^ here 
 in the extreme northern march of Germany, to defend the 
 German system against the growing arrogance of the Danish 
 crown; and if they were fervent advocates of constitutional 
 rights, their aim was simply to realise that ideal of free and 
 humane culture which had formerly been enunciated in Weimar. 
 
 359 
 
History- of Germany 
 
 It was from this little world full of talent and charm that in 
 1815 was issued Dahlmann's essay A Word concerning Constitution, 
 which in form and content was the precise opposite of Rotteck's 
 writings. Dahlmann's work was as thoughtful and pithy as 
 that of the Freiburg professor was thin and diffuse. Whereas 
 Rotteck contested the validity of historic law, Dahlmann 
 exhorted the Germans to realise fully the existence of their 
 fathers in order to effect their own moral regeneration. Whilst 
 Rotteck would tolerate monarchy only as a provisional institu- 
 tion, Dahlmann frankly displayed his strictly monarchical 
 inclinations, and declared, to the horror of the philologists, that 
 the Greeks and the Romans had failed to recognise the moment 
 when it would have been advantageous to adopt a monarchical 
 system. He looked for his ideal of the state in England, not 
 in France. " In England the foundations of the political organi- 
 sation towards which all the neo-European nations are striving 
 are most purely developed and preserved." Since Montesquieu's 
 Esprit des Lois had found its way into Germany, vague praise 
 of English liberty had indeed never been lacking. At this very 
 moment Riickert made the returning spirit of freedom exclaim : 
 " Oh, build for me a temple after Albion's example ! " But 
 Dahlmann was the first among publicists who, with a thorough 
 knowledge of his subject and without any desire for blind 
 imitation, held up the English parliament as an example to 
 Germany, just as Vincke shortly before had done with the 
 British system of self-government. Such men as Niebuhr, 
 Schleiermacher, and Thibaut, expressed their cheerful- accord 
 with the historian of Kiel, but it was many years before his 
 ideas obtained wider support. The Kieler Blatter had little 
 circulation outside Schleswig-Holstein, for the mass of: the popu- 
 lation of North Germany was oppressed by economic car^, 
 while those in South Germany who might have been receptive 
 to constitutional ideas preferred the more convenient catechism 
 of Rotteck's rational law. 
 
 Opposed to both these tendencies of liberalism, separated 
 from them by the breadth of the heavens, was Carl Ludwig 
 von Haller, the dreaded " restorer of political science." The 
 Bernese aristocrat had seen the power of the Swiss patricians 
 collapse amid the storms of the Revolution, and subsequently, 
 as an exile in Austrian service, had constructed the political 
 system which was "to re-establish monarchy upon its true 
 foundations, to overthrow the presumptuous revolutionary science 
 
 360 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 of the godless eighteenth century, and to make the Catholic 
 church shine with renewed effulgence." With the proud con- 
 sciousness of his claim to rank as a universal historian, he 
 announced his doctrine, first of all in Allgemeine Staatskunde 
 (1808), and subsequently, from 1816 onwards, in Restaur ation 
 der Staatswissenschaft. It seemed to him a wonderful dispensa- 
 tion of Providence that from him in particular, the bom 
 republican and Protestant, should proceed the anti-revolutionary 
 doctrine of salvation. And indeed the sledge-hammer dialec- 
 tical blows of his severe reasoning fell with crashing force 
 upon the imaginative structures of the doctrine of natural rights. 
 It was the incontrovertible demonstrations of this blustering 
 naturaUst which first shattered the belief in the state of nature, 
 in the social contract, and in the innate sovereignty of the 
 people, even in those circles of the uninstructed who were unable 
 to follow the ideas of the historical school of law. Yet all that 
 he advanced in place of this obsolete doctrine was a crude 
 popularisation of the principles of patrimonial law upon which 
 had been based the authority of the Bernese aristocracy. Just 
 as in former days the rulers of Berne had treated the conquered 
 subject lands of Aargau and Vaud simply as the property of 
 their glorious republic, so Haller founded the state solely upon 
 the right of the stronger. Land belongs to a prince, a corpora- 
 tion, or a church ; upon this property of a suzerain lord, and 
 under his protection, settlers appear ; if the people should 
 disappear, the state would still continue to exist in the person 
 of the prince, who can readily find new subjects. Consequently 
 the state resembles any other association based on civil law, 
 differing from others only because it is more powerful and indepen- 
 dent, and because its prince is "an owner, a man equipped with 
 absolutely independent rights " ; he rales the nation through 
 the instrumentality of his personal servants, is entitled to regard 
 (it is even his duty to regard) himself and his house as the 
 principal aim for which the state easts, but he must resist the 
 dispersion of his own property and must protect his subjects 
 with his own soldiers. A caricature of the ancient feudal state, 
 which even in the fourteenth century existed nowhere in such 
 crudity as this, was now propounded as the universally valid 
 political ideal, was announced with the same air of infallibility 
 that had characterised the writers who constracted the model 
 imaginary constitutions of the Revolution. The subordination 
 of the citizen, established by constitutional law, became degraded 
 
 361 
 
History of Germany 
 
 to a state of servitude defined in terms of civil law. In a word, 
 the restorer of political science practically abolished the state. 
 
 Nowhere did his doctrine; seem more utterly devoid of 
 foundation, nowhere did it seem to conflict more hopelessly 
 with facts, than in Prussia, for nowhere else had the majesty 
 of the state-idea been esteemed so highly as in Prussia, where 
 the princes had always been the first servants of the state. It 
 was precisely upon this that depended Haller's fierce hatred of 
 Frederick the Great, of that enlightened Prussian absolutism 
 which had discovered the detestable conscription, and of the 
 Allgemeines LandrecM [Prussian System of Common Law promul- 
 gated in 1794]. "Except on the title-page." said Haller, 
 " there is nothing to show that this system of laws may not 
 be intended rather for Japan and China than for the Prussian 
 state." Yet it was in Prussia that Haller secured numerous 
 and powerful adherents. The crown prince and his romanticist 
 friends considered that in the idea of the state as private 
 property they could rediscover the motley glories of the 
 middle ages. Marwitz and the feudalists among the knighthood 
 of the Mark hailed with delight this resolute thinker who 
 reduced j the monarch once more to the ranks of the land- 
 owners, who divided society once again into the three castes 
 of teachers, warriors, and manual workers, and assigned such 
 valuable privileges to those " who had the freedom of the land." 
 The absolutists found it satisfactory that in Haller's state the 
 prince was above all the people. The ultramontanes were 
 delighted with the praise of theocracy, which the convert had 
 extolled as the freest and best of all political forms. The timid 
 found their own fears confirmed by the complaints of the Bernese 
 fanatic who imagined that the entire world was endangered by 
 the great conspiracy of the freemasons, the illuminati, and the 
 revolutionaries. To all opponents of the Revolution, the 
 victorious polemic against natural rights was welcome. Whereas 
 amid the simpler and wider relationships of French poUtical 
 life, the feudal and clerical party was already the open enemy 
 of bureaucratic absolutism, in Germany all the aspects of the 
 counter-revolution were still indistinguishably confused. 
 
 Far less support was secured by the purely ultramontane 
 political doctrine of the skilled sophist, Adam Miiller. The 
 Roman Catholic system could not truly flourish in the homeland 
 of heresy ; not one of our clerical authors could go so far as 
 the Savoyard noble Joseph de Maistre, who^ glowing with all 
 
 362 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 the ardour and religious fanaticism of the Latin races, demanded, 
 now half jestingly and now again wrathfully, that the sinful 
 world should be subjected to the pope, and who fiercely contested 
 the " bestial " science of " the century of folly." The able 
 German convert lacked this emotional impulse, this crusadering 
 enthusiasm. Adam Miiller, with clear insight, descried indeed 
 many of the weaknesses of liberalism, especially in respect of 
 its economic doctrines ; he showed incisively how inadequate 
 was the system of laissez-faire amid the struggles of social 
 interest, how impossible was the complete international division 
 of labour between independent nations, and prophesied that 
 from the modem economic system would proceed a new pluto- 
 cratic nobihty more contemptible and more dangerous than the 
 old aristocracy of birth. But in his Theologische Grundlegung 
 der Staatswissenschaft we find no more than a repetition of 
 Haller's doctrines, adorned with some of the frippery of theology 
 and natural philosophy. In a manner even more arbitrary than 
 that of HaDer, he artificially effected a " natural " classification 
 of society, sometimes distinguishing the teachers, the warriors, 
 and the manual workers as the respective representatives of 
 faith, love, and hope, and sometimes classifjdng the popvilation 
 into nobles, burghers, and rulers. Miiller, like Haller, denied the 
 distinction between constitutional law and civil law, and declared 
 that every state must to all eternity be composed of a union 
 of states. His ideal was a rational feudaUsm ; he hoped to 
 solve the contradiction between politics and law by the power 
 of faith, elevated to the rank of law.' 
 
 Thus everjrthing which German poUtical science had secured 
 during the last century and a half, since Puffendorf had delivered 
 our poHtical thinkers from the yoke of the theologians, was once 
 more put in question, and political doctrine was degraded anew 
 to the level of the theocratic conceptions of the middle ages. 
 Friedrich Schlegel hailed the church as the greatest of all guilds, 
 after whose example all the other corporations of civil society 
 should be reconstituted. Baader spoke of the teaching caste, 
 the warrior caste, and the caste of manual workers, as the three 
 orders of every nation, rejecting the expression "the state" 
 as an impious modem discovery. " Corporation, not association," 
 was the catchword of the political romanticists, most of whom 
 associated with this term no more than the indefinite conception 
 of a debile state authority, limited by the power of guilds, diets 
 of nobles, and self-governing communes, and in spiritual matters 
 
 363 
 
History of Germany 
 
 subjected to the control of the church. The sober-minded Gentz 
 felt utterly alien from this dream-world of politics as understood 
 by theologians, and declared to his friend Miiller that everything 
 characteristic Of science — clearness, method, and consistency — 
 was conspicuous by its absence. His secular sentiments were 
 profoundly irritated when his friend asseverated that the peace 
 of the world was dependent upon belief in God's incarnation. 
 It was only when he imagined that he could himself recognise 
 the precursors of the imminent revolution, that in an access of 
 nervous ainxiety he wrote : " You are perfectly right, all is lost 
 unless reUgion should become established pas seulement comme foi 
 mais comme loi." But this contrite mood did not persist ; the 
 first of German publicists stood on too lofty a plane to abandon 
 for long his recognition of the secular nature of the state. 
 
 An abyss of centuries seemed to be estabHshed between the 
 romanticist theory of the state and the doctrines of liberalism. 
 The great majority of writers of note, the superior advantages 
 of scientific culture, seemed to be on the conservative side ; and 
 yet liberalism, notwithstanding its youthful immaturity, displayed 
 more understanding of the needs of the present, had a better 
 grasp of the just claims of the middle classes whose strength 
 was increasing. Those who endeavoured to intermediate between 
 these crudely contrasted views earned only suspicion for 
 their pains. Even Steffens was accused of being a reactionary 
 because in his briUiant though confused political writings, whilst 
 demanding representative institutions, he nevertheless, after his 
 fantastical manner, explained that " the communion of saints " 
 represented the idea of the state, and regarded the privileges of 
 the nobility as founded upon "the mystical depths of all those 
 born of earth." To the patriots it seemed as if they were being 
 mocked when the sanguine Steffens actually hailed as an advan- 
 tage the feeble multiformity of the distracted political life of 
 Germany, saying that every constitution was defective, and 
 nothing but a plurality of constitutions could guarantee a higher 
 spiritual unity ! Still less could Ancillon appease the angry 
 spirits. His numerous works on poUtical science looked down 
 with distinguished contempt upon the shallow worshippers of the 
 Zeitgeist, and yet manifested such poverty of ideas as to make 
 Rotteck's limpid clarity seem in comparison an outpouring of 
 genius, whilst he displayed in addition a chameleon-like vagueness 
 of thought and of expression in order to leave always open a 
 way of retreat. When in profound humility he acclaimed the 
 
 364 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 Holy Alliance as the reconciliation between politics and ethics, 
 or when with unctuous prolixity he showed that there was no 
 essential difference between an advisory diet and one which 
 possessed powers of independent action, the Uberals were all the 
 more furious because they knew that the author, a cautious 
 intermediary, was engaged at the Prussian court in the persistent 
 support of the aims of the reactionary party. 
 
 Even before the return of the victorious armies, a disagree- 
 able incident, trifling in itself, had greatly accentuated pohtical 
 differences, poisoning for a long time to come that party Ufe 
 which was now for the first time awakening. For years the 
 Napoleonic fables of the Tugendbund and of the Jacobin intrigues 
 of the Prussian patriots had been busily circulated in the 
 Hofburg and among the Rhenish Confederate cabinets. More- 
 over, the well-disposed minor courts had been alarmed by the 
 noisy terrorist language of the spokesmen of the Teutonising 
 movement. All the governments felt insecure, reaUsing how 
 Httle the terms of peace and the federal act could satisfy the 
 desires of the nation. In Prussia, the old opponents of Stein 
 and of the Silesian headquarters-staff began once more to become 
 active. As early as during the congress of Vienna a certain 
 councillor named Janke endeavoured to arouse the suspicions of 
 the chancellor on account of " the wild clamour for Uberty " 
 which proceeded from Amdt and Gorres. When the monarchs 
 were for the second time assembled in Paris, Schmalz, professor 
 at Berlin, published a pamphlet entitled Berichtigung einer SteUe 
 in der Bredow-Venturinischen Chronik vom Jahre 1808.^ The 
 passage in question had been emended by the author years 
 before at Schmalz's instigation, and the BerUn professor merely 
 availed himself of this excuse as a text on which to hang 
 stories about the old Tugendbund, and to give a sinister picture 
 of the subterranean intrigues of the secret societies which 
 " perchance " had issued from the Tugendbund. Schmalz was 
 Schamhorst's brother-in-law and had always lived on good terms 
 with the general ; during the period of French dominion he had 
 preserved his patriotic courage ; and he had taken a vigorous 
 part in the foundation of the Berlin university. In his innu- 
 merable writings on pohtical science he displays a limited and 
 hard intelUgence ; hating the ideas of the Revolution, he was 
 
 1 Recftification of a Passage in the Bredow-Venturini Chronicle of the Year 
 1808. 
 
 36s 
 
History of Germany 
 
 yet unable to offer a scientific refutation pf their foundation, 
 the doctrine of natural rights. His reputation was hitherto 
 unstained. What a scandal, when this highly respected patriot 
 suddenly launched a long series of furious accusations against 
 the new Germanism. Just as formerly the Jacobins had held up 
 before us the mirror of humanity, so now did these conspirators 
 hold up the mirror of Teutonism to lead the people astray, 
 to make us perjure ourselves in the endeavour to realise the 
 inseme notion of a single German nation. It was above all 
 against Amdt, the most modest and moderate of the Teutonist 
 orators that Schmalz directed his furious invectives. In his 
 priceless Catechism for the German Landwehrmann Amdt had 
 made use of the bibhcal phraseology : " Protect the defenceless 
 and wives and children, for this is Christian and humane." 
 From this Schmalz drew the conclusion that these reckless 
 offenders " advocated murder, pillage, and rape, the last in 
 express terms." Beyond question, as even the professor's 
 opponents admitted, the unhappy man was acting in good faith. 
 For the first time for three hundred years a genuinely 
 national movement was manifest in the quiet land of North 
 Germany ; the contemplation of all the elemental energies which 
 are unchained in such a stormy epoch had obscured and 
 bemused many a weak nature. Just s& in England in the 
 days of Charles II thousands of excellent persons were convinced 
 of the reality of the purely fictitious popish plot, so now in 
 Germany a gloomy delusion spread like a devastating pestilence, 
 and it was not the base and the stupid alone who beheved in 
 the secret conspiracies of demagogic leagues. The malicious 
 half-truths of the Schmalzian pamphlet were even more wound- 
 ing than its manifest absurdities. In defiance of the literary 
 sense of self-complacency, he declared that the mass of the 
 nation had never read a line of the writings of the pubhcists. 
 From the magnificent unpretentiousness of the Prussian nation, 
 which performed colossal deeds as if they were a matter of 
 course, the denunciator drew the conclusion that there had 
 nowhere been any extraordinary enthusiasm, but that the 
 Prussians had hastened to the colours in the spirit in which 
 neighbours come to extinguish a fire. When Arndt's writing on 
 Preussens rheinische Mark declared " Prussia must be everywhere, 
 and Prussia's Germany everjrwhere," and when it named the 
 state of the HohenzoUerns the only German land capable of 
 raising Germany from futility to glory, these vague prophecies 
 
 366 
 
Mental Currents of the First Years of Peace 
 
 seemed to the accuser sufficient proof of a deliberate design for 
 the dethronement of all the minor German princes. 
 
 The best men of the nation were moved to the soul^when 
 they saw the repute of the most splendid period of modem 
 German history thus shamefully soiled. The book-market was 
 flooded with rejoinders, and during the last months of the year 
 1815 almost the whole of cultured Germany was breathlessly 
 engaged in this wretched dispute. Even foreigners intervened. 
 The Times took it upon itseU to hold up obedient Hanover as 
 an example to the unruly Prussians. Niebuhr and Schleier- 
 macher refuted the pitiful attack, the former in a profoundly 
 serious maimer, the latter with unsparing ridicule. Some of 
 the other rejoinders unquestionably displayed the bhnd self- 
 conceit of youthful Uberalism. Ludwig Wieland, son of the poet, 
 bluntly answered the defender of absolute monarchy in the 
 words : " The representative system is the true method, and 
 indeed the only method, which legally disposed and patriotic 
 men can pubHcly recognise ! " Councillor Kappe in Aix-la- 
 Chapelle, a distinguished Prussian official, confidently maintained 
 that German unity could be secured by the tahsman-like word 
 " constitution," for, he said, " on all hands the national wiU is 
 striving towards such unity, and all divergences therefrom are 
 dependent upon the excessive power of governmental authority 
 as contrasted with that of the popular will ! " 
 
 These disputes came at a very inopportune moment for the 
 king. Just before, when taking over the new provinces he had 
 repeatedly declared that he was concerned solely with the future 
 of the state, regarding the past as past. He had a keen, 
 appreciation of all that he owed to the love and devotion of 
 his Prussians, and confidentially assured the czar that he 
 regarded it as his sacred duty to ensure the happiness of this 
 loyal people. But the contemplation of the party struggles of 
 the Parisians had disquieted him profoundly, and when he 
 learned that the municipal representatives of Berhn had made 
 the unheard-of proposal to subject the civic and defensive 
 companies to the sole supervision of the municipality, he ordered 
 the chancellor to take strict measures lest this party spirit which 
 was unknown to the Prussian nation should gain the upper 
 hand.i In the spring of 1816 he put an end to the literary 
 dispute by an admirably conceived and amiably worded ordinance. 
 
 1 King Frederick William to Czar Alexander, March, 1816. Cabinet Order 
 to Hardenberg, September i, 1815. Further details in Appendix IV. 
 
 367 
 
History of Germany 
 
 The king publicly recognised that the same sentiments which 
 had led to the formation of the old Tugendbund had in the year 
 1813 animated the majority of the Prussian nation and had led 
 to the salvation of the fatherland, but now, in time of peace, 
 the effect of secret societies could not fail to be deleterious. 
 The old prohibition of such societies was therefore renewed. 
 The continuance of the dispute was prohibited, and an enquiry 
 which Niebuhr and his friends had demanded for their own 
 justification was refused as superfluous. The turmoil now sub- 
 sided, but everyone felt that the bad seed sown by the accuser 
 (who, at this juncture, was distinguished by a Prussian order and 
 by one from Wiirtemberg) had not fallen upon perfectly sterile 
 soil. — Such were the sentiments amid which the German princes 
 and the German peoples entered the greatly desired epoch of 
 peace. On one side there prevailed a tacit and causeless mood 
 of suspicion ; on the other there existed a blind faith in the 
 magic influence of constitutional political forms, a childlike 
 confidence in the unerring wisdom of the people. Among the 
 masses, finally, there predominated a profound longing for repose 
 and peaceful labour. 
 
 368 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 OPENING OF THE GERMAN BUNDESTAG. 
 
 § I. THE EUROPEAN SITUATION. 
 
 The world-empire had fallen, and upon its ruins there was 
 re-established a peaceful society of states. The old system of 
 European politics, which endeavoured by means of mutable 
 alliances and counter-alliances to preserve a balance of power 
 between the five leading states, did not, however, at first return. 
 As Genta said, all the nations of Europe now constituted a 
 great union under the supervision of the four powers which had 
 carried on the war against Napoleon and had just renewed their 
 alliances in Paris. Through so many years of work, dming the 
 weary time of waiting and of suffering, had this saving alliance been 
 brought into existence ; now in three terrible years of war it had 
 stood the test. During their close and prolonged association, 
 the monarchs and the leading statesmen had become accustomed 
 to confidential personal intercourse, such as had hitherto been 
 unprecedented among the crowned heads : they determined that 
 in the future also they would consider all the great problems of 
 European poUtics in personal interviews. The Quadruple Alliance 
 regarded itself as the supreme court of justice of Europe; 
 it considered that its first duty was to preserve from a breach 
 of the peace the new ordering of the society of states, and 
 consequently that the great powers must exercise a common 
 supervision over France, a country whose actions could not be 
 counted upon, a focus of revolution and of wars. Whilst the 
 European army of occupation, under the supreme command of 
 Wellington, was to preserve order in France, the four ambassadors 
 in Paris, meeting in regular conferences, were to deal with 
 the current affairs of the great alliance, and to support the 
 court of the Tuileries with their counsel ; in isolated cases the 
 four even invited the due de RicheUeu to join their deliberations. 
 All the contentious problems which had resulted from the 
 
 369 2 B 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Viennese and Parisian negotiations, were referred to this con- 
 ference of ambassadors ; it was only the unravelling of the 
 complex German territorial questions which was reserved for 
 special discussion at Frankfort. 
 
 Never before had the system of states constituted so firmly 
 ordered a federal community. The protectorate of the four 
 powers dominated Europe, less forcibly than, but just as 
 unrestrainedly as, formerly the will of Napoleon. The states 
 of the second rank (in the diplomatic circles of the quadruple 
 alliance, they were jestingly spoken of as les Sous-Allies) were 
 completely excluded from all the affairs of high poUtics ; when 
 the haughty Spanish court, which could not forget the days of 
 Philip II, demanded admission to the Parisian conference of 
 ambassadors, it was met with a brusque refusal, Prussia's nega- 
 tive being the bluntest of all. Nowhere was the predominance 
 of the four powers felt more painfully than in France. Although 
 the French had no certain information regarding the extraordinary 
 powers of the conference of ambassadors, in questions of national 
 honour the instinct of the masses rarely goes altogether astray. 
 The nation felt obscurely that its government was supervised by 
 the foreign powers, and it was inspired with an overwhelming 
 hatred for the " lord-proconsul," Wellington. It was impossible 
 for the old royal regime to strike deep roots once more, for the 
 very reason that it was regarded by the people as a foreign 
 dominion. At the peace congress of Paris, Humboldt had 
 declared that the Revolution would never come to an end if 
 Europe were to take France under her guardianship. All too 
 soon was the admonition justified. 
 
 The four powers were at one in regarding the existence of 
 the legitimate dynasty as a strong support of the newly-ordered 
 society of states, and for this reason they treated the French 
 court with an upright and careful benevolence. Hardly had 
 the congress of Paris settled the question of the cession of 
 territory, when Gneisenau, as early as October, 1815, began 
 secret negotiations with the Tuileries. Accustomed in politics, 
 as on the battle-field, to choose his means with little circumspec- 
 tion, he had in the days of the Saxon negotiations seriously 
 considered whether Prussia might not be able to carry her claims 
 through with the aid of the returned Napoleon. Now, once 
 more, even an adventurous way seemed to him permissible, if 
 only he could secure the aim of estabhshing on a firm founda- 
 tion the new system of states. His negotiator. Major von 
 
 370 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 Royer, a legitimist in Prussian service, went so far, with 
 Hardenberg's approval, as to offer the due de Richelieu a secret 
 alUance. Prussia, as France's nearest neighbour, was to pledge 
 herself in case of a revolution to help the Bourbons with her 
 entire miUtary force. The negotiations led to nothing, plainly 
 because Frederick WiUiam ultimately hesitated to undertake 
 such far-reaching and dangerous responsibiUties ; but they 
 afforded sufficient proof that Prussia was determined to forget 
 alike the intrigues of Talleyrand and all the other proofs of 
 Bourbon ingratitude, and to live on terms of friendship with 
 her western neighbour. » 
 
 The savage struggles of the French parties aroused all the 
 more anxiety in the conference of ambassadors because the 
 wealthy land recovered with wonderful rapidity from its 
 economic struggles, and soon appeared capable of undertaking 
 a new war. According to the irreconcilable opposition, France 
 consisted of two nations, the conquerors and the conquered of 
 Waterloo. Where was to be found any common platform for 
 the democratic masses, intoxicated by the glories of the world- 
 ruling tricolour, and the emigres, these " pilgrims to the shrine," 
 who dreamed of the oriflamme and St. Louis ? Mockingly did 
 Beranger exhibit to the old nobility the image of the 
 Marquis de Carabas ; his satirical song, " C'est le roi, le roi, le 
 roi," held kingship up to contempt. The whole country was 
 covered with a network of secret societies ; every veteran of 
 the grande armee who returned to his native village preached 
 the Napoleonic legend. Even the talented doctrinaires who 
 expressed their liberal views in the Minerve, undermined the 
 prestige of the crown by a malicious mistrust. Yet more 
 dangerous than the passion of the opposition seemed the fanatical 
 infatuation of the royalist ultras who ruled the chamber of 
 deputies. The hotspurs of the Chambre introuvable were aiming 
 directly at the restoration of the ancient feudal order ; they 
 demanded a sanguinary revenge against the regicides and the 
 mm-derers of God. When King Louis endeavoured to moderate 
 the savage zeal of the Emigres, they too turned against the 
 crown, no less defiantly than did those Polish magnates who had 
 
 * Infonnation gathered from Royer's letters to Gneisenau, October 3, 1815, 
 and subsequent dates, kindly communicated to me by Dr. H. Delbriick. The 
 reason ior the failure of the negotiations was not expressly given in the letters, 
 but can hardly have been other than that suggested in the text. On November 9, 
 Royer reports that King Frederick WUliam must now be let into the secret, since 
 everything depends upon his decision ; whilst a few days later, the whole affair 
 vanishes from the correspondence. 
 
History of Germany 
 
 oiice exclaimed to their King Sigismund, rege sed non impera! 
 The feudal ideas of unbridled licence for the nobles reappeared, 
 adorned with the catchwords of the new parliamentary doctrine. 
 In the name of constitutional freedom, Chateaubriand demanded 
 that the crown should be subordinated to the will of the 
 chambers, and in his writings he already advocated that revolu- 
 tionary theory of parliamentarism which the liberals subsequently 
 made their own, epitomised in the words, le rot rigne, mais il 
 ne gouverne pas. 
 
 All the members of the conference of ambassadors, led by 
 Pozzo di Borgo, supported the king in his resistance of the 
 ultras. Even the high tory English statesmen disapproved of 
 the partisan fury of the emigres, although the liberal zeal of the 
 " Jacobin " czar and of his obtrusive ambassador always 
 remained suspicious to them. When Wellington contemplated 
 the insane activities of the ultras, who received their instruc- 
 tions in the Pavilion Marsan from the comte d'Artois, he said 
 with concern that the offspring of Louis XV would not be able 
 to rule France, and that for this Artois would be to blame ! 
 Mettemich wrote wamingly : " The return to a past order of 
 affairs constitutes one of the greatest dangers for a state which 
 has come into existence out of a revolution." Subsequently 
 he allowed the uneasy exclamation to escape him : " The 
 legitimists are legitimising the Revolution." The Prussian 
 ambassador, von der Goltz, an old member of Blucher's head- 
 quarters-staff, displayed himself a diplomat of worthy conduct 
 and sound judgment ; he was never weary of warning his court 
 concerning the suicidal party-rage of the royalists. The result 
 was that Hardenberg declared, as early as March, 1816, that 
 the estabhshed order in France could be secured only by the 
 dissolution of the Chambre introuvaUe. The other three powers 
 hesitated at first to recommend so bold a measure to the 
 Tuileries. But when the infatuation of the ultras remained 
 incurable, King Louis at length plucked up courage. On 
 September 5th the dissolution was effected, amid general reijoic- 
 ing ; the elections returned the moderate parties in a majority, 
 and the Richelieu-Decazes ministry was on tolerable terms with 
 the new chamber. Henceforward the four powers began to 
 contemplate the future of France with somewhat more con- 
 fidence. In a note of February 10, 1817, they informed the 
 due de Richelieu that his oft-repeated request for a diminution 
 of the burden of the military occupation could not be acceded 
 
 372 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 to, and that Wellington's army was to be reduced by one-fifth, 
 by 30,000 men ; but they did not refrain from adding that 
 the praiseworthy principles of the duke and his colleagues had 
 contributed greatly to this resolve. So profoundly was proud 
 France humiliated : her first minister had to accept the formal 
 praise of the high council of Europe. 
 
 It soon became apparent that the independence of modern 
 states cannot permanently endure so intimate a community as 
 had been established by the Quadruple Alliance. The old con- 
 trast between Russian and Austro-English policy continually 
 recurred, and Czar Alexander did all he could to increase the 
 suspicion of the courts of Vienna and of London. Without 
 consvilting his aUies, in February, 1816, he published the charter 
 of the Holy Alliance ; the world was to admire him, him alone, 
 as the saviour and the leader of aUied Europe. Whilst the 
 other powers reduced their armaments, the Russian army was 
 increased, and in serried masses was moved nearer to the frontier. 
 The czar took delight in exaggerated descriptions of Russian 
 miUtary power, and notwithstanding the experiences of the last 
 campaigns, this power was, in fact, incredibly overestimated by 
 everyone ; even Gneisenau beUeved that Russia had more than 
 a miUion soldiers at her disposal, and that she was in a position 
 to begin a war of offence with the immediate use of 500,000 
 men. Mettemich anxiously declared that the burden of these 
 armaments, and his orthodox enthusiasm, might readily mislead 
 the czar into warlike adventures ; the Austrian minister beUeved 
 that ever3nvhere, in France and Spain, in Italy and Turkey, he 
 came upon traces of the secret intrigues of Russian agents.' 
 This restless, ambitious policy sailed under the Hberal flag ! In 
 all the courts the Russian ambassador put in a plea for a 
 system of " wise freedom," whilst the English ambassadors were 
 just as zealous in the issue of warnings against the " dangerous 
 folly " of liberal attempts at a constitution. In Poland, 
 Alexander promulgated a constitution at Christmas in 1815. 
 Although this fundamental law made no important alterations 
 in the cancer of PoKsh affairs or in the enslavement of the 
 country-folk, and although it placed all political power in the 
 hands of the nobiUty, nevertheless the name of constitution 
 exercised its magic charm. Uncritical liberals triumphantly 
 acclaimed the gracious gift of the czar, and asked impatiently 
 
 1 Krusemark's Reports, dated February 24, i8r6, February i and March 
 23, 1817, March 7 and April 9, 1818. 
 
 373 
 
History of Germany 
 
 when Germany's princes were going to follow the example of 
 the enlightened autocrat, who was secretly preparing a charter 
 even for Russia herself. Of the two statesmen whom the czar 
 consulted in foreign affairs, the insignificant Nesselrode remained 
 devoted to his friend Mettemich ; all the more suspicious, 
 therefore, to the court of Vienna seemed the liberal philhellene 
 Capodistrias. The Austrian general Steigentesch soon found 
 himself in just as painful a situation at St. Petersburg as was 
 the Russian ambassador Stackelberg at Vienna. Caveat consul ! 
 was the continual exclamation in Stackelberg's reports ; in 
 alarmed phrases he warned his imperial master against the 
 cunning of these Viennese " Dalai-Lama." The secret compact of 
 January 3, 1815, remained unforgotten in St. Petersburg, and 
 the chief blame in this matter was ascribed to Prince Metter- 
 nich by all Russian statesmen. 
 
 The profound mistrust of the tory cabinet for the czar 
 was plainly shown in a proposal which in August, 1816, 
 Lord Cathcart transmitted to the court of St. Petersburg. A 
 conference of officers was to assemble, to consult about a simul- 
 taneous reduction of armaments on the part of all the powers, and 
 to prescribe to each state the strength of its peace army. It was 
 unmistakable that this pacific proposal was directed against the 
 Russian armaments. Hence Mettemich eagerly accepted the sug- 
 gestion, and rejoined, with a friendly side-thrust at the Prussian 
 army, that the diminution of armies was especially desirable in a 
 period " in which even revolutionaries assume a military mask." 
 Alexander gave a sympathetic but non-committal answer. 
 The English proposal was shelved, for it was felt that so 
 unnatural a limitation of the most important suzerain right of 
 independent states could not seriously be carried into effect. 
 Prussia, in especial, could never allow the extent of her national 
 army to depend upon the preferences of powerful neighbours.* 
 Meanwhile at the Austrian court anxiety grew from month to 
 month, and at the new year of 1818 Mettemich directly pro- 
 posed to privy-councillor von Jordan, Hardenberg's confidant, 
 who was in Vienna at the time upon the affairs of the Gefmanic 
 Federation, that Prassia should conclude with Austria a secret 
 defensive alUance, in case of a Russian attack. Hardenberg 
 was immediately prepared to accede to this idea, for to him 
 
 * Memorial of the English government upon the European situation ; Metter- 
 nich's AperfU sur le mdmoire anglais. (Sent to Hardenberg by Knisemark in 
 August and October, 1816.) 
 
 374 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 the friendship of Austria outweighed all other considerations. 
 The king, however, refused. Why should Prussia abandon her 
 old ally (who, besides, had already penetrated the secret designs 
 of Mettemich) on account of the indefinite fears of the Hofburg ? 
 The chancellor was profoundly displeased by this refusal ; in his 
 opinionated way he believed that Frederick WilUam was once 
 more playing a part similar to that which he had played in the 
 tragical epoch of 1805. Vainly did he appeal for aid to Prince 
 Wittgenstein, who was an unconditional adherent of Austria ; 
 vainly did he complain that his royal master displayed so Uttle 
 confidence. The monarch held firm, and on May 2nd Harden- 
 berg was forced to refuse the Austrian offer. ^ 
 
 The English court was especially suspicious regarding the 
 many-sided activities of Russian diplomacy in Spain. Here, as 
 in France, the four powers were earnestly endeavouring to keep 
 the re-established monarchy within bounds, in so far as their 
 regard for the irritable Spanish national pride rendered this 
 possible. They all felt how greatly the common cause of the 
 European restoration was being damaged by the sins of King 
 Ferdinand. The whole liberal world was in an uproar, and 
 Byron wrote flaming verses against the Catholic Moloch, when 
 the most profligate of the European princes re-established the 
 inquisition immediately after his return, when he visited horrible 
 punishments upon the heroes of that national war which had 
 restored the Bourbon throne, when from the ranks of his 
 monkish adherents the insane cry arose, " Long Uve chains, long 
 live oppression, long Uve King Ferdinand, death to the nation ! " 
 But whilst all the powers were united in condemning the 
 Spanish government, Russia at the same time endeavoured to 
 undermine the position of power which England had acquired 
 in the peninsula during the war of independence. The Russian 
 ambassador, Tatischtschew, gradually acquired in Madrid even 
 greater influence than Pozzo di Borgo enjoyed in Paris. It was 
 soon observed that Russia desired the renewal of the old Bourbon 
 family-treaty, in order to be able to employ against England 
 the naval power of the two crowns. The unwearied Russian 
 patron at length went so far as to sell a portion of his own 
 fleet to Spain, and demanded that by common intervention 
 the European powers should reconcile the revolted South 
 American colonies with the Speinish motherland. All the 
 powers rejected this adventurous proposal ; England and Austria 
 
 » Hardenberg's Diary, January 14, March 12, May 2, 1818. 
 375 
 
History of Germany 
 
 observed the Mediterranean policy of the czar with anxiety, an 
 anxiety which was all the more lively because new disturbances 
 were now threatening in the Balkan peninsula. 
 
 How often did Mettemich complain that his " best and 
 firmest ally," Turkey, remained the only state in Europe which 
 could not secure recognition from the great powers. Through 
 slothful arrogance, the Porte had refrained from demanding from 
 Europe a guarantee for her territorial dominion ; now, by the 
 conclusion of the Holy Alliance, she found herself forihally 
 excluded from the society of European states. The hatred of 
 the Mohammedans against the Giaours flamed up powerfully 
 once more ; Sultan Mahmud intentionally left certain articles 
 of the treaty of Bucharest unfulfilled, and confidently awaited 
 the reopening of the Russian war.^ Meanwhile the inevitable 
 rising of the unhappy Rayahs had already begun. The Serbs 
 would not lay down their arms, and, under the leadership of 
 Milosch, acquired the status of a semi-independent Christian 
 national community whose very existence conflicted with the 
 fundamental idea of the Ottoman empire ; envoys from the 
 dissatisfied Greeks assembled in St. Petersburg, and had a 
 friendly reception from Capodistrias. Neither in London nor in 
 Vienna was there any recognition of the inevitabihty of the 
 wars of independence which were here preparing. In the circles 
 of the high tories, the maintenance of Turkey was absolutely an 
 article of political faith, especially since English interests in the 
 east seemed to have been safeguarded by the aquirement of the 
 Ionian islands. Notwithstanding all reasons to the contrary, 
 people still appealed to the saying of Pitt, who declared that 
 he would not talk politics with a man who did not regard the 
 maintenance of the Porte as essential. Mettemich, in his turn, 
 unhesitatingly applied to the foreign dominion of the Turks his 
 doctrine of the inviolable rights of legitimate authority. He 
 detested the despairing Christian nations of the Balkan peninsula, 
 not merely as proteges of Russia, but also as rascally rebels. 
 In his concern he failed to notice that the unsteady ambition 
 of the liberal autocrat, whilst playing at times with high-fl3dng 
 resolves, nevertheless lacked the resolution requisite to bring his 
 schemes to perfection. To the anxious enquiries of General 
 Steigentesch, the czar replied scornfully that it would be opposed 
 to his conscience to shed the blood of a single soldier in a 
 
 1 Krusemark's Report, January 8, 1817. 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 struggle against these Turkish swine. ^ To his ambassador in 
 Vienna he had a despatch sent, to the effect that the European 
 ministers had not yet Hberated their minds from antiquated and 
 pusillanimous ideas, the reason being that their hearts were 
 untouched by the moraUty of the gospel. From this arose 
 their mistrust of Russia, but to-day in accordance with the 
 counsels of divine providence, there prevailed the rule of pubUc 
 opinion, based upon truth and justice. 
 
 Thus, while the Hofburg was trembling in contemplation of 
 the imagined secret plans of the czar, the Austrian government 
 was itself animated by a genuine desire for peace. How 
 miraculously had this ancient Austria, after so many defeats and so 
 many losses, risen once more to a height of power which recalled 
 the days of Wallenstein ; rarely indeed, at the issue of a world 
 war, had any state found itself so completely at the goal of its 
 desires. Mettemich could pride himself on the extent to which, 
 by prudent husbanding and well-timed utihsation of the energies 
 of the realm, he had personally contributed to this briUiant 
 result ; and since even as quite a young man he had always 
 wished to be regarded as one who had foreseen and prophesied 
 everything that happened, his self-satisfaction now increased to 
 the degree of immeasurable arrogance. To him it seemed that 
 the whole new ordering of European affairs was his personal 
 work, and that its preservation was the sole task of his Ufe, 
 since he himself and his state could not but lose by any 
 change. The profound inveracity of his spirit made it easy 
 for him to explain facts in a way agreeable to himself ; the 
 images of the past became rearranged in his mind, and before 
 long, in the history of the generation that had just come to a 
 close, he could see nothing but a colossal welter of madness 
 and crime ; amid the general confusion, he alone had remained 
 free from passion, free from error, and above all, as he was 
 always glad to maintain, free from self-love. He spoke con- 
 temptuously about " politicians of the breed of Richelieu and 
 Mazarin." 
 
 The foreign diplomats soon observed how difficult it was to 
 carry on a business conversation with him ; it was his custom 
 to deliver long and learned addresses, in which he expounded 
 his infallible opinion to the ears of respectful Hsteners. Monoto- 
 nously, unctuously, verbosely, and grandiloquently, did his 
 letters and despatches continue to revolve in innumerable 
 
 ^ Krusemark's Report, April 17 and May 13, 1816. 
 
 377 
 
History of Germany 
 
 circumlocutions around the single idea of the maintenance of 
 the status quo. Yet behind this proud confidence there was 
 concealed a secret anxiety. Mettemich dreaded war because he 
 knew the weakness of the neglected Austrian military system, 
 and still more did he dread revolution. He never doubted the 
 excellence of the system which drained the life-blood of the two 
 great nations of Central Europe ; but he saw that the party 
 of revolution, which had alarmed him all his life, continued to 
 prowl around in obscurity ; he regarded it as prepared to hurl a 
 fire-brand upon his artificial structure. Since he had always 
 been convinced that the Tugendbund had for long fostered 
 revolution in the Prussian army, it was with great anxiety that he 
 contemplated the party struggles in France and the convulsive 
 movements of national feeling in Germany and Italy. He 
 learned with horror that even in England, the citadel of the 
 counter-revolution, the idea of parliamentary reform was 
 reawakening, that the fiery Cobbett was widely circulating his 
 Political Register among the masses, and that the long-neglected 
 lower classes were remembering their human rights. The master 
 of diplomacy had hitherto troubled himself as little regarding 
 the problems of constitutional government and of administra- 
 tion, as he had about the great civilising aims of national life, 
 whose fulfilment the genuine statesman regards as his highest 
 duty. He even stood so remote from the internal life of his 
 country as to sum up his judgment upon the character of the 
 Austrian monarchy in the phrase that without being a federative 
 state Austria still had the advantages as well as the disadvan- 
 tages of the federative structure. Utterly void of poietic ideas, 
 his policy was one which lived from hand to mouth. It was 
 his view that enough was done by always running promptly to 
 the spot with fire-buckets as soon as the flames of revolution 
 broke out an5^where. His poUcy swore as unconditionally by 
 the idea of stability as did that of youthful liberalism by the 
 abstractions of the law of reason, and the enemy of the doc- 
 trinaires himself ultimately fell into a doctrinairism which was 
 far more barren than were the theories of Rotteck. The more 
 clearly it became manifest year by year that the living energies 
 of history could not stand still in front of the limits imposed by the 
 treaties of Vienna, the more desperate became this peace-lover's 
 fear of the revolution ; until at length, in almost all his 
 despatches, the spectre of the impending world-conflagration 
 recurred like the fixed idea of a lunatic. 
 
 378 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 In one region alone of her dominions had Austria failed 
 to carry out all her intentions ; the plan for the ItaUan 
 alliance had been frustrated in Vienna by the opposition of 
 Piedmont. In order to win over the court of Turin for this 
 idea, the Hofburg now put forward claims to the western 
 shore of Lake Maggiore and to the important road over 
 the Simplon, but since Russia and Prussia supported the 
 threatened Piedmontese,* Mettemich let this plan drop for a 
 time, and contented himself with the actual dominion over 
 Italy, which for the nonce seemed tolerably well-estabUshed. It 
 was true that the deUght with which the invading Austrians had 
 been greeted in Lombardy had long since evaporated ; the 
 people murmured at the relentless dismissal of so many old 
 officials ; at the severe methods of a government completely 
 unacquainted with the peculiarities of the country ; at the 
 malpractices of the secret poUce, and at the roughness of the 
 bastone tedesco. In February, 1816, when Emperor Francis made 
 his ceremonial progress through the new Lombardo- Venetian 
 kingdom, he was received everywhere with unmistakable cold- 
 ness ; even the Prussian ambassador. General von Krusemark, 
 a warm friend of Austria, had to report to the king that the 
 Austrian officials and officers were one and all detested, and that 
 all Itahans " to whom the idea of an independent nation had 
 become dear " were disaffected towards the new government. 
 There was no breach of order anjTwhere, and Mettemich, when 
 Hardenberg communicated to him the names of certain suspected 
 Italian patriots, confidently replied that the Itahans, notwith- 
 standing their hostile sentiments, lacked courage for conspiracy." 
 What was there to fear ? In every court throughout the 
 peninsula there prevailed a rigid absolutist spirit in conformity 
 with the fundamental principles of the Hofburg ; moreover, by 
 a secret treaty signed on June 12, 1815, the Bourbons of 
 Naples had pledged themselves to maintain the ancient 
 monarchical institutions, and to report to the court of Vienna 
 anything which seemed to threaten the peace of Italy. 
 
 In relation to German affairs, above all, the Hofburg was 
 altogether without plan and without ideas. It would be enough 
 if the Germanic Federation could be held together at all, and 
 if in case of war it could give mihtary help to the House of 
 
 ' Krusemark's Report, April 10, 1816. 
 
 2 Krusemark's Report from Milan, February 28, March 8, 1816; from 
 Vienna, January 4, 181 7. 
 
 379 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Austria ; as long as this was done it mattered little if the 
 deliberations of the Bundestag of Frankfort were as vain as had 
 been those of the Reichstag of Ratisbon. Metternich cordially 
 despised the petty German courts, and unhesitatingly appealed 
 to the czar whenever " some of the German princes desiring to 
 make a trade in inhabitants " could not come to terms about 
 their territorial disputes. He knew, however, that these petty 
 princes remained of the Austrian party solely because they 
 revered the Hofburg as the benevolent protector of their 
 sovereignty. Consequently he proposed to leave them as free 
 as possible. Even the inconvenient article 13 of the federal 
 act, the promise to summon diets, did not at first seem 
 very dangerous, since the majority of the German courts were 
 above all suspicion of liberal sentiments. The prudent Austrian 
 statesman had never been misled into imagining that the 
 imperial house could participate in the political life of the 
 German nation, or could do anything on behalf of German rights 
 and German well-being. In his memoirs he wrote unreservedly : 
 " As far as Austria is concerned, the expression ' German senti- 
 ment ' (especially in the sense in which the term has been 
 employed among the higher circles of the population in North 
 Germany since the disasters to Prussia and the North) is simply 
 a myth." In his view every awakening of national ideas in 
 Germany involved a danger to the dominion of Austria. 
 Emperor Francis, finally, regarded patriotism with direct sus- 
 picion, considering it a dangerous revolutionary passion, and he 
 would never hear of an Austrian fatherland, since all the order 
 of the state reposed simply upon the obedience of subjects to 
 the person of the ruler; when there was laid before him a 
 proposal for sending a letter of thanks to Schwarzenberg and 
 the army, he carefully erased the word " fatherland," writing 
 in its place, " my people " and " my state." 
 
 A good understanding with Prussia was essential, if the 
 Germans were to remain in a loose defensive alliance without 
 ever awakening to a strong national life. Metternich had not 
 failed to recognise this, but how differently from Hardenberg 
 did he understand the idea of peaceful dualism ! He had 
 formed his views of the Prussian state in accordance with the 
 contemptuous and hostile judgments which were current in the 
 circles of the CathoUc imperial nobility, and, subsequently as 
 ambassador to Berlin in the years before 1805, he had observed, 
 close at hand, the weakest period in the history of the 
 
 380 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 Frederician monarchy. He never could overcome the repellent 
 impressions of those days. To him the Prussian state always 
 remained no more than a chance structure, a household of 
 different nations that had been thrown together. " Everything 
 seems contradictory in the history of Prussia, and her annals 
 embrace barely a century ! " Consequently he believed through- 
 out Ufe that the world-empire of Napoleon would have 
 endured if only the Imperator had treated the state of 
 Frederick with somewhat more intelligence, and had accepted 
 it, as a modest middle-sized state, into the ranks of the Con- 
 federation of the Rhine. In the year 1811, he definitely counted 
 upon the destruction of Prussia, and hoped with the help of 
 Napoleon to gain Silesia for the House of Austria. 
 
 When this expectation was frustrated and Prussia experienced 
 a glorious resurrection, Mettemich still failed to have any under- 
 standing of the moral energies which had rendered the humiliated 
 state capable of the unequal struggle. He delighted in regard- 
 ing Prussian affairs in the gloomiest light, and spoke disdainfully 
 of the narrow, irresolute king, and of Hardenberg's credulous 
 weakness ; he persuaded himself that at the time of the truce 
 the Prussian army had " existed only in name " ; he even 
 thought it possible to decry the fame of Blucher, Gneisenau, 
 and York, by a few silly jokes about the grammatical blunders 
 of Marshal Forwards. In the Hofburg there was no doubt 
 whatever that Prussia had been saved from destruction by 
 Austria alone ; Mettemich had never recognised the existence of 
 more than three great powers upon the continent. Re-estab- 
 Ushed Prussia was ever to remain the first auxiliary of the 
 House of Austria ; in the view of the court of Vienna, 
 the meaning of German dualism was the dominion of Austria 
 with the voluntary co-operation of Prussia. Mettemich, however, 
 had a masterly understanding of the way in which he could 
 deceive Hardenberg about the latter's own heart-felt opinions; 
 he preserved forms so carefully that the statesmen of BerUn 
 remained firmly convinced that Prussia was regarded in Vienna 
 as a thoroughly equal and friendly great power. During twenty 
 years it happened once only, and this on a comparatively 
 trifling occasion, that Mettemich permitted himself to make any 
 observation to the Prussian ambassador regarding the internal 
 affairs of the aUied state. Such questions were always discussed 
 solely in confidential letters to Prince Wittgenstein, the most trust- 
 worthy of Mettemich's friends in Berlin, or were cautiously touched 
 
 ^81 
 
History of Germany 
 
 on in friendly conversation during the personal meetings of the 
 monarchs. 
 
 This carefully calculated reserve did not come easily to the 
 prudent man, for in the bottom of his heart he was far more 
 uneasy about the internal condition of Prussia than he was 
 about the situation in France. He could not conceal from 
 himself that Prussia had laid down her arms filled with bitter 
 memories of an undeserved diplomatic reverse, and that it would 
 be impossible for her to content herself permanently with the 
 ridiculous disintegrated state of her territory. He held firmly to the 
 belief that the administration of his deadly enemy Stein had 
 filled young Prussia with dangerous ideas, with a revolutionaiy 
 lust of conquest, and his suspicions were confirmed by the 
 writings of Arndt and Gorres. Most sinister of all seemed the 
 unprecedented emergence of the Prussian national army ; not 
 one of the statesmen of the old school could beUeve that so 
 much unconsidered candour, so much noisy patriotic enthusiasm, 
 could go hand in hand with invincible loyalty to the crown. 
 Moreover, the Prussian officers by no means concealed their 
 contemptuous opinion of the Austrian army and Austrian 
 military leadership. Many were of the same view with their 
 gallant General Steinmetz, of York's corps, who at the time of 
 the second peace of Paris wrote bluntly : " Austria no longer 
 belongs to the German household ; the supreme dominion in 
 Germany falls to the Prussians." During the first two years 
 after the conclusion of peace, all the courts of the Quadruple 
 AUiance continually suffered from the fear that Prussia might 
 be led into revolutionary adventures by her fanatical army. 
 Wellington declared that Prussia was worse than France, since 
 in the former authority no longer existed. Alexander excused 
 his miUtary preparations by the need for protecting Germany 
 against the revolution. " Prussia, in especial, is in a bad condi- 
 tion," he said to Steigentesch, " and the king of Prussia will be 
 the first to whom I shall have to furnish assistance. "* 
 
 In reality, nothing was further from the court of Berlin 
 than the ambition of a revolutionary war policy. Everyone 
 throughout the country knew that the king was firmly determined 
 that never again, if he could possibly help it, would he draw 
 the sword. No doubt among the younger officials and ofiicers 
 there were not wanting a few men of far-seeing intelligence who 
 recognised the untenability of the configuration of , the state 
 
 ' Krusemark's Report, April 17, 1816. 
 382 
 
opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 domain, and who demanded speedy redress. In an able 
 memorial, president von Motz, in Erfurt, maintained that the 
 leading position in the north, for which Hardenberg was working, 
 coidd be secured only if Prussia could acquire Upper Hesse 
 and Fulda in exchange for portions of her Rhenish WestphaUan 
 provinces, and thus regain on the Lower Main what had been 
 lost on the Upper Main in Ansbach-Bayreuth ; in this way the 
 whole of North Germany would be surrounded by Prussian 
 territory, and the important mihtary position of the Kinzig 
 defile, together with the chief commercial artery of Germany, 
 the road from Frankfort to Leipzig, would pass into the posses- 
 sion of Prussia. He referred wamingly to the hostile sentiments 
 of the Rhenish Confederate states of the south : "As regards both 
 Germany and France, these states seem to be animated by but 
 one interest, namely, the dispersal and isolation of the German 
 national energy and the hindering of all unity." For this 
 reason he implored the chanceUor to thrust a wedge of Prussian 
 territory between Hesse and Bavaria, so that the North German 
 central states might not be exposed " to pressure from the 
 south."* But how could so bold a plan be reahsed without 
 war ? The government rejected the proposal, being honourably 
 resolved to content itself with the new arrangement of frontiers, 
 more especially since the king spumed any territorial exchange 
 as a disregard of his duties as a ruler. Hardenberg's German 
 policy was content with the more modest task of favouring the 
 development of the federal constitution which had been promised 
 in Vienna and, above all, of firmly establishing the federal 
 mihtary system. 
 
 /.like to the king and to the chancellor, the friendship of 
 the eastern powers seemed indispensable to the carrying out of 
 these peaceful plans ; the only difference was that now, as before, 
 Frederick William regarded the czar as his most trusty ally, 
 whereas Hardenberg reUed especially on Austria. The imion of 
 the royal house with the Russian court became even more 
 intimate when Alexander's brother, the grand duke Nicholas, was 
 betrothed to the amiable princess Charlotte. The marriage took 
 place two years later, in June, 1817 ; and the Prussians learned 
 with justified resentment that the princess had been received 
 into the Greek church. The gentle spirit of the king made it 
 impossible for him to contradict the heart-felt incUnation of his 
 
 * Motz's Memorial concerning the geographical union of the eastern with the 
 western half of the Prussian state, 1817. Humboldt's Reply, March 18, 1819. 
 
 383 
 
History of Germany 
 
 beautiful favourite daughter ; through paternal tenderness the 
 faithful Protestant was led to make a sacrifice to Russian 
 arrogance, a sacrifice which had long seemed a trifle to the 
 minor Protestant courts, but which was unexampled in the 
 House of the Hohenzollerns, and which comported ill with the 
 pride of a .great power. Notwithstanding the friendship between 
 the courts, the two nations became speedily estranged after the 
 war, and indeed almost hostile. The enthusiasm displayed for 
 the Cossacks in the spring of 1813 had passed away, and no 
 permanent friendliness resulted from the long-continued military 
 co-operation of the two armies. The Prussian liberals put Uttle 
 trust in the emotional utterances of the liberal-minded autocrat, 
 and detested Muscovy as one of the powers of darkness ; while 
 in the border provinces, everyone execrated the petty and 
 dishonourable spitefulness of the Russian customs officials. 
 
 § 2. THE FRANKFORT NEGOTIATIONS. 
 
 Such were the relationships among the great powers when 
 the first envoys to the Bundestag arrived in the ancient coro- 
 nation town. The curse of ludicrousness which was to rest 
 upon the federal assembly throughout its activities, was attached 
 to it from its very birth. First of all, the opening, which by 
 the Paris congress had been announced for September i, 1815, 
 was postponed for three months. Then the envoys, who 
 assembled in the course of November, had still to wait a whole 
 year, exposed to the mockery of the inhabitants of Frankfort, 
 before the proceedings began. The reason for this delay was 
 that the two great powers wished first of all to settle the 
 difficult problems involved in the German territorial disputes, 
 and, more especially, the hopelessly confused Bavario-Austrian 
 negotiations. 
 
 At the congress of Vienna, the court of Munich had not 
 secured the promised continuous domain, and consequently 
 remained in temporary possession of Salzburg and the regions 
 along the lower Inn, which were to be handed over to Austria. 
 In order to secure a compromise which should be in its own 
 favour, it had since then persistently supported the policy of the 
 Hofburg ; in Paris, the Bavarian minister Rechberg had given 
 but lukewarm support to the demands of Prussia and of 
 the petty German states, because Austria did not desire that 
 
 384 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 France should be diminished. It was in gratitude for this that 
 Mettemich, in the sitting of the Paris congress of November 
 3rd, had seciu-ed the assent of the great powers to the " rever- 
 sion " of Breisgau and of the Badenese Palatinate. Thus, with- 
 out even reporting the matter to the cabinet of Carlsruhe, the 
 four powers arbitrarily disposed of the future of certain Badenese 
 territories. The reversion of the Badenese Palatinate was 
 absolutely illegal, and there was no more than an artificial and 
 specious groimd for the reversion of Breisgau. The grand duke 
 of Baden possessed Breisgau in virtue of the peace of Press- 
 burg, " in the same manner and with the same rights " as had 
 formerly the duke of Modena. Since the imperial house was 
 the next heir of its Modenese cousins, the court of Vienna put 
 forward the preposterous claim that not only could it demand 
 the Italian possessions of the House of Modena when that house 
 became extinct, but that it could also demand the return of 
 Breisgau when the direct Zahringen line died out. The great 
 powers recognised this groundless claim because the statesmen 
 of England and Russia had absolutely no knowledge of German 
 affairs, and Hardenberg countenanced it because he continued to 
 hope that Austria would take over the guardianship of the 
 Upper Rhine. 
 
 With this means of negotiation in his hands, Mettemich now 
 demanded the immediate exchange of Salzburg for the Palatinate 
 on the left bank of the Rhine. Seeing that Bavaria still 
 hesitated, he finally lost patience, and in December sent General 
 Vacquant to Munich to enforce the cession in any circumstances ; 
 simultaneously General Bianchi advanced to the Bavarian 
 frontier with an Austrian army. The court of Munich recog- 
 nised too late how foolishly Wrede had acted, when by his 
 spiteful attitude in the Saxon negotiations, he had alienated 
 Prussian sj^mpathies. King Max Joseph and Montgelas now 
 implored the Prussian ambassador Kiister to forget the Viennese 
 quarrels. The chancellor answered coolly that time would show, 
 that if the Bavarian court should in the future display friendly 
 sentiments, the king of Prussia would not be relentless towards 
 the king of Bavaria. The chancellor then instructed the 
 ambassador to join with England and Russia in supporting the 
 Austrian negotiator.* 
 
 ' Kiister's Report, September 2 ; Hardenberg's Instructions, October 5 and 
 December i, 1815. 
 
 38s 2 C 
 
History of Germany 
 
 In Bavaria the news of Austria's demands aroused 
 passionate anger. For centuries, with one brief intermission, 
 the region of the lower Inn had belonged to the Wittelsbachs ; 
 Salzburg had always been part of the Bavarian realm, and had 
 carried on friendly intercourse with the neighbours in the 
 electorate. These two territories, with a purely Bavarian 
 population, were to be exchanged for the remote Trans-Rhenish 
 Palatinate, whose fickle and light-minded inhabitants had from 
 remote antiquity been unsympathetic towards the ponderous 
 Bavarians! The old tribal hatred against the Austrians once 
 more became active ; memories of the struggles of 1705 and of 
 the legendary smith of Cochel were in everyone's mouth. The 
 Salzburgers were forbidden, under pain of severe punishment, 
 even to speak of the cession of the land. Marshal Wrede 
 stormed and threatened, and in military circles the bitter com- 
 plaint was heard: " We lack the protection of Napoleon." 
 Loudest of all stormed Crown Prince Louis. He regarded it 
 as a dishonour to the^ new kingly crown that the exchange 
 should not be made by his house of its own free will, but that 
 it should be enforced by the Quadruple Alliance. The hterary 
 incendiaries of the Wittelsbachs once more set to work. A fierce 
 pamphlet, Efitweder — oder, composed by Aretin, and widely 
 circulated by Prince Charles, demanded vociferously of all true 
 Bavarians that " they should beat their plough-shares into swords 
 in order to resist the joint dominion of Austria and Prussia." 
 In the Salzburg region a petition was circulated for signature 
 by the Bavarian officials, suggesting that there should be 
 placed at the disposal of the court " hundreds of thousands of 
 bayonets" in the hands of Salzburg volunteers. " The people, 
 not enervated by over-culture, rejoices in the plenitude of 
 youth ; our princely house is older than all the others ! Must 
 we suffer from Austria the very wrong which so recently, when 
 Prussia designed to mutilate Saxony, was opposed by Austria 
 upon the noblest and justest grounds of principle ? " Yet 
 while the Bavanan people were thus venting their ancient spite 
 against the North German great power. Max Joseph was saying 
 to Kiister that he hoped before long there would be a new war 
 between Austria and Prussia, and declaring that in that case 
 Bavaria would faithfully take Prussia's side ! » 
 
 It almost seemed as if the history of the Germanic Federa- 
 tion was to begin with a civil war. The condition of the 
 
 1 Kiister's Report, January 25, x8i6. 
 386 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 Bavarian army was, however, deplorable, and Mettemich held 
 firmly to his demands. He declared dryly that the promised 
 " contiguity " of the Bavarian domain had been rendered 
 impossible by the opposition of the South German neighbour 
 states, and thus admitted with his customary ease of conscience 
 that in Ried and Paris he had deceived his Bavarian friends 
 with promises which could not possibly be fulfilled. The 
 Wittelsbachs ventured one final attempt. The king wrote to 
 Czar Alexander (who had urgently advised him to peld " out 
 of regard for the peace of the Germanic Federation ") and was 
 not ashamed to praise the czar for having preserved Alsace for 
 the French. "It is to the magnanimous, continuous, and 
 persistent labours of your majesty, that Europe chiefly owes her 
 Uberation ; it is your foresight, above all, which has preserved 
 France for the political system of Europe, in opposition to the 
 sophisms of ambition and the outcries of exaggeration. You 
 will not deny the like protection to an ally who asks merely 
 for preservation." ^ Shortly afterwards, in February, 1816, 
 Crown Prince Louis went to Milan, to win over Emperor Francis 
 by a personal interview. At the same time, however. Baron 
 von Berckheim was despatched to Milan on behalf of the 
 Badenese court, for in the meanwhile inteUigence had been 
 received in Carlsruhe, as to what had been determined in Paris 
 regarding the future of Breisgau and the Badenese Palatinate, 
 so that the Austrian court was now between two fires. The 
 Badenese minister entered a formal protest against any infringe- 
 ment of the rights of his prince ; in his excitable manner, the 
 Bavarian crown prince reminded Emperor Francis of his pledged 
 word, and stormily demanded the promised contiguous domain ; 
 the true-hearted emperor, shrugging his shoulders, answered 
 the disputants, by saying, " I am body and soul at one with 
 my aUies, and can do nothing without them." Mettemich, too, 
 imperturbably appealed to the decision of the great powers ; 
 and although he sharply censured the Badenese statesman for 
 the irritable tone of his protest, Berckheim soon perceived that 
 it was the intention of Austria to enforce nothing more than 
 the cession of Salzburg, and that there was no serious intention 
 of handing over Breisgau and the Badenese Palatinate to 
 Bavaria.^ 
 
 ^ Czar Alexander to King Max Joseph, December 24, 1815. The king's 
 Reply, January 6, 1816. 
 
 ^ Berckheim's Report to the Badenese ministry, Milan, February 14. Berck- 
 heim's Protest, February lo. Metternich's Reply, February 22, 1816. 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Louis returned home with nothing effected. Since the 
 four powers urgently demanded that these unsavoury negotia- 
 tions should at length be brought to a conclusion, negotiations 
 in which the duplicity of the Hofburg played a hardly less 
 detestable part than the arrogant greed of Bavaria, the court 
 of Munich 5delded a step, and by the treaty of April 14, 1816, 
 surrendered Salzburg and the region of the lower Inn, in 
 exchange for the Palatinate on the left bank of the Rhine 
 and certain still masterless areas in Odenwald. It was with 
 profound discontent that the Bavarians of Salzburg passed under 
 Austrian rule, but a great part of the country was crown-land, 
 so that the welfare of the inhabitants was wholly dependent 
 upon the new suzerainty, which exercised its powers mildly ; 
 the consequence was that the excitement gradually subsided, 
 and to the inhabitants the unnatural separation from their 
 fellow tribesmen soon came to seem a matter of course. 
 
 Since the Bavarian state had, by the treaty of exchange, 
 gained an accession of 85,000 inhabitants, no just grievance any 
 longer existed Nevertheless the failure to secure an unbroken 
 territorial area continued to rankle at the court of Munich, and 
 a demand was therefore made that, in the secret articles of the 
 treaty, Bavaria should be allotted still further compensations. 
 Mettemich had no objection to display himself as a free-handed 
 giver at the cost of Baden, for he foresaw what insuperable 
 obstacles would arise to the fulfilment of his promise. It was 
 agreed in the secret articles that after the extinction of the 
 direct line of the Zahringens, the Badenese Palatinate should 
 lapse to Bavaria ; in addition, in compensation for the lost 
 contiguity, Bavaria was to receive as soon as possible the 
 Badenese Main-Tauber circle, and until this cession could be 
 effected she was to be paid by Austria an annual rent of 
 100,000 florins. Here was another frivolous and arbitrary act, 
 and Bavaria did not hesitate to push her reputed claims by all 
 possible means. Whilst in the Frankfort territorial negotiations 
 the Bavarian envoy demanded the cession of the Main-Tauber 
 circle as an incontestable right. Count Bray courted the favour 
 of the czar. The alarmed Badenese court armed itself with 
 similar weapons. Berstett hastened for help to London ; to 
 St. Petersburg there had already been despatched a prince of 
 the new collateral line. Count William of Hochberg. Subse- 
 quently, on the Neva, the most fortunate member of the 
 Badenese cabinet, the young baron von Blittersdorff, won his 
 
 388 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 diplomatic spurs, endeavouring with the aid of the empress 
 Elizabeth to dislodge the Bavarian ambassador from Alexander's 
 favoiir. Thus the disgraceful rivalry of the two German courts 
 for foreign protection persisted for many months, and Capodis- 
 trias exclaimed contemptuously to the Badenese envoy : " You 
 are always lying before the door of the great powers ! ' Mean- 
 while the Bavarian government had increased its demands, at 
 the instigation of the crown prince, who was unwUUng to 
 postpone his entry into the castle of the counts-palatine at 
 Heidelberg ; in February, 1817, Bavaria actually demanded 
 from the great powers the immediate cession of the Badenese 
 Palatinate. 
 
 This new and presumptuous claim on the part of Bavaria 
 at length drove the Prussian chancellor from his reserve. 
 Hitherto Hardenberg had moved with great caution, for he did 
 not wish to wound Austria, and he felt that on his own account 
 he was to some extent bound by the agreements of Ried and 
 Paris. Yet such a manifestation of illegal land-hunger seemed 
 to him " utterly opposed to the aims of the Germanic Federa- 
 tion " ; he would never consent that Bavaria should cut off the 
 minor South German states from the north. He therefore 
 immediately altered his tone ; having a decisive declaration 
 made in Vienna and in Munich that Prussia would not tolerate 
 any kind of forcible measures against Baden, and he remained 
 henceforward the loyal protector of the court of Carlsruhe. 
 The king of Wiirtemberg gratefully recognised the altered atti- 
 tude of the cabinet of Berlin, and in secret even the Hofburg 
 was pleased at Prussia's intervention, for Mettemich did not fail 
 to recognise that should Bavaria acquire an excess of power in 
 the German south this would run counter to Austrian interests ; 
 but he could not formally repudiate his own underhand promise." 
 The ultimate decision of all territorial questions remained, 
 however, with the Quadruple AUiance ; and since Alexander 
 had not as yet made any definite decision, and even for a time 
 showed himself favourable to the Bavarian claims, the hateful 
 negotiations still hung in the balance ; from month to month 
 they became more embittered, and exercised a profound and 
 enduring influence upon the neighbourly relationships of the 
 South German states, and also upon the course of their 
 
 1 Blittersdorff's Reports, St. Petersburg, June 5, et seq., September 4, 1818. 
 ' Krusemark's Report of March 5. Kiister's Report of March 14. Har- 
 denberg's Instructions of February 28, March 4, and April 12, 18x7. 
 
History of Germany 
 
 constitutional life. But the two German great powers had already 
 recognised in September, 1816, that the Bundestag must now be 
 opened before the territorial disputes had been settled. 
 
 To the general astonishment of the diplomatic world, the 
 court of Vienna twice offered Stein the position of Austrian 
 federal envoy. What a low opinion Mettemich must continue 
 to hold regarding the importance of the Bundestag if he could 
 offer the leadership of this assembly to the man whom he 
 detested as leader of the German Jacobins, and whom in addition 
 he despised on account of his extravagant ideas ! Stein refused, 
 hardly to the surprise of the Hofburg ; he knew that as Metter- 
 nich's subordinate he would not find a worthy field of activity. 
 The choice of the Viennese cabinet then fell upon the elderly 
 minister Albini, the last presidential envoy from electoral Mainz 
 to the old Reichstag. The intrigues of Ratisbon were to be 
 comfortably pursued in Frankfort ; the man who had guided 
 the old empire to the grave was the right man to hold the new 
 federation at the font. But Albini, already weakened with old 
 age, died in January, 1816, before he had taken up office, and 
 now the Austrian envoy in Cassel, Count Buol, was appointed 
 to the vacant post. Buol was a man of mediocre intelligence, 
 lacking both judgment and principle, but he was cunning enough 
 to conduct a petty intrigue with a good-natured air, or to gain 
 over the servile diplomats of the petty states by an excess of 
 flattery and by occasional lies. 
 
 For the post of Prussian envoy, Hardenberg, too, thought 
 first of Stein ; in this position the dreaded rival, it seemed, 
 would not be dangerous ; his great name was to assure the 
 nation of the Prussian government's German sentiments. At 
 first the baron was incHned to assent, but after the second peace 
 of Paris, he definitely refused the proposal. During the last 
 few months his old mistrust of the chancellor had increased to 
 unjustified contempt, and he no longer expected any good 
 from the Bundestag. After prolonged hesitation, Hardenberg 
 ultimately turned to the Prussian minister in Cassel, von Hanlein, 
 an elderly diplomat of the Franconian school of officials, 
 who, like Albini, had acquired his knowledge of German affairs 
 in the Reichstag of Ratisbon. The unlucky choice soon brought 
 its own revenge. Even before the opening of the Bundestag, 
 the new envoy prepared a painful defeat for his state, a defeat 
 which long continued to accentuate the difficulties of Prussia in 
 
 390 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 the Federation. This was a worthy prelude to and symbol of 
 the whole course of the history of the Federation. 
 
 On January 23, 1816, Hanlein accepted the position. 
 Although still sceptical regarding the stabiUty and value of 
 the Bundestag, he rehed upon his rich experiences in Ratisbon, 
 as well as upon the friendship of Count Buol, his close associate 
 and trusted colleague in Cassel, and immediately transmitted to 
 the chancellor a memorial. What are we to expect from the German 
 Bundestag at Frankfort? Hanlein, intimately acquainted with 
 the old imperial constitution, did not fail to see that Austria, 
 " which could not take more than a half interest in Germany," 
 had gained a position of supremacy altogether intolerable for 
 Prussia : the new presidential power, canying with it the 
 conduct of affairs, must soon become enormously greater than 
 had formerly been the power of the emperor over the Reichstag. 
 He then drew attention to the way in which the stipulation 
 that there should be unanimity in respect of all vital decisions 
 would hinder the peaceful development of the Federation, so 
 that it seemed " as if it had been desired to choke the life and 
 effective activity of the Federation in its very birth." Under 
 such conditions, the North German people, becoming desperate, 
 might readily be led to determine that the domination of the 
 Prussian state in Germany should be secured by a revolution. 
 To avert this danger one means only remained, the partition 
 of dominion between the two great powers. Austria should 
 resiune the imperial dignity, whilst Prussia should receive 
 the title of King of Germany ; then both states, closely alhed 
 and with perfectly equal rights, should take over the joint 
 leadership of the Federation, with the power and prestige of a 
 genuine "supreme head."* 
 
 In March, when Hanlein came to Frankfort for a brief visit, 
 he was received by Buol with open arms, and at once laid his 
 memorial before his faithful friend, and subsequently showed it 
 also to old Wessenberg, who was in Frankfort as member of 
 the territorial commission. In his usual gushing manner, Buol 
 gave verbal assurance of his cordial approval. Wessenberg, in 
 a complimentary note, thanked Hanlein for his admirable memoir, 
 and concluded by saying : " It is to be hoped that your excel- 
 lency will soon return with instructions in accordance with your 
 views, for this will already gain much ! " DeUghted with such 
 success, Hanlein now hastened to Berlin, developed his great 
 1 Hanlein's Report and Memorial to the chancellor, January 23, 1816. 
 
 391 
 
History of Germany 
 
 plan once again in a detailed memorial, » and gave his solemn 
 assurance that Prussia could rely upon the assent of the court 
 ef Vienna. Hardenberg took the improbable assurance at its face 
 value ; where his Austrian friends were concerned, the expe- 
 rienced man was ever childishly unsuspicious, and he could not 
 believe that Mettemich's oft-repeated confidential utterances 
 regarding the necessity of the German dual dominion had been 
 no more than empty words. He therefore made Hanlein draw 
 up a formal treaty for the immediate acceptance of the two 
 great powers, which was subsequently to be laid as an accom- 
 plished fact before the friendly minor courts. Since the 
 chancellor, faithful to his old view, had struck out the clause 
 relating to the titles of emperor and king of Germany, the 
 proposal had become restricted to two main demands : equality 
 of the two great powers in the Bundestag, on such lines that 
 Austria should take over the presidency, whilst Prussia, like 
 electoral Mainz in the old Reichstag, should keep the minutes 
 and draft the resolutions ; all the minor North German military 
 contingents were to be under Prussia's orders, while the South 
 German contingents were to be under the supreme command 
 of Austria. jThe latter proposal was further elaborated in a 
 memorial by Boyen, the minister of war. In this document, all 
 offence to the self-respect of the middle-sized states was sedu- 
 lously avoided, and nothing more was demanded than was 
 absolutely essential to preserve the German federal army from 
 sheer anarchy : Mecklenburg, Electoral Hesse, Anhalt, Nassau, 
 and part of the Thuringian states, were to join Prussia, while 
 Baden, Darmstadt, and Liechtenstein, were to join the Austrian 
 army; the remaining trifling contingents were partly allotted to 
 the four small kingdoms, and partly combined to form a special 
 Low German corps.^ Such were the instructions with which, 
 towards the end of June, Hanlein returned to Frankfort ; amid 
 the accumulated business of this period of transition, it had 
 taken Hardenberg all this time to find a free moment to devote 
 to federal affairs. 
 
 Meanwhile Count Buol had made an adroit use of the 
 absence of his Prussian colleague, scattering the seeds of 
 Austrian federed sentiments freely over the grateful soil of Frank- 
 fort. The minor envoys reported with delight how affable the 
 
 » Wessenberg to Hanlein, March ii ; Hanlein, Report and Memorial to 
 Hardenberg, March 24, 1816. 
 
 » Boyen, Instructions concerning the military constitution of Germany. 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 Austrian seemed : he did not wish to be styled even primus 
 inter pares, but only servus servorum ! Even more satisfactory 
 was the jojrful certainty that Austria had not the remotest 
 thought of any transformation or enlargement of the hastily- 
 drafted constitution. " The federal act," said Buol, " is like the 
 Bible ; it may be expounded but not altered." Berstett, the 
 Badenese envoy, a fat and easy-going man, who in the corvee at 
 Frankfort often yearned for Paris and the well-supplied tables 
 of the Freres Proven9aux, wrote home well satisfied that no 
 one ventured any longer to touch the master-piece, that the 
 federal act was regarded as a sacred object, especially by the 
 minor states.^ Several of the middle-sized states showed them- 
 selves determined from the first never to allow the Bundestag 
 to acquire serious efficiency. The king of Wiirtemberg now 
 announced his accession to the Federation, adding in set terms 
 that the latter half of the federal act seemed unessehtial. 
 Similar views were held by the elector of Hesse, who was 
 represented in Frankfort by his favourite, Buderus von Carlshausen, 
 a notorious skinflint, who had gained the confidence of his 
 prince by artful manipulation of the fractions of a heller in the 
 accounts of the electoral war treasury. Berstett could give 
 satisfactory reports of most of the other envoys as well ; they 
 were all agreed in the determination not to tolerate even the 
 semblance of a dangerous influence ; should Austria and Prussia 
 come forward with plans for a federal mihtary system, some 
 kind of counter-project must immediately be proposed, for " its 
 impracticability must first be proved before it can be rejected. "^ 
 No one, however, knew better how to express the ideas of 
 impenitent particularism than did Baron von Marschall, the envoy 
 of Nassau ; at home, an all-powerful minister, he ruled with 
 Rhenish Confederate official arbitrariness, and occasionally visited 
 his post at Frankfort in order to strengthen the weaker spirits 
 against the Germanising demagogues by his despotic manners 
 and blunt invectives. 
 
 The hidden thoughts of these courts were immediately 
 brought to hght when it was learned that England and Russia 
 intended to accredit as envoys to the Bundestag their diplomats 
 who had been occupied in the territorial commission. Everyone 
 knew that this headless Federation could not conduct any foreign 
 poUcy, or that at most, in some special emergency, it might 
 
 ^ Berstett's Reports, December i6 and i8, 1815. 
 * Berstett's Report, November 12, i8i6. 
 
 393 
 
History of Germany 
 
 send an ambassador abroad ; could it, then, tolerate the regular 
 attendance of foreign diplomats ? Meanwhile Count Reinhard 
 had already been appointed French envoy to the still unopened 
 Bundestag. This talented German-Frenchman was one of those 
 strange characters, exhibiting a mixture of idealism with half- 
 unconscious mendacity, frequently produced by the homeless 
 life of Old German particularism. In the bottom of his heart 
 he always remained the learned Swabian theologian, and sympa- 
 thetically followed the bold flights of German genius ; he really 
 believed that he was acting as a good German when, in earlier 
 days, in Napoleon's service, he had kept a strict eye upon the 
 Rhenish Confederate states, and had now no hesitation in 
 emplo3dng, in the name of the Most Christian King and against 
 victorious Germany, language which recalled the time of Louis 
 XIV. In a memorial communicated to the federal envoys, he 
 asked scornfully whether the Germanic Federation proposed to 
 renounce all foreign relationships, like Turkey in former days, 
 or like the Convention under Robespierre. What an unjust 
 privilege it would be if the foreign powers, Austria, Prussia, 
 England, the Netherlands, and Denmark, were to be represented 
 at the Bundestag, while the other powers were excluded. 
 A Germanic Federation without regular intercourse with foreign 
 lands would be nothing more than a new Confederation of the 
 Rhine, for in that case Germany's foreign poUcy would be 
 decided in Vienna and BerUn alone. "The presence of foreign 
 envoys in Frankfort will assist the Federation to conduct its 
 affairs in accordance with the true spirit of the federal act." 
 Finally, Reinhard claimed admission as a right, for if it should 
 be decided in Frankfort to replace the federal act " by a better 
 ordering of affairs," all the European powers were entitled tc 
 co-operate in this change in the treaties of Vienna ! 
 
 Well did the Frenchman know how far he could allow him- 
 self to go in dealing with the minor German princes ; to all of 
 them the demand of the court of the Tuileries seemed a matter 
 of course. The Badenese minister, von Hacke, immediately 
 wrote to Berstett to the effect that the envoys of France, 
 Russia, and England, must certainly remain in Frankfort, " for 
 these powers are always a protection and a support for the 
 German sovereigns against Austria and Prussia." * That which 
 the court of Baden concealed in secret instructions, was openly 
 
 ^ Reinhard, Mimoire sur les ligations it Francfort. Hacke, Instructions to 
 Berstett, March 6, 1816. 
 
 394 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 expressed by Aretin in the Aletnannia. Crome, too, the statistician 
 of Giessen, an old Bonapartist who had now assumed the mantle 
 of a German patriot, also proved, in a writing upon the poUtical 
 and national interests of Germany and Europe, that the unity of 
 Europe and Germany could be secured only if every European 
 power had the right to speak at the German Bundestag ! 
 
 The court of Berlin alone decisively opposed these foreign 
 claims, and now began to maintain a view (unfortunately far 
 from incontestable from the legal standpoint) to which Prussia 
 subsequently ever adhered. This was the contention that the 
 European powers, since they had accepted the first articles of 
 the federal act in the final act of the Viennese congress, 
 had indeed recognised the status of the Germanic Federation, 
 but had by no means given any guarantee for its .constitution. 
 As early as February, in a Prussian memorial, the unfortunate 
 experiences of the last days at Ratisbon were recalled : the 
 Germanic Federation was now only a federation of states, with- 
 out a genuine centralised authority ; " the life of this federation 
 as such, and vis-a-vis the foreign world, must consist in the 
 idea of repose." Hardenberg made an mgent representation to 
 the court of Vienna to the effect that the continued presence of 
 foreign envoys in such a federal assembly could not fail to lead 
 to dangerous attempts at interference."^ Czar Alexander, how- 
 ever, took the side of France, and in order to allay the anxieties 
 of the Prussian court, laid before Berlin the instructions which 
 had been sent to Anstett, the Russian envoy at Frankfort. 
 With childlike innocence they ran : "As minister of the czar 
 you have no opinion regarding the internal affairs of the Ger- 
 manic Federation. It is useful, it is necessary, thjrt personally, 
 too, you should have no opinion upon these matters. Such is the 
 czar's wish." ^ Therewith, for the patriots of the Bundestag, 
 was proved the complete harmlessness of the admission of 
 foreign envoys. , It could already be foreseen that Prussian 
 opposition would remain fruitless, and that in matters also of 
 foreign poUtics the Bundestag was to be the worthy successor 
 of the Reichstag of Ratisbon : it was itself unrepresented abroad 
 and was to be exposed without defence to the secret intrigues 
 of the foreign powers. 
 
 Beside the representatives of imconcealed particularism were 
 
 ' Hardenberg, Memorial concerning the foreign envo3rships, February, 1816. 
 Instructions to Krusemark, March 11, 181 6. 
 
 ^ Ministerial Despatch to Anstett, St. Petersburg, August 9, 1816. 
 
 395 
 
History of Germany 
 
 ranked numerous well-meaning patriotic statesmen from the 
 petty states : such as Smidt and Hach, from the Hansa towns ; 
 Plessen from Mecklenburg, who had made himself known in 
 Vienna as a well-informed and upright man of business ; Eyben 
 of Holstein ; and, by no means last, the inevitable Gagem. 
 How happy had the indefatigable man been during these first 
 months, when there was as yet no business to do, and everyone 
 could follow his own preferences in paving the way to hell 
 with good intentions for the unborn Bundestag ! With his 
 customary complacency, and undisturbed by coldly-worded 
 replies, he laid before the statesmen of Vienna and Berlin his 
 interminable proposals. " The plague, slavery, the Jewish 
 problem, fanaticism, embargoes on trade, colonisation, literature 
 and the arts, handicrafts, praise of our great men " — ^all these and 
 countless other affairs were to occupy the Bundestag, upon 
 whose table the delighted Luxemburger already in imagination 
 saw crown and sceptre lying.* Even the quieter members of 
 this particularist circle were filled with boundless conceit. The 
 ancient illusion of German liberty decked itself with new plumes. 
 Through unrestricted sovereignty, Lippe, Liibeck, and Prussia, 
 were placed upon an exactly equal footing ; consequently there 
 could be no doubt that this approximation of nine-and-thirty 
 completely equal and completely independent states would 
 spontaneously, and solely through the miraculous power of unity, 
 develop magnificent poUtical efficiency, if only each individual 
 member of the federatipn should be scrupulously prevented from 
 exercising dangerous and excessive influence ! 
 
 Even Smidt, the moderate republican, who in the affairs of 
 his beloved Bremen had always preserved the secure and com- 
 prehensive outlook of the true statesman, even this leading 
 intelUgence of the Frankfort assembly, soon entered the dream- 
 world of federalism, and innocently assumed that his colleagues 
 were animated by the same upright patriotic zeal as that with 
 which his own mind was filled. How splendid it was that 
 henceforward the whole of Germany was to constitute a great 
 repubUc of states, wherein sovereignty emanated from individuals. 
 The only thing needed was that these sovereign individuals 
 should, in the republican manner, be treated as perfectly equal, 
 for why was it impossible that in Germany too " salvation 
 should come just as well from Nazareth as from Jerusalem " ? 
 
 • Gagern to Metternich and Hardenberg, May 3. Hardenbere's Reply 
 June 18, 1816. 
 
opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 The sovereign Hansa towns, too, must at length " emerge from 
 the commons," they must no longer content themselves with 
 modest transitional forms. In such a federation of equals, the 
 sanguine man considered that the German great powers would 
 be educated in the ways of justice, and he maintained that 
 while " great states bring energy and strength to a federation, 
 minor states bring love of justice and capacity for constitutional 
 government." Yet he carefully avoided explaining why Mecklen- 
 burg was more capable of constitutional government than 
 Prussia, or what sort of justice the king of Prussia was to 
 learn from the elector of Hesse, the prince-regent of Hanover, 
 or the king of Wiirtemberg. 
 
 The views of this well-meaning federalist foimd their literary 
 echo in Heeren's work. The Germanic Federation in relation to 
 the European System of States. The Gottingen historian, 
 a distinguished representative of the old book-learning remote 
 from practical life, had recently spent a short period in 
 Frankfort, had associated freely with Smidt and the other 
 federal envoys, and now sketched an entrancing picture of the 
 great future of the Germanic Federation, but one which evoked 
 little response from the depressed nation. The world had had 
 to endure an epoch of blood and horror because Germany, in 
 its dismembered condition, had been unable to defend itself. 
 In face of such experiences, Heeren once more declared, in 
 almost the same words as had been used by Johannes Miiller 
 at the time of the league of princes, that the freedom of Europe 
 depended upon the loose ordering of Germany, for what foreign 
 power could quietly enjoy its possessions if Germany should 
 become united to constitute a great monarchy ? The motley 
 characteristics of German internal affairs were also regarded by 
 him as thoroughly wholesome ; the continual contemplation of 
 " experiments " in various political institutions preserved Ger- 
 mans from narrow-mindedness. Yet this museum of political 
 experiments (which to the professors of constitutional law was 
 certainly of inestimable value) was to be recognised by all the 
 great powers as the ruling central force, as " the peace-state of 
 Europe." To the man of Gottingen this seemed self-evident ; 
 before long Frankfort would become what the Hague had once 
 been, " the centre of the system of states," and the Bundestag 
 would enlarge itself to become a European senate ! 
 
 At the courts of the great powers a definite' opinion regard- 
 ing the Frankfort assembly had already been formed ; but this 
 
 397 
 
History of Germany 
 
 opinion was less flattering than Heeren imagined. The Bundes- 
 tag from now onwards and until the day of its dissolution. 
 was regarded as the great mart for the second-rate diplomatic 
 gossip of Europe. For many months a swarm of unoccupied 
 minor diplomats had been buzzing about Frankfort. What was 
 there for the poor devils to do other than to constitute petty 
 cabals, to engage in tale-bearing, and to rival one another in 
 the attempt to glean information from the plentipotentiaries of 
 the Quadruple Alliance who were occupied in the great territorial 
 commission, from Wessenberg, Humboldt, Clancarty, and Anstett ? 
 Whoever wished to remain on top in this busy idleness must 
 make himself indispensable by piquant novelties, or by keeping 
 an elaborate table. How often did the senate of Bremen send 
 the faithful Smidt a present from its renowned town-hall cellar 
 in order that Count Buol might better rehsh the turtle-soup, 
 lampreys, and other delicacies of the Hanseatic envoy's dining- 
 table. Yet of the secrets of the great courts the minor diplo- 
 mats learned so little that even the real pith of Hanlein's 
 unhappy proposal remained concealed from them. 
 
 All the more luxuriantly flourished the formation of myths, 
 and this m5^h-making was inevitably directed above all against 
 the state which, with its national army and its brilhant warlike 
 renown, seemed the natural enemy of the newly re-established 
 glories of Ratisbon. Moreover, among the envoys of the four 
 powers, Humboldt understood least how to spare the vanity of 
 the minor diplomats ; only too often did he display his 
 superiority by the use of cutting sarcasms and repellent coldness. 
 Most of them stood before him with similar feelings to those 
 felt by a dog before a glass of wine. It was known that 
 Himiboldt hoped to become minister of foreign affairs, but that 
 he was unable to carry this wish into effect owing to Harden- 
 berg's irreconcilable mistrust. It was natural that the purely 
 personal opposition between the two statesmen should 
 immediately be interpreted as political hostility, and that Hum- 
 boldt should be falsely regarded as the secret leader of the 
 Prussian revolutionary party. There was not a single revo- 
 lutionary folly which was not ascribed to him. The diplomats 
 in Wessenberg's house were perfectly certain that Prussia 
 was preparing for a hfe-and-death struggle against the middle- 
 sized states. Humboldt had already elaborated a constitutional 
 plan " of an unprecedentedly liberal character"; as soon as 
 Blucher returned to Berlin, " this army run mad " was to hand 
 
 398 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 in a petition to the king, demanding that the army, Uke 
 Cromwell's dragoons of old, shoiild be represented in the Prussian 
 Reichstag by army deputies. > Wangenheim, the hberal minister 
 of Wiirtemberg, having certain proposals to make to his king 
 regarding the Wiirtemberg constitution, accompanied them with 
 a letter, which he promptly pubUshed. This letter hugely 
 deUghted the federal envoys, for in it Prussia was described as 
 a state utterly disordered by the work of secret societies, and 
 the alluring prospect was then held out to the despot of Stutt- 
 gart, that if a revolution should break out in Prussia and at 
 the same time in the south, and a German state with a free 
 constitution should eome into existence, a change in the condi- 
 tion of affairs would be rendered possible, so extensive as to be 
 hardly conceivable to the boldest imagination ! 
 
 Such was the mood of the Bundestag when Hanlein returned 
 with his confidential instructions. Count Buol possessed an 
 infallible means for the immediate defeat of the Prussian plans ; 
 it was merely necessary for him to communicate them to his 
 minor colleagues, and he did not hesitate to employ this weapon. 
 The affectionate friend, who, in the winter, had met the first 
 proposals in so kindly a spirit, now (June 30th) received the 
 new approach, as Hanlein said, in an extremely tragical mood ; 
 he regarded it as his duty to discuss the matter immediately 
 with the other envoys, and in this way forced Prussia to 
 disclose the secret on her side also. The result was instan- 
 taneoiis and complete. An outcry of horror arose from the entire 
 Bundestag. Was it possible that this revolutionary state should 
 propose to violate Ithe so recently concluded federal act (Buol's 
 Bible), and should, even demand the supreme command of the 
 warlike forces of some of the sovereign powers ? Everyone 
 overwhelmed the most maladroit of all Prussian diplomats with 
 reproaches ; even the peaceful Plessen said openly to him that 
 the federation could get along without Prussia. The chancellor 
 was painfully surprised when in Carlsbad he heard of this 
 incident in Frankfort, and when at the same time he received 
 direct information from Vienna that Mettemich would not accept 
 the Prussian proposals. What was left but to withdraw from 
 the false position which had been entered into almost as much 
 on account of Hardenberg's credulousness as on account of 
 Hanlein's blundering ? On August 9th Hanlein was recalled. 
 His enraged chief reproached him with having by erroneous 
 
 ^ Berstett's Reports, December 16, 1815'; March 6, 1816. 
 399 
 
History of Germany 
 
 reports misled the Prussian court, and of having subsequently, 
 by making the matter public, excited an extremely disadvan- 
 tageous sensation. " The success of the federation depends upon 
 the fullest understanding between Prussia and Austria ; no one 
 mtist even hint at a divergence of views between the two courts 
 which are so closely alUed for the well-being of Europe and 
 Germany." * At the same time Humboldt was temporarily 
 commissioned to represent Prussia at the Bundestag, and by a 
 resolute attitude he was able so far to re-establish the shattered 
 prestige of Prussia that in the preparatory sittings of the 
 Bundestag Count Buol did not venture to take any steps without 
 his approval. But the evil consequences of the defeat that had 
 been sustained, long continued. Prussia and the land-hungry 
 Bavaria were for three years generally regarded with suspicion 
 as ambitious disturbers of the peace of the Federation. Whereas 
 in Ratisbon a Prussian party had never been completely wanting, 
 in Frankfort at first there was no trace of an3rthing of the 
 kind, and the influence of the North German great power upon 
 the federal negotiations remained so trifling that the South 
 German statesmen were subsequently accustomed to describe 
 these first years as the golden age of the Bundestag.* 
 
 Humboldt, from his experience of these first weeks, formed 
 a hopeless, and unhappily altogether just, view of the Germanic 
 Federation. He expounded this view in a lengthy memorial 
 dated September 30, 1816, which subsequently formed the basis 
 of the instructions of the Prussian federal envoy.' Here was 
 given a drastic description of the federal constitution, " an 
 utterly shapeless structure, resting upon no secure foundation" ; 
 " the enormous difficulty " of all decisions was explained, so that 
 "it is hardly possible to see how, about certain matters, any 
 resolution can be passed." It follows from this that Prussia 
 must indeed preserve a good understanding with Austria, but 
 must be content at the Bundestag to deal only in generali- 
 ties. The true carrying into effect of institutions of common 
 utility can be secured only " in isolated intercourse with the 
 individual German states. It must be the policy of Prussia to 
 interweave these neighbour states to a certain extent into her 
 own political system and even into her own administrative 
 
 1 Hanlein's Report, July 2 ; Hardenberg's Answer, August 9 ; Berstett's 
 Report, July i, 1816. 
 
 * Blittersdorfi, for instance, in his Memorial upon federal policy, dated 
 February 18, 1822. 
 
 ' Published by C, Rossler, Zeitschrift fiir preussische Geschichte, 1872. 
 
 400 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 system." These words contain the entire programme of Prussian 
 federal policy. Even before the Bundestag had come into 
 existence, Humboldt expressed that which the experience of half 
 a centiuy was to confirm, namely, that in Frankfort only the 
 verbiage of German poUcy could thrive ; that all the affairs of 
 national statecraft must be managed from Berlin through nego- 
 tiations with the individual state:. 
 
 On November 5, 1816, the federal assembly was at length 
 opened. After Hanlein's defeat, Buol, in the preparatory 
 sittings, had without protest assumed the entire formal leader- 
 ship. Upon Humboldt's demand, the recording of the minutes 
 was entrusted, not to Friedrich Schlegel, who at the Vienna 
 congress had aroused the anger of the Prussians by his clerical 
 zeal and his doggerel verses against the Nord- und Morddeutsehen, 
 but to a harmless Austrian privy councillor named von 
 Handel, whose detestable German made the empty proceedings 
 seem even more ridiculous than before. The high council of 
 the German nation assembled in the Thum and Taxis palace in 
 the Eschenheimer Gasse, where the Austrian embassy was lodged, 
 and henceforward for fifty years remained the modest tenant of 
 the princely house of Taxis. Since the middle-sized states would 
 not hear a word of the revival of the ancient imperial eagle, 
 the published minutes bore the Austrian arms upon their title- 
 page, with the inscription Kaiserlich Oesierreichische Bundes- 
 kanzley. It seemed as if there was really sitting here nothing 
 more than an Austrian provincial board. The president, more- 
 over, was to blame for the fact that, at the opening of this 
 new epoch in German history, the blessing of God was not 
 called down upon the assembly. Buol refused to participate in 
 a Protestant service, and demanded High Mass in the ancient 
 imperial cathedral, although five-sixths of the sovereigns of new 
 Germany were Protestant. Since there was no ecclesiastical 
 ceremony, he proposed a theatrical festival, but Humboldt's good 
 sense fortunately brought this scheme to nought. 
 
 When the members of the Bundestag, saluted by the guard 
 with a present-arms and with the waving of flags, had all 
 assembled before the Austrian embassy. Count Buol read a 
 speech whose senseless verbosity could not fail to give offence to 
 cultured hearers, for it vividly displayed into what barbarism 
 heartless and mindless pohticians fall as soon as they endeavour 
 to display pathos The address had been drafted by Mettemich, 
 who had not thought it worth while to employ the classic pen 
 
 401 2 D 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of Gentz ; even Buol regarded it as unsuitable, and out of 
 consideration for his audience, read a portion only.* The 
 most callow among the Teutonising students had never used 
 emptier phrases than were here employed by the Viennese court 
 when it declared : "In the German as human being, in the 
 absence of all arbitrary political forms, there already exist the 
 hneaments of the fundamental character of the Germans as a 
 nation. National need is the creatress and guiding star of all 
 national forms, and therewith is guaranteed progress towards 
 the true, towards the highest goal ! " The speech then went 
 on to describe the decay of Germany during the last centuries, 
 and then expressed gratification that, thanks to the Germanic 
 Federation, Germany was once more taking its place as "a 
 power among the ranks of the nations." ..." Thus we hold fast 
 to the summit where a great nation, in the manifoldedness of 
 its civic forms, advances freely forward towards the glorious 
 destiny of mankind and of its own development, and at the 
 same time becomes a single whole in national relationships ! " 
 In conclusion, the envoy gives fervent assurances of " the 
 Germanity of his sentiments " ; he once more declares that his 
 emperor regards himself " as a completely equal member of the 
 Federation," and recalls (with a friendly dig at Prussia which 
 everyone in the audience immediately understood) " the fortunate 
 circumstance, one justif5dng mutual confidence, that Austria 
 neither will nor can aspire either to conquest upon German soil 
 or to the aggrandisement of her own position in the Germanic 
 Federation ! " 
 
 Humboldt's response was brief and dignified. Most of the 
 other envoys merely commended themselves to the good will of 
 those present, or else expressed the venturesome hope " that 
 in subsequent years, and even in remote generations, this day 
 would be accounted one of the most joyful that had ever 
 dawned for the united fatherland." Gagem could not refrain 
 from deUvering a long speech, extolling the German sentiments 
 of the House of Orange, and promising that Luxemburg should 
 for ever be the natural mediator in Germany. He con- 
 sidered it a suitable occasion " in this illustrious German senate, 
 to hold a trial of the dead, somewhat after the manner of 
 the most remarkable nation of antiquity " ; in glowing language 
 he spoke of the prince of Nassau- Weilburg, of the Guelphs who 
 had fallen for Germany, and, " to escape the reproach that 
 ^ Humboldt's Reports, November i and 8, 1816. 
 402 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 I am celebrating princely rank alone," also of Andreas Hofer, 
 and of Palm. In conclusion he appealed enthusiastically to his 
 inevitable Je maintiendray ! It was an indescribably tasteless 
 ceremony, the worthy opening of a poUtical farce from which 
 the entire nation was to turn away with loathing. 
 
 Six days later, Count Buol deUvered his first presidential 
 address, and dwelt with emotion upon the benefits which might 
 accrue for the Germans from the realisation of the indefinite 
 promises of the federal act. Of article 19, which promised 
 the regulation of national commerce, the Austrian boasted in 
 his extraordinary German " this article purposes to estrange 
 \_entfremden'\ the German federal states in respect alike of com- 
 merce and intercourse and of navigation " — ^an unintentional 
 prophecy which was to be completely realised. In the empty 
 words, the only point of political significance was the definite 
 declaration that the Germanic Federation was not a federal state 
 but a federation of states, for the former " would conflict with 
 the unalterable course of the ages advancing ever towards higher 
 directions ! " The catchwords " federation of states " and 
 " federal state," now began to make frequent appearance in the 
 press, although no definite legal sense was as yet attached to 
 these phrases. How far had the poUtical culture of the nation 
 lagged behind its advance in other branches of knowledge ! 
 Hardly a thought had as yet been given to the fundamental 
 principles of the pubhc law of federal states ; the classic 
 American work, which a generation earher had illuminated these 
 questions with a combination of talent and knowledge of affairs 
 The Federalist, written by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, was 
 still hardly known to the learned of Germany. Even J. L. 
 Kliiber, who soon after the opening of the Bundestag pubUshed 
 his Oeffentliches Recht des Deutschen Bundes, had but little to 
 say regarding the political characteristics of the different forms 
 of federal fife. By " federed state " was meant any kind of 
 powerful, highly respected, federal authority which might raise 
 the German name to honour ; the young Teutonisers enthusias- 
 tically agreed with their teacher Fries when, in his work Vom 
 Deutschen Bunde und deutscher Staatsverfassung, with the audacity 
 of the weU-meaning dUettanfe he roundly declared, "we do not 
 desire a lax federation of states, but a firmly united federal 
 state." The Austrian envoy now displayed his direct opposition 
 to all such vague aspirations, and he had the spirit and the 
 letter of the federal act upon his side. Since unanimity was 
 
 403 
 
History of Germany 
 
 demanded for any change of the federal act, the further develop- 
 ment of the federal constitution was rendered a priori impossible, 
 and even before the opening of the Bundestag, the envoys, good 
 and bad aUke, began tacitly to recognise that even the drafting 
 of the fundamental laws of the federation, which in accordance 
 with article lo of the federal act was to be the first business 
 of the Bundestag, would necessarily suffer shipwreck upon this 
 
 shoed. 
 
 Humboldt left the Bundestag immediately after the first 
 sitting, and, in a very bad humour, went first to Berlin, to attend 
 the sittings of the council of state, and then left for London 
 as ambassador; the post of ambassador in Paris, which he 
 desired, was denied to him because, since the last congress, the 
 caustic Prussian had been a ■persona ingrata to the Bourbons. 
 His place at Frankfort was taken by von der Goltz, the same 
 man who, in the spring of 1813, had been president of the 
 unlucky governmental committee of Berlin, a loyal official, 
 pleasant and good-natured, but quite devoid of independent 
 ideas. The choice showed how little Hardenberg expected from 
 the pseudo-activities of the Frankfort assembly. The personal 
 intercourse betweeii the envoys of the two great powers continued 
 to be effected upon the most courteous terms, and they even 
 mutually exchanged their instructions. ^ Yet it was none the 
 less plain how widely divergent in two important respects were 
 the intentions of the two courts. In the Austrian instructions, 
 the federal act was declared sacred and inviolable; Hardenberg, 
 on the other hand, expressed his lively regret that it had not 
 been possible in Vienna to secure for the Federation "something 
 more in the nature of a federal state," and proposed to effect 
 every reform that was still possible. Whilst Count Buol, acting 
 on Mettemich's orders, assured the minor envoys that in federal 
 affairs his court would never enter into separate negotiations, 
 the Prussian chancellor continued to repeat to his Viennese 
 friend that it was only by direct understanding between Austria 
 and Prussia " that the Federation could acquire consistency, and 
 party-spirit be destroyed," ^ 
 
 The unacknowledged divergence of views between the two 
 leading courts was at first but little perceptible, since the activity 
 of the federal assembly was for a long time almost entirely 
 
 * Austrian Instructions of October 24. Prussian Instructions of November 
 30, 1816. 
 
 2 Metternich to Buol, August 2; Hardenberg to Metternich, November 
 30, 1816. 
 
 404 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 devoted to the settlement of claims for pensions and to other 
 private matters. The Bundestag was overwhelmed by a flood 
 of petitions and grievances ; all the unfortunates whose rights 
 had suffered through the wild times of war sought help in 
 Frankfort. Thither came bishops and priests from the left 
 bank of the Rhine, demanding pensions upon the ground of the 
 principal resolution of the Diet of Deputation; similar demands 
 were made by the Teutonic Knights, and by the members of 
 the dissolved cathedral chapters ; next came the advocates and 
 procurators of the imperial court of chancery ; next Joseph 
 Fahrenkopf of Mainz, who in the year 1796 had carried out 
 building operations for the imperial fortress of Mainz, and whose 
 bill was still unpaid ; with him came hosts of creditors of the 
 old imperial treasury, that bad paymaster which during the 
 revolutionary war was always in want of money ; there came, 
 too, the holders of certain Electoral Palatinate bonds, a notorious 
 government stock, regarding the pajmient of the interest on 
 which Bavaria and Baden, the legal successors of the Electoral 
 Palatinate, continued to dispute fiercely for a generation ; there 
 came an unending series of suitors, down to minor handicrafts- 
 men, creditors of serene highnesses who obstinately refused to 
 pay their bootmakers' bills. 
 
 With praiseworthy zeal, the Bundestag undertook to deal 
 with all these distresses. But how could an assembly of diplo- 
 mats decide with certainty all the complicated legal questions 
 which were here involved ? Fortunately they had at least one 
 able lawyer in their ranks, the Hanoverian envoy Martens, the 
 well-known authority on international law. Another difficulty 
 was the ever-recurring doubt as to the competence of the federal 
 assembly. This doubt was not definitely dispelled even when, 
 in June, 1817, the federal assembly passed certain provisional 
 resolutions upon this question of competence. Where, in 
 difficult cases, was the Bundestag to secure the necessary informa- 
 tion as to matters of fact ? Since it possessed no executive 
 authority, it always remained dependent upon the goodwill of 
 the governments concerned. A final difficulty arose from the 
 ludicrously cumbrous mode of procedure. Hardenberg had 
 proposed that, after a brief delay, the assembly should pass its 
 resolutions regardless of absent members or of those who had 
 not received instructions. Goltz very speedily perceived how 
 unacceptable this idea was to the arrogance ^of the minor courts, 
 puffed up with the pride of sovereignty ; the Wiirtemberg 
 
 40s 
 
History of Germany 
 
 envoy, von Linden, roundly declared that a unanimous resolution 
 was impossible if even one envoy should be absent. Owing to 
 the negligent business methods of the Viennese authorities, and 
 also to Mettemich's indifference towards the Federation, the 
 instructions of the Austrian envoy were almost always the 
 longest delayed. Since the presidential court thus set a bad 
 example, it soon became the custom to postpone and repostpone 
 the decisions until the last envoy had received his instructions, 
 and thus the fate of the federal resolutions fell into the hands 
 of the most slothful and most ill-affected of the sovereigns. 
 
 The consequence was that even those private petitions towards 
 which the majority of the envoys displayed sympathetic senti- 
 ments were granted only after scandalous delay. The trans- 
 Rhenish priests, whose claims were, in accordance with the federal 
 act, to have been settled within a year, did not receive an 
 award until 1824 ; the procurators of the imperial court of 
 chancery had to wait until 1831 ; the fortunate grandsons of 
 the creditors of the old imperial treasury received in the year 
 1843 payment for the work done by their grandfathers dining 
 the years 1793 to 1796; finally, in the year 1844, the settle^ 
 ment of the debts of the Electoral Palatinate and of the Upper 
 Rhine was at length ordered, through the intermediation of 
 the crown of Prussia, which received the warm thanks of the 
 Bundestag for this speedily rendered assistance. Many of the 
 envoys became agreeably accustomed to these subordinate activities, 
 and soon within the assembly there developed a pecuUar class 
 of federal bureaucrats, diligent and experienced men of business, 
 whose spirits were never disturbed by any political ideas, but 
 who for this reason could deal all the more effectively with the 
 affairs of Joseph Fahrenkopf and of the holders of the Electoral 
 Palatinate bonds. The prototype of these extraneous elements 
 in the Bundestag was the representative of the sixteenth vote, 
 von Leonhardi. At the close of the first session, the good 
 Goltz also wrote home in high content that though the promised 
 estabhshment of the fundamental laws of the Federation had 
 unfortunately proved impossible, none the less, the federal 
 assembly had displayed its efficiency in its internal working, 
 and had therefore served to secure internal repose. » 
 
 In view of this contented futility, many of the political 
 anxieties which had at first filled Hardenberg's mind spontaneously 
 
 1817 ' '^°^^^' •^''*™^P^'=* °* the first session of the federal assembly, August 5. 
 
 406 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 fell to the ground. The chancellor withdrew his opposition to 
 the presence of foreign diplomats as soon as he had learned 
 the character of the Bundestag, for what was there to fear 
 from the agents of foreign powers in so powerless an assembly ? 
 Moreover, what answer was there to be made to the great 
 powers when they demanded that their envoys should be 
 admitted in order to avert the danger of possible war, for the 
 federal act had, after all, given the Bundestag the right of 
 declaring war. In actual fact, the envoys of the great powers 
 in Frankfort at first found nothing whatever to do. What did 
 it matter that the petty diplomats went busily in and out of 
 the Red House, the Malepardus of the cunning Russian, Anstett ? 
 Serious questions, in which the influence of the foreign world 
 might have had an injurious effect, did not come before the 
 Bundestag in these two quiet opening years. Even the fear, which 
 was at first widespread that a secret Sonderbund of the old 
 central lands of the Confederation of the Rhine, might come into 
 existence, showed itself to have been premature. It is true 
 that King Frederick of Wiirtemberg, when he received news of 
 Hanlein's appearance, immediately journeyed to Carlsruhe, in 
 order to gain over the grand duke of Baden and the king of 
 Bavaria, who was staying in Baden, for a common South 
 German policy, to protect their undiminished sovereignty ; 
 but Bavaria and Baden were bitterly hostile one to another, 
 and both were mistrustful of their neighbour of Wiirtemberg. 
 The attempt miscarried completely ; ^ and since King Frederick 
 died shortly afterwards, nothing more was heard for a time of 
 these Rhenish Confederate plans. Even the Saxon federal 
 envoy, the punctiUous old Count Gortz, displayed throughout a 
 blameless innocence, since his king never ventured to contradict 
 the House of Austria. 
 
 Meanwhile the Bundestag could not deal with the most 
 harmless of the claims that have been enumerated without 
 coming into violent conflict with the arrogant sovereignty of the 
 petty princes. At the very begirming of the proceedings, 
 Bavaria expressed doubt whether the federal assembly was 
 competent to deal with the grievances of German subjects 
 against their suzerain lords ; but the Bavarian vote was tem- 
 porarily interred in a secret minute. Yet, as the Bundestag was 
 soon to learn, to permit of such grievances to be brought before 
 
 1 Jouffroy's Report, Stuttgart, July 20; Kuster's Report, Baden, July 25, 
 xSl6. 
 
 407 
 
History of Germany 
 
 its forum was to expose itself without redress to a gross affront. 
 From no country were so many complaints received as from 
 unfortunate Electoral Hesse, which had had to suffer a regime 
 of shameless arbitrariness and greed under the elector whose 
 restoration had been so ardently desired. Among the innumer- 
 able persons whose rights had been denied by William of Hesse, 
 was a land-owner named Hofmann. This man had purchased 
 from the royal treasury a secularised estate which had belonged 
 to the Teutonic Knights ; in August, 1815, two years after the 
 return of the old sovereign prince, the purchase had been 
 inscribed in the cadaster by the electoral authorities. Neverthe- 
 less, six months later, the purchaser received orders to 
 restore the lands, which meanwhile he had subdivided and 
 had disposed of to twenty other persons. The elector, he 
 was bluntly told, could not tolerate that state property should 
 remain in the hands of private persons. The federal assembly 
 adopted the mildest resolution possible in such a case ; it 
 referred^ the petitioner to the elector, saying " should he, 
 contrary to all the best expectations of the federal assembly, fail 
 to secure redress," he was to appeal once more to the Federation. 
 The elector was in a fury when he heard of this scandalous 
 infringement of his sovereign rights, and had a rejoinder read in 
 Frankfort which was immediately to be printed in the published 
 minutes (March 17, 1817). In this document he declared that 
 the last resolution was "very remarkable," expressed to the 
 envoys his " astonishment at conduct which could hardly have 
 received the approval of their principals," and concluded by 
 saying threateningly that he forbade all interference in the 
 internal affairs of his country. 
 
 Even to the patience of the Bundestag this language seemed 
 intolerable. All the envoys broke off social relations with the 
 elector's representative; it was definitely expected that both 
 the great powers would recall their representatives from Cassel, 
 and would secure for the Federation a striking satisfaction for 
 the affront that had been suffered.' Count Buol made a vigor- 
 ous reply; the position of the Bundestag would have been 
 affected m a manner most injurious to the common weal if he 
 had permitted an- unsatisfied member of the Federation to address 
 him in such a tone. " The federal assembly," he said " can 
 never be subordinated to any single member of the Federation." 
 He concluded with an assurance which for one in this circle 
 * Berstett's Report, March 16, 1817. 
 408 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 was couched in language of unprecedented enthusiasm, by saying 
 that the Bundestag " was determined to estabUsh in the minds 
 of oppressed subjects the assurance that, as the outcome of the 
 Uberation of Germany from a foreign yoke through the blood of 
 the nation, a condition of legal justice should everywhere prevail 
 in place of the exercise of arbitrary power." Count Goltz 
 announced the unconditional assent of his king to the resolution 
 which was passed. Even Gagem, in an extremely emotional 
 and confused speech, declared that the right of property infringed 
 by the elector " contained a noli me tangere of almost virgin 
 sanctity." With the exception of the two Hessian plenipo- 
 tentiaries, the whole Bundestag seemed united. 
 
 Unfortunately, however. Count Buol had acted on his own 
 initiative. His instructions, after the usual practice of the 
 Hofburg, were once more in arrear. Consequently in the 
 beginning of April he returned home in order to be able, on 
 his return, to assure the Bundestag of the support of the court 
 of Vienna. But what a reception was awaiting the unfortunate 
 man ! The elector had immediately complained to Emperor 
 Francis, and Mettemich overwhelmed the presidential envoy with 
 reproaches, asking how he could possibly have undertaken to 
 infringe the dignity of a sovereign in such a manner ! He 
 threatened him with recall, and with a formal disavowal of the 
 resolution of the Bundestag. This extreme step was, indeed, 
 averted by Hardenberg's intermediation. The chancellor made 
 urgent representations to his Viennese friend to the effect that 
 the Bundestag was right^and must not be exposed to public 
 contempt.' Mettemich therefore contented himself with a 
 severe reprimand, and Buol returned to his post in a mood 
 of profound humiliation. Thereupon the Bundestag confirmed 
 its previous decision by a new but extremely guarded resolution, 
 and Hofmann's grievance was quietly settled by the elector. 
 But there was no talk of any atonement for the affront that 
 had been endured ; the German sovereigns now knew how far 
 they might venture to go against the Federation. The envoys 
 all felt that they had been shamed and browbeaten, and hence- 
 forward it became their custom to ask for definite instructions 
 even regarding the most trifling questions, so that all decisive 
 action was indefinitely postponed. 
 
 The case of Hofmann was but one of a long series 
 of infringements of justice which continued to occupy the 
 * Hardenberg to Mettemich, April 12, 1817. 
 409 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Bundestag for many years, and which abroad, especially in 
 France, gave the German name an evil reputation. A severe 
 penalty had to be paid because, after the dissolution of the 
 kingdom of WestphaUa. the great aUiance had trustingly restored 
 the old territorial suzerains without imposing any conditions. 
 The crown of Prussia, indeed, acted with strict legality in her 
 own WestphaUan provinces ; in the Treaty of Tilsit, Prussia had 
 recognised the kingdom of Westphalia, and henceforward regarded 
 as legally valid all the actions of the Westphalian government 
 which accorded with the treaty. The princes of Hanover, 
 Brunswick, and Electoral Hesse, on the other hand, had been 
 deprived of their lands only de facto and without any peace 
 having been signed, so that they regarded King Jerome as 
 merely a usurper. Vainly did the court of Berlin represent to 
 them that they had been re-established, not by their own power, 
 but by the arms of the allies, and that for this reason they 
 were not entitled to treat simply as an illegal order that Napo- 
 leonic kingdom which had once received recognition from all 
 the great powers. Prussia desired, by means of friendly negotia- 
 tions between the four states concerned, to secure common 
 legal principles for the recognition of the Westphalian laws and 
 ordinances.^ But none of the other three courts would act on 
 this reasonable suggestion. In Hanover and Brunswick, the 
 Westphalian laws were all declared null ; it was only the well- 
 established liberties of the subject which were treated with 
 respect. 
 
 All the more audaciously did the elector of Hesse take 
 action. Everything in his country was to be restored to the 
 status of the autumn of 1806, and the avaricious prince entered 
 upon this colossal undertaking, not like the king of Sardinia at 
 the same moment with the ingenuous honesty of the legitimist 
 fanatic, but after the manner of the manifest cheat. What 
 his " administrator Jerome " had acquired for the royal treasury 
 was retained as legitimate spoils of war, what he had disbursed 
 was demanded back as stolen goods. The workmen who had 
 decorated the rooms of the gay Napoleonid, received no pay, but 
 the furniture which had been delivered was retained in the 
 electoral palaces. Hardly in the days of the Pohsh Augustus 
 had long-suffering Germany witnessed such gross acts of despotism. 
 Most of all suffered the purchasers of the numerous domains 
 
 * Goltz's Report, July 19 ; Memorial by the chancellor concerning the 
 kingdom of Westphalia, November 18, 1817. 
 
 410 
 
opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 which had been sold by Jerome. They were expelled from their 
 properties, and besieged the Federation with complaints. When 
 these grievances came up for discussion at Frankfort, the 
 Hessian envoy harped on the usual string, and spoke about 
 the " abominable lies " which were being circulated. Martens, the 
 representative of Brunswick, was brazen-faced enough to exclaim 
 threateningly to the loyaJ people of those Guelph-Hessian lands 
 which had sacrificed and suffered so enormously for their tribal 
 prince, that it was necessary, by the maintenance of strictly 
 legitimist principles, " to deprive German subjects of the desire 
 to give any assistance to a possible invader ! " The majority 
 of the Bundestag, having learned wisdom from bitter experience 
 in the Hofmann affair, was content on this occasion to 
 commend the complainants to the grace of the elector (July 
 17. 1817). This merely served to postpone the decision, for 
 soon additional victims of the electoral tjn-anny came to state 
 their grievances. , 
 
 While the Bundestag was thus wasting its time, Hardenberg 
 was honourably endeavoming to carry into effect the only 
 politically significant article of the federal act which still seemed 
 capable of realisation, if goodwill were forthcoming — ^article 
 II, which promised the federal states common aid against 
 hostile attack. From the time of the Vienna congress down to 
 the dissolution of the Federation, the hopes of Prussia regarding 
 the military system of the Germanic Federation remained 
 unaltered. The court of Berlin desired the bipartition of the 
 federal army, and it was only when the resistance of the German 
 courts was not to be overcome in any other way that Prussia 
 became willing to agree that the middle-sized states should form 
 independent army-corps. Unaffrighted by the experiences of 
 Hanlein, the chancellor immediately began confidential negotia- 
 tions with the court of Vienna, although he was already aware, 
 from the instructions issued to the presidential envoy, that the 
 Hofburg was by no means disposed to incur the resentment 
 of the minor sovereigns by separate negotiations. At the very 
 begiiming of these consultations, a preUminary question came up 
 for settlement which displayed the hopelessly fictitious character of 
 the federal constitution. The boundaries of the federal domain 
 had to be defined before it was possible to decide upon the 
 supply of men to be demanded from the members as their respec- 
 tive contributions to the federal army. The federal act had 
 
 411 
 
History of Germany 
 
 been satisfied with the obscure statement that the rulers of 
 Austria and Prussia entered the Federation "for their entire 
 possessions in so far as these had formerly belonged to the 
 Germanic empire." Since Metternich had from the first deter- 
 mined that he would never allow the Bundestag to exercise any 
 influence in the internal affairs of the crown-lands, he considered 
 the matter of no importance. He declared unhesitatingly that 
 his emperor intended to assign to the Federation a domain 
 containing about 8,000,000 inhabitants — the lands of the crown 
 of Bohemia, the archduchy, Tyrol and Salzburg, Styria, 
 Carinthia, and Carniola. Hardenberg held fast to his favourite 
 idea, the complete equahty of the two great powers, and there- 
 fore proposed to the king that the Prussian contribution to the 
 Federation should contain an equal population ; in addition to 
 the indisputably imperial lands of the crown of Hohenzollem, 
 Guelderland, which for two hundred years had had nothing to do 
 with the empire, and the sovereign duchy of Silesia, together 
 with Lusatia, were to be declared federal lands. 
 
 Frederick William, however, took the matter very much in 
 earnest, and surprised the chancellor by making a definite 
 rejoinder that he thought of entering the Germanic Federation 
 with the whole of his territorial domain. He knew the incal- 
 culable vicissitudes of European poUtics, and notwithstanding his 
 friendship for the czar, he prudently bore in mind the possibility 
 of a war against Russia. But since he regarded himself as 
 simply a German prince, and was loyally determined to 
 resist with the entire force of his monarchy any violation of 
 federal territory, it seemed to him only reasonable that the 
 Federation should on its side be pledged to defend the Prussian 
 state against every attack ; in this connection he thought first 
 of all of Posen, and of the unconcealed greed of the Poles in 
 Warsaw. In case the formal incorporation of the entire state 
 territory into the Federation could not be effected, the king 
 demanded that at least there should be concluded a permanent 
 defensive alliance between Prussia and the Federation. As 
 early as the autumn of 1816, the monarch's intention in this 
 respect had found expression in the instructions to the federal 
 envoy, and since then, to Hardenberg's despair, for a year and 
 a half Frederick William had obstinately held to this view. 
 German affairs were still in so confused a condition that 
 even the simplest and best-intentioned political idea^ appeared 
 premature and actually dangerouSi However certain it was 
 
 412 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 that the Eiiropean interests of Prussia coincided with those of 
 the rest of Germany, it was just as certain that the Prussian 
 crown must not renounce its independence in foreign poUcy in 
 favour of the Bundestag. And however indisputable it was 
 that the loyal German Ordensland belonged by blood and by 
 history to the great fatherland, it might be foreseen with equal 
 certainty that neither Austria nor the middle-sized states would 
 ever voluntarily accept this eastern march into the Germanic 
 Federation, for every one of them regarded Umitation of Prussian 
 power as the primary aim of federal policy. 
 
 The chancellor therefore implored his royal master not to 
 arouse a general and painful sensation by such a proposal, and 
 not in this way " to step out of the ranks of the European 
 powers"; he artfully enquired, "would not this action serve 
 especially to foster the idea of Germanity which prevails 
 among the giddy heads of the time?"* Humboldt agreed 
 with the chancellor, pointedly recaUing the difficulty with which 
 Prussia had acquired her position within the European pen- 
 tarchy. Goltz, too, reported from Frankfort, that all the petty 
 states desired that the Federation should play only a passive 
 part in Emropean pohtics, and that they would never tolerate 
 the entry of the entire Prussian state. Hardenberg further 
 represented to the king what mistrust the plan would arouse in 
 St. Petersburg and in the minor courts." Yet the possibihty 
 that Prussia might some day, by a majority of the Bundestag 
 inspired with Austrian sentiments, be dragged against her will 
 into an Itahan war waged by the Hapsburgs, was not yet 
 mooted in any of these memorials; such a contingency lay far 
 beyond the horizon of the time. If Austria should be attacked 
 in Lombardy, it was the unanimous opinion of the statesmen 
 of Berlin that Prussia was unquestionably pledged to support 
 her federal ally ; for who else than France could undertake the 
 attack ? fe No one as yet ventured to dream of the Piedmontese 
 taking up arms on their own behalf. 
 
 The king remained firm. In answer to the chancellor he 
 said : "In this extremely important matter it is impossible 
 for me to come to any other decision, for I am too keenly 
 aware of the danger which may befall the state." » Hence, 
 with a heavy heart, Hardenberg, through the instrumentaUty, 
 
 1 Hardenberg to the king, February 23, 1817. 
 
 2 Humboldt's Opinion, July 12 ; Hardenberg's Memorial, December i ; 
 Goltz's Memorial, December 30, 1817. 
 
 8 King Frederick William to Hardenberg, December i, 1817. 
 
 413 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of privy councillor Jordan, had to communicate the king's 
 plan to the Hofburg, together with a detailed memorial 
 by Ancillon. Metternich did not hesitate. Nothing was further 
 from his mind than to outbid the Prussian proposal by offering 
 that Austria should enter the Federation as a whole ; such bold 
 resolutions were then generally regarded as impracticable, since 
 they conflicted with the fundamental ideas of the poUcy of 
 stability, and to the court of Vienna they appeared all the 
 more foolish because the plan of forming an Italian Federation 
 had not yet been abandoned. The Austrian statesman sent 
 his Prussian friend an affectionate letter, couched in extremely 
 moving terms (January 9, 1818), which was to remain abso- 
 lutely and permanently secret except to the king and the 
 chancellor. He declared that the happy harmony of the two 
 powers depended solely upon the complete equahty of their 
 position. " To destroy this equality would result in the over- 
 throw of the entire structure. Let us guard ourselves, my 
 prince, against making any change in this happy situation ! " 
 An appended memorial maintained with proud confidence that 
 if any one of the states of the Federation should be illegally 
 assailed in its non-German domains " it would hardly need a 
 defensive alliance in order to set the Federation in motion, for 
 its own interest would dictate this step. The cEise of Austria 
 or Prussia being separately attacked by Russia without the other 
 power coming to the aid of its ally, is so remote from possi- 
 biUty that it would be superfluous to waste time over its 
 consideration." The king was not convinced either by the 
 assurances of Austria or by a new memorial from the chancellor, 
 and demanded, although Hardenberg urgently advised to the 
 contrary, an opinion from the foreign section of his council of 
 state. ^ After lively discussions, all the members of this body 
 agreed that, in view of the sentiments of the German federated 
 states, the king's proposal was for the time being impracticable. 
 Even the monarch's confidant. Colonel Witzleben, who had at 
 first advocated the views of his royal friend, was convinced by 
 the superior reasoning of the other side. Now at length the 
 king yielded, and on April 24th approved that, in addition to 
 the ancient imperial lands, only Guelderland, Silesia, and Lusatia 
 should join the Federation ; he added ill-humouredly that this 
 
 ' Ancillon's Memorial to the court of Vienna, December 3, 1817 ; Met- 
 ternich's Letter and Memorial to Hardenberg, January 9, 1818 ; Hardenberg's 
 Memorial, February 22, 1818. Cabinet Order to the Council of State, March 8. 
 r8i8. 
 
 414 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 was done against his own conviction. * Consequently Frederick 
 William's intention to restore to the political union of the nation 
 the land anciently colonised by the Germans in the middle ages, 
 was for the present frustrated. It was not till a generation 
 later, amid the storms of the revolution, that the plan was to 
 be revived ; not until eighteen years later still, when the 
 dominion of Austria collapsed, was it permanently realised. 
 
 Just as unfortunate was the course of the negotiations 
 about the federal army. Frederick WiUiam engaged in these with 
 unwearied zeal, for since Prussia herself had five per cent, of 
 her population in the army, he considered that he was justified 
 in demanding from his alUes an effort of similar intensity. 
 Mettemich, on the other hand, held the organisation of the 
 smaller German armies to be a matter of trifling importance, 
 because he was sure of the Prussian alliance. The matter did 
 not seem to him of sufficient accovmt to induce him to excite 
 for its sake the suspicion of the middle-sized states ; should a 
 war break out, the smaller contingents would, in one way or 
 another, be forced, as they had been in the last campaigns, to 
 join the greater masses. Apart from this, the court of Vienna 
 completely lacked mihtary sense and failed to understand the 
 moral significance of military organisation. Although the defects 
 of the cumbrous Austrian mihtary system had been lamentably 
 displayed during the recent wars, there had been no improve- 
 ment since peace had been declared ; the suspicious emperor 
 made it a matter of principle that no officer who had distin- 
 guished himself in the war should ever be given any position 
 of influence, and he left Radetzky, the most capable of his 
 generals, rusting for ten years in command of the fortress at 
 Olmiitz. The machine got more and more out of gear. The 
 young officers made an open mock of mihtary philistinism, and 
 chuckled over an ill-natured satire which appeared in the year 
 1816, Das standhafte Kriegs- Dienst- und Exerzierreglement der 
 Reichsstadt Riblingen ; for how often had the Austrian army, 
 like the armada of Riblingen, had to put up with a commander 
 utterly devoid of energy and resource ! In addition it was the 
 urgent desire of the emperor to avoid all provocative negotiations 
 in Frankfort. When for the first time the Bundestag sent him 
 congratulations on his birthday, he expressed his thanks through 
 Mettemich (March 2, 1817). The augurs of the Eschenheimer 
 
 1 The two Opinions of Witzleben reported by Dorow, /. von Witzleben, pp. 115 
 et seq. Hardenberg's Diary, April 24, 1818. 
 
 4IS 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Gasse learned with a satisfied smile that the good kaiser admon- 
 ished them not to forget that as a permanent assembly they 
 had no reason to do anything in a hurry ; never again by 
 " excessive pressure of business " was a " disadvantageous out- 
 break " to be induced in the Bundestag. 
 
 Whilst Emperor Francis thus expressed his concern regarding 
 the possible impetuosity of the youthful Bundestag, the middle- 
 sized states all displayed their determination to reject everything 
 which might even approximate to the unity of a genuine army. 
 In no other question did the still unimpaired Rhenish Con- 
 federate sentiment of these courts display itself so shamelessly. 
 Not the defence of the fatherland against foreign enemies, but 
 the safeguarding of petty sovereignty against the power of their 
 own great allies, was openly declared to be their aim. As 
 Berstett reported to his court with much satisfaction, all the 
 middle-sized and petty states desired the formation of a 
 purely federal army consisting of several corps made up out 
 of the small contingents, under the direction of an elected 
 federal commander-in-chief ; in addition, one Austrian and one 
 Prussian corps might be tolerated as independent accessory troops. ^ 
 The German army was to be intentionally weakened, so that 
 the numerical preponderance of the Austrians and the Prussians 
 might not prove a danger to their smaller neighbours. If 
 this, the highest, aim could not be achieved, the petty states 
 must at least be preserved against any subordination to the 
 great powers. The very same courts which so recently, when 
 the question was that of the admission of foreign envoys, had 
 acclaimed the European power of the Germanic Federation, now 
 humbly declared that their task was not to take a decisive 
 position in the European system of states, but simply to main- 
 tain a defensive position with dignity — such was the wording 
 of the first report of the committee of the Bundestag appointed 
 to deal with mihtary affairs. Baden and Darmstadt went even 
 further, and actually declared, in opposition to the spirit and 
 the letter of the federal act, that neutraUty was the one and 
 only principle of the Federation. Since the minor courts all 
 confidently hoped for a long period of undisturbed peace, they 
 wished to impose no more than trifling mihtary demands upon 
 their wearied peoples and their disordered finances. The pro- 
 fessional pride of the Rhenish Confederate officers led them to 
 look down with contempt upon the Landwehr, which most of 
 * Berstett's Report, January 29, 1817, 
 416 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 the minor states had during the war constituted upon the Prussian 
 model, more especially since this force, with the exception of the 
 Hanoverian Landwehr, had very rarely come into action. Nor was 
 there any lack of suspicion, for Stein's detested central administra- 
 tion had led to the arming of the people ! After the peace, in all 
 the petty states, the Landwehr was abolished, or was allowed 
 to fall into desuetude, so that it appeared only occasionally 
 for a few hours at a time, on days of festival, as for instance 
 in the case of the greatly ridiculed " Corpus Christi soldiers " 
 of Bavaria ; and soon Prussia was the only German state 
 which still possessed a Landwehr fit for war. 
 
 The thoughtless selfishness of the minor states and the 
 hatred of mihtarism characteristic of liberalism were united in 
 demanding disarmament. The middle-sized states were also 
 agreed in the view that although a moderate contribution of 
 military force must be promised in case of war, a supervision 
 of this force by the Federation in time of peace could never be 
 tolerated. At the courts of Darmstadt and Carlsruhe it was 
 openly asked why sacrifices should be made for a federal army 
 which could after all be of no use whatever to the narrow 
 fatherland. Long before the Austrians and the Prussians could 
 come to the help of the south-west, the French army would 
 have flowed over the German frontier lands. So speedily had 
 the brilliant victories of recent years been forgotten ! So 
 paralysing to German pride was the effect of the proximity of 
 those Alsatian fortresses which the unworthy peace had left in 
 the hands of France ! On this occasion the elector of Hesse 
 once more exhibited his fondness for the good old time, and 
 gave strict instructions to his envoy, saying that Hesse had 
 never contributed more than 800 men to the army of the Holy 
 Empire, but that out of his special consideration for the 
 Germanic Federation he would in an extreme case provide 
 2,500 men, but he must not be bothered with the " domestic 
 wars " of Austria and Prussia. Already in the ' introductory 
 negotiations upon military affairs these views of the minor 
 courts were expressed with cynical openness. Bavaria asked 
 bluntly why any arrangement at all should be made for the 
 peace strength of the contingents. It would be enough if the 
 relationships between the mihtary forces to be suppUed by the 
 different members of the Federation should be laid down in case 
 of war. Once an agreement had been attained about this 
 simple matter, everything else could be left to circumstances, 
 
 417 2 
 
History of Germany 
 
 and to the free agreement of the states. In fact on May 29, 
 1817, the Bundestag merely came to the determination to 
 appoint a committee to draw up a provisional register. But 
 was population alone to form the measure for the register, or 
 were extent of territory and amount of revenue also to be 
 taken into account ? Even upon these points no unanimity 
 had as yet been attained. The wealthy Hansa towns vigorously 
 recommended that population should be the determining factor, 
 for this seemed to them advantageous from a business point of 
 view; on the other hand, thickly populated Wiirtemberg was 
 just as definitely opposed to the idea. 
 
 In face of such experiences, Hardenberg placed his last hope 
 upon an understanding with Austria. As early as the middle of 
 May, 1817, he proposed separate negotiations to the court of 
 Vienna,! but it was not until July that Mettemich, with mani- 
 fest unwilhngness, commissioned General Steigentesch to meet 
 Boyen and General Wolzogen in Carlsbad. There the two old 
 friends, Steigentesch and Wolzogen, came into sharp conflict, and 
 a partial understanding was at length secured only through the 
 quiet strength of Boyen. As soon as matters of detail came 
 under discussion, it was at once apparent how completely 
 Hardenberg had deceived himself regarding the intentions of 
 the Hofburg. To the Viennese statesmen, the Prussian pro- 
 posal for the bipartition of the federal army was absolutely 
 unacceptable. This plan did, indeed, offer to Prussia the 
 military command of the numerous North German petty states ; 
 but what had Austria to gain thereby, since the subjection of 
 the Bavarian and the Wiirtemberg kingly crowns to the 
 supreme imperial command was altogether inconceivable ? The 
 plan was the outcome of the poHcy of peaceful dualism; but 
 in the existing posture of affairs, it could serve only to 
 strengthen Prussia to the disadvantage of Austria. For this 
 very reason it received the warm support of the only notable 
 Prussian statesman who was already advocating the separation 
 from Austria. President von Motz sent at this time a memorial 
 to the chancellor, wherein with the boldness of genius he threw 
 hght on the gigantic fraud of German federal law. In this 
 document, the Federation was spoken of as " a mere political 
 expedient " which the jealousy of the German princes, in unison 
 with Austna, Russia, and France, had brought into existence, 
 ' m order to keep Germany in a state of perpetual disintegration 
 
 1 Hardenberg's Instructions to Krusemark, May 13, 1817 • 
 418 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 of energies." Motz continued by sa3dng that Prussia must now 
 begin to look forward to the time " when the flimsy Federation 
 would fall to pieces of itself," and must therefore, in the mean- 
 while, so long as a united German army was stiU impossible, 
 endeavour to combine the North German contingents with her 
 own army by military conventions.^ How could Austria enter- 
 tain a proposal which gave occasion for such hopes ? 
 
 At length, on August loth, after vigorous resistance, the 
 Austrian plenipotentiary signed at Carlsbad a convention regard- 
 ing the federal fortress of Mainz ; each of the two great powers 
 was to provide half of the garrison, and each in turn was to 
 appoint the governor or the commandant for the term of five 
 years. This formal equality did not, indeed, serve to establish 
 harmony in the principal German fortress, for since Austria 
 from the first, in opposition to the spirit of the federal act, 
 sent non-German regiments into the Rhenish town, dissensions 
 soon broke out between the German and the foreign troops, and 
 as long as the Germanic Federation lasted, the continued broils 
 in the garrison of Mainz afforded a cheerful counterpart to the ' 
 bloodless disputes of Frankfort. Some time before, on March 
 I2th, a treaty had been entered into with the Netherlands, in 
 virtue of which King Frederick William pledged himself to 
 provide for the second federal fortress of Luxemberg, three-fourths 
 of the garrison, the governor, and the commandant. Simulta- 
 neously Prussia, under the able superintendence of Aster, began 
 the construction of her Rhenish fortresses of Coblentz, Cologne, 
 Wesel, Jiilich, and Saarlouis, utilising gradually for this purpose, 
 in addition to the 20,000,000 francs allotted by the treaty of 
 Paris, a considerable sum from her own resources. The fortress 
 of Ehrenbreitstein was re-established, and before long the beautiful 
 heights overlooking the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine 
 were crowned by that powerful mass of fortifications which 
 aroused the admiration of Wellington, the old stormer of for- 
 tresses, and which put to shame the French art of fortification, 
 still entangled in the ideas of Vauban. Whilst, in thus providing 
 for the safety of the Lower Rhine, Prussia went far beyond the 
 duties imposed by her connection with the Federation, the south- 
 west continued to remain utterly defenceless before the 
 sally-ports of the Alsatian fortresses. In Paris, it had been 
 
 1 Motz, Reflections concerning the Military Organisation of the Germanic 
 Federation, especially in respect of Treaties with the minor North German states, 
 September 24, 1817. 
 
 419 
 
History of Germany 
 
 agreed that Landau, as a third federal fortress, should be handed 
 over to the Federation, but the promise still remained unfulfilled. 
 Frcs. 20,000,000 out of the French contribution had been ear- 
 marked for a fourth federal fortress on the Upper Rhine, but 
 the South German courts were disputing about its site. Baden 
 and Wiirtemberg demanded a fortress close by the Rhine, 
 perhaps in Rastatt, for the protection of their own domain; 
 Austria, on the other hand, desired to close the road along the 
 Danube by the fortification of Ulm, and thus prevent any recur- 
 rence of the campaign of Austerlitz. Since the position of Uhn 
 was suitable for the erection of a great Upper German fortress, 
 and since Austria would not consider the equaUty of the two 
 great powers in the fortress of Mainz on any other terms, Boyen 
 agreed that in the Bundestag Prussia should vote for Ulm. 
 
 The negotiators in Carlsbad could not come to an agreement 
 regarding the division of the federal army. No more than an 
 extremely general understanding, the mere sketch of a sketch, 
 could be effected. The federal states pledged themselves that 
 " in time of war two per cent, of the population should be allotted 
 to the federal army, and that in addition they would supply one 
 per cent, for supplementary troops ; should a federal war be 
 declared, the contingents of the federal states would wear a 
 distinctive badge, and the Bundestag was to choose the state 
 which should nominate the federal commander-in-chief. This 
 state could only be Austria. Boyen made this concession 
 because he foresaw that, as in the last campaign, the nature 
 of things would enforce a subdivision of the theatre of war. 
 In order to supplement the pitiful outcome of the conference 
 of Carlsbad by a more definite arrangement, and in order to 
 unite the two great powers upon a common procedure at the 
 Bundestag, in December Privy-councillor Jordan was again sent 
 to Vienna, but could obtain no more than vague assurances. 
 
 Meanwhile the Austrian diplomats had long ago betrayed 
 to the minor courts the secret of the Carlsbad convention. As 
 early as fourteen days after it had been concluded, and long 
 before the Prussian federal envoy had himself any inkling of 
 the Carlsbad negotiations, the South German cabinets had 
 already been informed. The sovereigns were terrified, the 
 spectre of German duarchy stood threateningly at their gates. 
 The elector of Hesse immediately hastened to Darmstadt, and 
 the grand duke of Baden to Homburg, to the king of Wiirtem- 
 berg ; the four princes pledged themselves to combine in 
 
 420 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 resisting every encroachment by the great powers. In the 
 autumn, when the Bundestag reassembled after its first recess. 
 Count Goltz, who had not been officially informed of the matter 
 until November, found the mood of the assembly extraordinarily 
 excited and embittered.^ It was not until January 15, 1818, 
 that Buol ventured to lay the Carlsbad convention before the 
 Bundestag, as a presidential proposal. In order to conciUate 
 his incensed hearers, he gave the assurance that in doing this 
 he wished merely to open the field for free discussion. Two 
 points of view should dominate the negotiations : " The com- 
 pletest respect for the sovereignty of the German states, and 
 the necessary regard for an effective system of defence." He 
 then handed in, in addition, an extraordinary proposal for the 
 subdivision of the federal army, which required a peace strength 
 of no more than 120,000 men, each of the two great powers 
 providing an army of 41,500 ; the remaining 37,000 were to 
 be enrolled in nine corps, so that each of the middle-sized 
 states, from Bavaria down to Luxemburg, could enjoy the 
 privilege of having a general-in-chief. The pearl of these eleven 
 corps was the eleventh, which was to consist of 2,606 Luxem- 
 burgers, Nassauers, and Hanseats, under the leadership of a 
 Netherland general. Prussia gave a provisional assent to this 
 remarkable proposal only because it was impossible that in case 
 of war these trifling corps could maintain their independence 
 beside the armies of the two great powers, and the step could 
 not yet be ventured of directly advocating bipartition of the 
 army. 
 
 Yet however sedulously Austria had respected the sove- 
 reignty of the petty potentates, and however modest her 
 proposals might sound, to the heirs of the Confederation of the 
 Rhine even this nothing seemed intolerably oppressive. Vainly 
 in January did Hardenberg send General Wolzogen to Stuttgart 
 to explain to the new king that only an army of not less than 
 two per cent, of the population would be adequate to resist 
 a French attack ; King WUliam's selfishness was stronger than 
 his soldierly judgment. When the voting began, on February 
 i6th, Bavaria, Saxony, Wiirtemberg, Baden, and the two Hesses, 
 were unanimously opposed to the great powers. Almost with 
 one voice they demanded that the war strength should be 
 reduced to one-half, declaring that more than one per cent, for 
 
 1 Goltz's Reports, October 8 and November 25, 1817. Goltz's Sketch of the 
 Proceedings of the Federation, April 13, i8ig. 
 
 421 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the active forces, and one-half per cent, for the supplementary 
 troops, was out of the question. They further insisted that 
 the federal commander ought to be directly chosen by the 
 Bundestag, for this would make it possible for Marshal Wrede, 
 or one of the petty princes, to be appointed to the supreme 
 command of the German army. It was regarded as a matter 
 of course that this German field-marshal would not be 
 empowered to alter the distribution of the corps, even in war 
 time ; he was also to enjoy the benefit of a sort of parliamen- 
 tary headquarters-staff, an assembly of officers from all the 
 contingents, whose business it would be to represent the interests 
 of their respective sovereigns. There was to be no inspection 
 from the federal side in peace time, nor were there to be any 
 definite regulations about the Landwehr ; speaking generally, 
 the carrying out of the future federal law was to be left exclu- 
 sively to the individual states. This prospect was all the more 
 cheering since the elector of Hesse expressly added that he 
 must not be asked to keep the cadres and the necessary equip- 
 ment for the war-strength ready prepared in time of peace. A 
 distinctive federal badge was to be tolerated in war, but it must 
 be nothing more than a sign of recognition, like the white 
 brassard which the soldiers of allied Europe had formerly worn 
 in France, without prejudice to their national independence. 
 As regards the subdivision of the federal army, it was demanded 
 as an inviolable rule that no state which provided a complete 
 army corps should mingle other troops with its own ; the 
 mixed corps should be constituted " in accordance with geo- 
 graphical relationships and ties of kinship." The elector of 
 Hesse also announced that he had agreed with his cousin of 
 Darmstadt to unite with him " in constituting a joint force in 
 opposition to the enemies of their common and peculiar father- 
 land," and everyone knew that when he spoke of the enemies 
 of their " peculiar fatherland," he meant Prussia alone. 
 
 In the first heat of his anger, Hardenberg wished to demand 
 reparation from Hesse ; ^ the well-meaning man was completely 
 helpless in face of the display of a particularism which so openly 
 avowed that the protection of the great powers was desired without 
 rendering anything in exchange, and which declared that, in 
 case of need, it would not hesitate to join with the enemies 
 of the country. Disheartening, too, was the deplorable men- 
 dacity of the whole discussion. Not one of the federal associates 
 • Hardenberg to Goltz, February 21, 1818. 
 422 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 could possibly imagine that either Austria or Prussia would ever 
 consent to divide her army into two fragments, and conse- 
 quently all dispute about the federal contingents of the two 
 powers was unmeaning. Yet Mettemich was far from being 
 alienated by the behaviour of the middle-sized states. He 
 negotiated in secret with the South German courts, and promised 
 the king of Wiirtemberg that in addition to the closed masses 
 of the Austrian, Prussian, and Bavarian armies, two or three 
 mixed corps should be formed, so that Wiirtemberg, Hanover, 
 and perhaps also Saxony, should each have the command of a 
 separate corps. Meanwhile the South German envoys were 
 also at work upon Buol ; Berckheim, the Badenese envoy, asked 
 him reproachfully why Austria was allowing herself to be 
 dragged at the heels of Prussia. ^ In the sitting of April 9, 1818, 
 the presidential envoy at length openly went over to the 
 side of the middle-sized states, and laid before the Bundestag 
 certain " leading points " of federal military organisation, 
 which in all important matters corresponded to the proposals of 
 the South German courts. The assembly joyfully agreed ; 
 Prussia was completely isolated, and accepted the inevitable. 
 
 Not even by this experience was the chancellor enlightened 
 regarding the untrustworthiness of Austrian friendship, although 
 Boyen, Wolzogen, and even the harmless Goltz, repeatedly drew 
 his attention to the manifest duplicity of Viennese policy. He 
 continued to regard Mettemich as a faithful friend, whose only 
 fault was an unduly yielding disposition, whereas Mettemich 
 (like the middle-sized states) was in reality tenaciously and 
 astutely advancing towards a single goal, the prevention of any 
 increase in the military strength of Pmssia. A committee of 
 the Bundestag was formed to carry these " leading points " 
 into effect, and in addition there was established a military 
 commission consisting of officers of the larger states, so that 
 military affairs had always to mn the gauntlet of three authori- 
 ties. A new dispute began when Prussia declared herself 
 prepared to contribute just as many troops to the federal army 
 as Austria, although the population of her lands in the Federation 
 was somewhat less. In his innocence, the king had hoped that the 
 Federation would thank him for this patriotic sacrifice, and was pro- 
 foundly disappointed when Mettemich answered the Prassian envoy, 
 in terms of friendly regret, that the acceptance of this " generous 
 offer " by the Bundestag was unfortunately extremely improbable, 
 
 1 Berckheim's Report, April 8 ; Boyen to Hardenberg, March 31, 1818. 
 
 423 
 
History of Germany 
 
 especially if the dreaded Austria were to express herself in 
 favour of the proposal. In fact the federal envoys, led by 
 Martens the Hanoverian, expressed their well-grounded hostility 
 to the unprecedented proposal as soon as Goltz ventured to 
 bring it forward in the summer. ^ 
 
 The dispute concerning the subdivision of the federal army 
 continued even longer. The " leading points " merely laid down 
 that the minor contingents must be completely safeguarded from 
 any contact with the armies of the three great states. Prussia 
 now demanded that Electoral Hesse, in view of her geographical 
 situation, should join a North German corps ; but the elector 
 held, in opposition to this, that " the ties of kingship " were 
 of greater importance, and wished, in conjunction with his 
 cousin of Darmstadt, to join Wiirtemberg. The quarrel had 
 become utterly intolerable since General Langenau, the new 
 representative of Austria in the military commission, had secretly 
 been adding fuel to the flames ; in Schwarzenberg's headquarters 
 and at the congress of Vienna the versatile Saxon had already 
 displayed his hatred for Prussia, and in all the petty arts which 
 were decisive in the Bundestag he showed himself far more adept 
 than the learned Prussian, Wolzogen. At length, in August, an 
 agreement was secured that population should constitute the 
 standard for the provisional military register of the Federation — 
 for in the course of half a century, the Germanic Federation 
 never attained to a permanent mihtary register. Now 
 recommenced the haggling of the petty states : Hildburghausen 
 reckoned its population upon the basis of a census of the year 
 1807, Gotha and Altenburg were shown to have estimated their 
 population at a figure which was 12,000 below the actual — and 
 so on. 
 
 When the Germanic Federation entered its third year, the 
 military organisation had not yet been decided, the Carlsbad 
 convention regarding the fortress of Mainz had not been 
 approved by the Bundestag, neither Luxemberg nor Landau had 
 been made over to the Federation, nor had any agreement been 
 secured regarding the fourth federal fortress. Meanwhile the 
 French miUions, purchased with the blood of those who had 
 fought at Waterloo, lay at moderate interest in the hands of 
 Rothschild, and enriched this house, whose greatness had first 
 
 1 Instructions to Kruseiuark, May 20 ; Krusemark's Report, June 10 ; 
 Goltz's Report, August 2i, 1818. 
 
 2 Qoltz's Report, April 28, 1818, 
 
 424 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 been founded by the blood-money of the elector of Hesse ; 
 which since the year 1813 had rapidly risen to the position of 
 a world power ; and which within a few years had made over 
 more than 1,200,000,000 gulden in subsidies and loans to the 
 deeply indebted courts of Europe. German economic life secured 
 but Uttle gain from the treasures of the Rothschilds, for the 
 firm was not German, as had been those of the Fugger and 
 the Welser, but showed from the first the cosmopohtan character 
 of the modem Jew. The five sons of old Amschel Rothschild, 
 who had been raised to the baronage by the grateful emperor 
 Francis, settled in the principal capitals of Western Europe, and 
 were all guided by that simple principle which their father had 
 once voiced to the elector of Hesse : " He who takes my money, 
 takes my honour, and my honour is my life." The Frankfort 
 branch of the house remained a faithful helper of the Hofburg 
 in its eternal financial need, and was a powerful ally of Austria 
 in her German policy. There was Mttle to be gained by the 
 Rothschilds in Berlin, for Prussian finances were once more in 
 order ten years after the peace. Yet Friedrich Gentz, full of 
 unselfish enthusiasm, wrote a long essay for the Brockhaus 
 encyclopaedia, wherein, in a thoroughly servile manner, he 
 glorified the incomparable wisdom and virtue of the brothers 
 Rothschild. 
 
 When the Bundestag so shamefully neglected the nearest 
 and most important of its duties, how httle could it do justice 
 to the numerous other tasks which the ambiguous words of the 
 federal act assigned to the assembly. All the parties of the 
 opposition were united in demanding the speedy fulfilment of 
 article 13, which promised the introduction of diets, and 
 nothing seemed less easy to forgive the Bundestag than its 
 unconcern about this promise. Yet article 13 was no more 
 than a vague prophecy which by no means justified the 
 federal assembly in interfering in the constitutional struggles 
 of the individual states. Although Hardenberg had strictly 
 enjoined upon Count Goltz that, after all the tribulations of the 
 years of war, failure to provide the promised constitution might 
 prove extremely dangerous, the federal envoys had speedily 
 united in a tacit determination not to touch this thorny question. 
 The cabinets soon learned that the realisation of the promise 
 was far more difficult than the hberals, in their impatience, 
 imagined ; all the states jealously preserved their sovereignty 
 
 425 
 
History of Germany 
 
 vis-a-vis the Federation, and many of them had secretly deter- 
 mined to avoid the execution of this inconvenient pledge. 
 
 Nevertheless the Bundestag was compelled to deal with the 
 matter. Charles Augustus of Weimar had, as early as May, 
 1816, been the first among the rulers to promulgate a constitu- 
 tion for his Uttle country ; and in December of the same year 
 he demanded a federal guarantee for this fundamental law. 
 The level-headed prince openly expressed his AviUingness 
 to realise in his own land the hopes that had arisen in 
 Germany, and the liberal press loudly acclaimed " the only 
 German prince who had kept his word." The majority of the 
 Bundestag received the proposal of Weimar with unconcealed 
 anger ; why should this minor prince press forward so arrogantly 
 and, in order to curry popular favour, throw other sovereigns 
 into the shade ? Violent altercations followed. When Bavaria 
 expressed doubts regarding the competence of the Bundestag, 
 the envoy of the Ernestines sharply replied that such a conten- 
 tion served only to confirm the widely diffused and groundless 
 accusation that the Federation troubled itself solely about the 
 new rights of sovereignty , but desired to withhold from subjects 
 the rights formerly secured to them by the imperial constitution. 
 The innocent Gagern increased the ill-feeling when he expressed 
 to the grand duke his cordial thanks for this action, which 
 would be an additional stimulus to other princes. Vienna was 
 painfully embarrassed, for Austria desired neither to accord 
 recognition to the princely demagogue in Weimar, nor yet to 
 admit that the Bundestag possessed an arbitrator's authority. 
 Hardenberg, on the other hand, who still confidently expected 
 the success of his own constitutional plans, espoused the cause 
 of the grand duke, praised the patriotic sentiments manifested 
 in the proposal of Weimar, and in a confidential letter 
 temporarily appeased Mettemich's concern. With customary 
 ceremonious slowness, the Bundestag at length did what it was 
 not able to leave undone, and after more than four months 
 voted the requisite guarantee in the driest possible terms ; but 
 the Austrian envoyj expressly added that, in such questions, 
 everything must on principle be left to a free understanding 
 between the princes and the estates. 
 
 At the same time, a lawyer named Beck, of Lowenstein, 
 had in Odenwald prepared a harmless petition which asked the 
 Bundestag to carry quickly into effect the cherished article 13. 
 Certain hotspurs among the students of Jena and Heidelberg 
 
 426 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 went from place to place endeavouring to secure signatures 
 for the petition. Beck himself came to Frankfort, visited some 
 of the envoys, and according to the reports which the alarmed 
 representatives despatched home, used extremely revolutionary 
 language. Notwithstanding the zeal of the students and the 
 approval of the Uberal press, the petition secured barely a 
 thousand signatures throughout Germany ; but it was the first 
 example since immemorial times of a political agitation embrac- 
 ing several German states at once, and the official corporation 
 continued to regard the old rule as inviolable, that every petition 
 is permissible, but not the collection of signatures. Consequently 
 this tentative awakening of party-Ufe aroused general alarm at 
 the courts ; even Hardenberg, greatly moved, ordered the envoy 
 in Frankfort to keep a wary eye upon such dangerous demagogic 
 activity.^ 
 
 Now, as before, Mettemich was detennined to keep the 
 Bundestag altogether aloof from these difficult questions. He 
 saw with satisfaction that in the Austrian crown lands the 
 promise of the federal act had long before been gloriously ful- 
 filled ; here there still existed those mummified postulate-diets 
 whose visible fife and history was usually played in three acts : 
 the arrival of the estates in their state chariots ; the reading, 
 and unanimous approval, of the sovereign's postulates ; and, 
 finally, the driving away of the estates in the same 
 state chariots. Once only, in the autumn of 1817, did it 
 occur to Mettemich that it might be advisable to assemble 
 some of the deputies to this diet, together with the heads of 
 the officialdom, to form a Reichsrat ; but since Emperor Francis 
 kept the bold and innovating proposal l5ring in his desk for 
 eighteen years, until the day of his death, the minister pursued 
 the idea no further, and continued to adhere to the tried prin- 
 ciples of stabiHty. Why, then, should he awaken the suspicion 
 of the German sovereigns on account of this article 13, which, 
 after all, had found its way into the federal act only on the 
 initiative of the idealogues Hardenberg and Humboldt ? As 
 soon as Rechberg, the Bavarian minister, alarmed by the vote 
 upon the Weimar proposal, expressed his Uvely concern regarding 
 possible encroachments on the part of the federal assembly, 
 Mettemich gladly availed himself of the] opportunity to satisfy 
 the minor courts regarding the harmlessness of the Bundestag, 
 and sent to Hmby, Austrian ambassador in Munich, a long 
 
 . 1 Instructions to Goltz, December 8, 1818. 
 427 
 
History of Germany 
 
 memorial, which was communicated also to the other cabinets, 
 under the title of a " manifesto." After a moving description 
 of the incomparable advantages of the German " federative 
 state," this document went on to show that the Bundestag 
 could not exercise an independent authority unless all the 
 princes personally participated ; it would suffice to recall a 
 single demagogic, and therefore disloyal, envoy, in order to 
 obviate all risk of mischief. " The emperor is convinced that 
 the small state of Weimar has up to the present hour managed 
 to invoke more misfortune upon Germany than the federal 
 assembly could possibly bring to pass in its present legal situa- 
 tion, even in hardly conceivable eventualities." Least of all 
 need the Federation trouble about carr57ing out article 13. "A 
 natural and extremely simple consideration of the activities 
 which to-day disturbers of the peace of all kinds are permitting 
 themselves to arouse in the designs of the Zeitgeist, demands 
 unconditionally that the federal assembly shall refrain from 
 taking any initiative. The law exists ; this must suffice for 
 the moment ; the application of the law must be left to the 
 wisdom of each individual government." ^ 
 
 So far was it still from the intention of the court of Vienna 
 to interfere with the constitutional movement by federal resolu- 
 tions. The first incitement to a reactionary federal policy came 
 rather from the monarch who at that time, next to Charles 
 Augustus, stood highest in popular favour. The ambitious 
 young WilUam of Wiirtemberg had since his accession to the 
 throne honourably endeavoured to bring to a close the vexatious 
 constitutional dispute which he had inherited from his ill-condi- 
 tioned father, and had twice vainly laid before the estates 
 liberal proposals for a constitution. But repentance overcame 
 him in the autumn of 1817, and he determined to seek assist- 
 ance from the Federation against his own UberaUsm. His 
 envoys, Wangenheim in Frankfort and Wintzingerode in Vienna, 
 received instructions to ask from the Federation an authentic 
 interpretation of article 13, " so that firm and immovable limits 
 may be imposed upon all excessive demands." Naturally, 
 neither of them was to betray the true ground of the petition. 
 They declared that the king was bound by his word, but that 
 the disorderly mood prevaihng in Prussia and among Wiirtem- 
 berg's neighbours called for restraint, and (this was a harmless 
 addition by the prolix Wangenheim) that the constitutional 
 
 1 Metternich to Hruby, December 11, 1817. 
 428 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 plans of Wiirtemberg were likely to constitute a momentous 
 example for the whole of Germany. ^ The proposal, however, 
 was received with such coolness by the federal envoys, that 
 Wangenheim had to agree that his motion, which he had brought 
 forward in a secret sitting (December i8th), should not appear 
 in the minutes. Wintzingerode fared no better in Vienna. It 
 is true that in confidential intercourse Mettemich declared that 
 the diets spoken of ia article 13 had nothing in common with 
 the revolutionary design of general popular representation, and 
 thus early disclosed a cherished idea of his poHcy which was 
 subsequently to lead to grave discontent in German poUtical 
 hfe. But were it only out of regard for Prussia and Bavaria, 
 it seemed to him impossible that the Federation shoTild exercise 
 any influence in the matter of the diets. King WUHam's 
 scheme had miscarried, but in Vienna it had not been forgotten. 
 Mettemich had learned how httle lasting resistance was to be 
 expected from the minor crowns if once it were determined to 
 use the power of the Federation against the diets. The consti- 
 tutional king, who was hailed by the ingenuous press as the 
 hero of liberalism, was the first to show the Hofburg the way 
 to stifle German freedom. 
 
 In the interim, the unfortunate article 13 had once more 
 come up for discussion in Frankfort, for the dukes of Meck- 
 lenburg also demanded the guarantee of the Federation for a 
 constitutional law which was to serve for the enlargement of their 
 venerable hereditary claims. In this negotiation. Count Goltz, 
 acting on instructions from Hardenberg, gave a detailed report 
 of what had hitherto been done in Prussia to fulfil the promise 
 of a constitution ; he advised against the regulation of the 
 question of the diets by the federal assembly, since this body 
 could do nothing more than " lay down general principles " ; 
 but suggested that the individual states should, within a year, 
 report once more to the Bundestag on their plans for a constitu- 
 tion. At first Frederick WiUiam was extremely averse to this 
 action on the part of the chancellor, because he foresaw that 
 the Prussian constitution could not possibly be completed for 
 years to come ; and what right had the Federation to demand 
 an account of these matters ? But the king's anxieties were 
 
 1 Berckheim's Reports of November i8, 23, and 30, December 13 and 29, 1817, 
 harmonising perfectly with the communications which Count W. Wintzingerode 
 furnishes from Wurtemberg documents (cf. E. L. Wintzingerode, A Statesman 
 of Wurtemberg, Gotha, 1866, pp. 31 et seq.). 
 
 429 
 
History of Germany 
 
 allayed when Hardenberg represented to him that the introduc- 
 tion of new representative institutions in place of the obsolete 
 provincial diets was a matter which had, after all, already 
 been determined : " To-day cannot go back to yesterday." ^ 
 The Bundestag now gave the Mecklenburgers the desired 
 guarantee, and accepted the Prussian proposal. The crown of 
 Wiirtemberg, however, could net refrain from once again di&- 
 plasdng before the nation the Hght of its incomparable Uberalism. 
 The very same Wangenheim who had just secretly demanded a 
 restrictive interpretation of article 13, declared, according to the 
 published minute of April 6th : " His majesty's hvehest anxiety 
 is directed towards the estabHshment of a representative consti- 
 tution based upon the most liberal principles." This was the 
 first sample of that hypocritical and false policy of vacillation 
 between the Bundestag and the local estates which for a |;enera- 
 tion to come was to be pursued by the constitutional middle- 
 sized states. 
 
 Next to a representative constitution, the freedom of the 
 press was the most cherished wish of the hberals ; they hoped 
 all the more securely for the fulfilment of this desire since 
 article 18 of the federal act prescribed for the Bundestag that 
 at its first assembly it should prepare uniform dispositions 
 regarding the freedom of the press and dealing with the question 
 of hterary piracy. This hope also was to prove illusory. The 
 comparatively unrestricted freedom which German literature 
 enjoyed in its classic days rested upon the supposition that 
 writers would always hold aloof from politics. But when, 
 after 1813, a political press suddenly came into existence, 
 honourable and warm-hearted, but also muddle-headed, noisy, and 
 characterised by youthful ill-breeding, the old official corporation 
 was for a while alarmed and helpless in face of the new 
 manifestation ; there was no diplomat who, in his confiden- 
 tial letters, failed to complain of the unbridled freedom of the 
 " pohtical scribblers." Among the few who, amid the general 
 alarm, were able to preserve some equanimity, was Hardenberg. 
 Whilst still in Paris, he wrote to the minister of justice that 
 he desired the approval of a regulated freedom of the press, 
 but also some restriction of the tendency to unbridled licence ; 
 it seemed to him that the revision of the numerous inadequate 
 laws of censorship which stUl prevailed in various parts of 
 
 ^ Cabinet Order of February 18 ; Hardenberg's Reply, March 10 ; the 
 king's Rejoinder, March zi, 1818. 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 Prussia, was urgently needed. Unfortunately, amid the enor- 
 mous mass of administrative business of these days of transi- 
 tion, he could not find leisure to pursue the plan. Meanwhile ' 
 the censorship was not severe ; and hterary piracy, which 
 on the left bank of the Rhine flourished luxuriantly, was strictly 
 suppressed in Prussia, although the petty neighbours did not 
 follow this good example. In ReutHngen, above all, under the 
 protection of the crown of Wiirtemberg, piracy was practised 
 altogether without restraint. Once only did the chancellor, 
 most unwillingly, allow himself to be moved to an act of 
 injustice which inflicted a severe wound upon the repute of 
 Prussia. Since the war, the Rheinische Merkur had rapidly 
 faUen from its high estate ; fiery patriotic emotion was no longer 
 adequate for the sober needs of the years of peace. Since 
 Gorres had nothing to say about the business questions of 
 organisation and administration, he soon decUned into aim- 
 less terrorist blustering. From all the courts, German and 
 foreign alike, there came complaints against the incorrigible 
 gazettier de Coblence. When he wrote scornfully that the govern- 
 ment's dread of the freedom of the press was strictly comparable 
 to the hatred of public prostitutes for the lighting of the streets; 
 when after the appearance of the Schmalzian pamphlet he broke 
 out into incredible exaggeration, into offensive images (saying 
 that now the seven stenches of the Prussian state had united 
 to form a single Schmalz-stench, and that the general reaction 
 had broken loose), this tone was too strong for the sensitive 
 ears of the day. After repeated private warnings, Hardenberg 
 resolved, in January, 1816, to suppress the Rheinische Merkur, 
 a few days after Gorres had hailed the new year with the 
 confident prophecy that the Merkur would be the guiding star 
 of the year that was then opening. The suppression made 
 everywhere a painful impression. What a strange way to show 
 gratitude towards the paper which, in a great time, had so 
 courageously represented the German cause ; and what folly to 
 offend in this way an incalculably passionate publicist who still 
 remained true to the German flag, but who, in his fantastic 
 manner, might at any time go over to the other side ! In 
 general, however, the Prussian press was left comparatively 
 unmolested. 
 
 Not until the spring of 1817 did the Bundestag remember 
 the promise of article 18, and thereupon commissioned von 
 Berg, the envoy of Oldenburg, to compile a statistical statement 
 
 431 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of the German press laws. This man of cumbrous learning 
 undertook his laborious task with all the pomp and circumstance 
 of an old-time Gottingen professor. Hardenberg recognised that 
 in this way the goal would never be attained, and since com- 
 plaints against the unbridled press, and especially against the 
 rough tone of the Jena newspapers, became increasingly frequent, 
 he decided, in the siommer of 1817, to secure a federal press 
 law by common proposals from the two great powers. He 
 therefore had a memorial upon the freedom of the press 
 elaborated by Privy-councillor von Raumer, and when his 
 confidant Jordan went to Vienna in the winter, he was instructed 
 to come to an understanding with Mettemich about this question. 
 The memorial akeady displayed some anxiety, but did not 
 exceed the measure of compulsion which appeared indispensable 
 to most of the governments of that day : it demanded absolute 
 freedom for all great scientific works, but strict censorship for 
 newspapers. 1 Here also, however, it became plain how widely 
 divergent were the views of the two great powers. Although 
 Metternich instructed Gentz to draw up a memorial on the press, 
 and expressed a vigorous demand that Germany should be free 
 from " the dictatorship of such men as Jahn, Amdt, Oken, and 
 Fries," he was once more deeply influenced by his respect for 
 the sovereignty of the individual states, and Jordan brought 
 nothing home beyond a few vague assurances.^ Then, in April, 
 1818, Grand Duke Charles Augustus endeavoured to hasten the 
 activity of the Bundestag, and urgently demanded the imposi- 
 tion of uniform principles applying to the German press, because 
 he had often had the painful experience that the constitutional 
 freedom of the press of his country was regarded with ill-feeling 
 by his neighbours. This was a vain demand. It was not until 
 October, 1818, after more than a year and a half, that Berg 
 had compiled his report; and now the Bundestag plucked 
 up courage to appoint a commission to draw up further 
 schemes. Thus, through shameful procrastination, was lost the 
 last opportunity for the securing of a tolerably reasonable German 
 press-law. 
 
 To the masses of the nation, the hopeless futility of the 
 Bundestag first became manifest when the assembly at length 
 
 1 Hardenberg to Krusemark, June 12 ; Raumer's Memorial concerning 
 article i8, with Remarks by the chancellor, November 18, 1817. 
 
 432 
 
 ' Jordan to Hardenberg, January 13 ; Mettemich to Hardenberg, January 
 
 5» IoJo« 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 came to deal with article 19 of the federal act, which promised 
 the regulation of trade relationships. So anarchical a confusion 
 as this impoverished and exhausted people had now to endure 
 in its commercial intercourse, had never yet been known, even 
 in the distressing history of Germany. The detested customs- 
 houses and droits reunis of the French had everj^where been 
 abolished immediately after the overthrow of the foreign 
 dominion, and had not yet been replaced by a new system of 
 indirect taxation. Consequently a great part of Germany lay 
 exposed without defence to the overwhelming competition of 
 the richer foreign world. The factories of Rhineland, which had 
 only just begun to develop under the Napoleonic mercantile 
 system, suddenly lost their market in France, Holland, and 
 Italy, whilst they were cut off from access to their own country- 
 men by the numerous state and district customs-barriers which 
 intersected Germany. It was a topsy-turvy section of the 
 world. As soon as the Continental System fell, English goods, 
 which had for years been shut out from the continent, were 
 poured over in vast quantities ; crowds of English commercial 
 travellers invaded German towns. In one year, English 
 manufacturing industry sent goods to the continent to the value 
 of 388,000,000 gulden, and of these, 129,000,000 gulden came to 
 Germany alone. Parliament then proceeded to re-establish the 
 metallic currency. Silver was reminted, quantities of new gold 
 coin were issued, and the bank was pledged to the gradual 
 resumption of specie payments. England needed gold at all 
 costs, and endeavoured to supply this need by extensive exports, 
 so that British cotton goods were frequently offered on the 
 German market at from thirty to forty per cent, below the 
 cost of manufacture. In addition, the high com duties of 
 England prevented the export of German grain, and during the 
 famine years of 1816 and 1817, German manufacturers lost also 
 the sole advantage which they had had over their English 
 competitors, namely, the low rate of wages. 
 
 Embittered by so hopeless a state of affairs, pubUc opinion 
 ran to extremes. Anxious manufacturers demanded a severe 
 prohibitive system for the protection of German labour, and 
 those inspired with an exaggerated Teutonism agreed. In 
 Berlin, the members of the town council and a number of 
 burghers of high position pledged themselves to buy only German 
 clothing and household requisites ; unions for similar purposes 
 came into existence in Silesia and Saxony, On the other hand, 
 
 433 2F 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the revolutionary free-traders, who, like Brunner the Bavarian, 
 condemned all customs-dues as an attack upon natural freedom, 
 raised a clamour ; a scientifically elaborated system of free- 
 trade principles first came into existence in a small circle of 
 professors and among the best heads of Prussian officialdom. 
 The abolition, or at least the restriction, of the internal customs- 
 dues, was the universal desire ; as early as the year 1816, 
 at the Leipzig fair, C. Weber summoned a meeting of manufac- 
 turers and merchants to send in a petition to this effect to the 
 Bundestag, but very few combined any clear idea with the high- 
 sounding words ; hardly anyone recognised what enormous 
 difficulties were imposed by nature herself against the economic 
 unity of Germany. No other civilised nation was so homo- 
 geneous in character, but no other comprised within its 
 boundaries such a variety of climatic conditions, of modes of 
 consumption, and of methods of labour. What a contrast 
 between the great manufacturing industry of the Lower Rhine, 
 and the semi-Polish provinces where, with a rise in the price of 
 grain, wages usually sank, because nothing but hunger would 
 force the lazy populace to work ; and what a contrast, again, 
 between the northerly climate of East Prussia, where elks lived 
 in the forests, and the happy vine-lands of the Rhine. No 
 man of poietic inteUigence had yet appeared competent to do 
 justice to interests so fundamentally divergent. 
 
 Least of all could the Bundestag venture upon such a task. 
 But one immediately pressing evil of German commercial rela- 
 tionships could be, and must be, allayed by the federal assembly, 
 when in the summer of 1816 a famine, whose like had not been 
 seen since the year 1772, affiicted the impoverished country. 
 Rain fell almost continuously for months, all the rivers over- 
 flowed their banks, in Central and West Germany almost the 
 entire harvest was destroyed ; in Rhineland, as late as the 
 spring of 1817, pale and miserable beings were to be seen 
 wandering through the fields digging up the rotten potatoes of 
 the previous year. The few roads which then existed had been 
 so completely spoiled by the war, that it was impossible to 
 transport grain any distance through the country ; in winter 
 even the mail coaches could in many cases only get along 
 with a supplementary team of from sixteen to twenty horses. 
 Consequently, in the year 1818, the price of the scheffel (one and 
 a half bushels) of wheat was, on the Rhine, 2 tlr. 9 sgr. 6 pfg. 
 higher than in Prussia, whereas in the previous fifty years the 
 
 434 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 highest difference in price within the Prussian monarchy had 
 amounted to only lo sgr. 7 pfg. Internal trade, already piti- 
 fully small, was now completely destroyed by the foolish enmities 
 of particularism. Austria, in accordance with her antediluvian 
 economic principles, forbade all export of grain immediately the 
 rise in price began, and thus gave the signal for a general tariff 
 war throughout South Germany. Bavaria, Wiirtemberg, Baden, 
 and Darmstadt, also closed their frontiers ; in the highlands, 
 the grain trade was completely arrested. In Frankfort, there 
 was a shortage of fodder, the federal envoys trembled for their 
 carriage horses, and Count Buol had, in the name of his 
 colleagues, to send a request to the crown of Bavaria that a 
 vessel laden with oats, which lay at Wertheim on the Main, 
 might at length be allowed to pass by the Bavarian customs. * 
 In the north, too, many grievous errors were committed. Biilow 
 made such a careless use of the 2,000,000 thalers which 
 the king had allotted for the purchase of grain from the Baltic, 
 that the severely afflicted Rhineland derived little advantage 
 from the money. None the less, the majority of the North 
 German governments, by facilitating intercourse, honourably did 
 their best to overcome the distress. After the South German 
 courts had overwhelmed one another for several months with 
 contradictory reproaches, and had mutually starved one another's 
 countries, Wiirtemberg at length applied to the Federation, and 
 demanded a speedy raising of the embargoes by federal action 
 (May ig, 1817). With the manifest design of frustrating this 
 idea, Bavaria made a counter-proposal to the effect that the 
 measure must be extended to the non-German provinces of 
 Austria, Prussia, and the Netherlands. Prussia, and the 
 majority of the other states, voted for the proposal of Wiirtem- 
 berg ; but the Hofburg, following its usual custom, left the 
 presidential envoy for eight weeks without instructions. 
 
 Then the kindness of nature came to the assistance of the 
 Bundestag ; the fields displayed promise of a bountiful harvest, 
 the price of grain fell, and, on July 14th, Buol was gratified to 
 be able to announce to the assembly, in his classic German, 
 that though he was still without information as to the intentions 
 of his court, this after all was a matter of little importance, 
 " since the prospect of so bountiful a harvest is itself raising 
 the embargo." In the following year the question of common 
 measures for the future was again discussed, and once more 
 
 1 Berstett's Report, May 20, 1817. 
 435 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Bavaria displayed her ill-will, until at length (on July 9, 
 1818) the presidential envoy closed this drama of federal unity 
 by sa}ring that the negotiations had, indeed, led to no definite 
 result, but, he continued, " I still cherish the hope that before 
 long this question will once more be agitated." This prophecy 
 of Austria was to be brilliantly fulfilled ; article 19 was to 
 estrange the federal states one from another ! An epilogue, 
 which could have been possible only on German soil, was not 
 lacking, for there exists a certain frankness of stupidity and 
 baseness which can thrive only in the narrows of particularism. 
 During the famine, the elector of Hesse had ordered Baltic 
 grain through the faithful Rothschild; but the shipment arrived 
 too late, when prices had already fallen. In order that his 
 privy purse should not suffer in any way, the wealthy prince 
 now forced the bakers of Cassel to take this grain off his hands 
 at a price of 12 tlr. 2 gr., when the market price was only 
 7 tlr. In this way, for the burghers of the Hessian capital, 
 the period of famine was artificially prolonged for several 
 months by the affectionate father of the country. 
 
 What, finally, could the foreign trade of the nation expect 
 from the Bundestag in a distressing emergency which was very 
 loosely handled even by the naval powers ? Like Turkey herself, 
 the Barbary states (Turkish protectorates) owed their continued 
 existence chiefly to the disunion of the European powers ; the 
 excess of contrasts which characterised the multiform civilisation 
 of the west, redounded to the advantage of the barbarism of 
 Islam. Since no European power would allow any of the others 
 to take determined action against the Porte, the people had 
 long been accustomed to regard the proceedings of the Barbary 
 corsairs in the Mediterranean as legitimate campaigns ; every 
 sea power protected itself by its own arms, or by the payment 
 of tribute. After the peace, when naval commerce revived, the 
 pirates ventured into more distant seas, and even as far as the 
 Baltic, where, within sight of the German coasts, German ships 
 were seized and their crews carried off to slavery ; in addition 
 there was danger of infection from the plague-stricken lands of 
 North Africa. The vessels of Hanover and Schleswig-Holstein 
 still enjoyed a certain amount of security under the protection 
 of the EngHsh and Danish flags, for a British fleet had recently 
 threatened the dey of Algiers in his capital and had forced him 
 to Hberate his Christian slaves. All the more severely did the 
 Hansa towns and the Prussian seaports suffer : a great part of 
 
 436 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 their ships had to sail under foreign flags. At length, in 
 September, 1816, Czar Alexander suggested in London the forma- 
 tion of a European naval alliance for a common attack upon 
 the sea-robbers ; but the English government once more sus- 
 pected hidden designs, and would not tolerate the appearance 
 of Russian warships in the Mediterranean. The weary 
 negotiations led to no result, although Prussia supported the 
 Russian proposals, and declared herself prepared to contribute 
 some frigates to the European fleet. In this matter, as in all 
 questions of commercial policy, Austria displayed imperturbable 
 indifference. When the corsairs of the sultan of Morocco had 
 once more seized a Prussian ship, Gentz wrote scornfully : "Is 
 this good man not to be granted the right possessed by other 
 sovereigns of taking hostile action when he is injured ? " 
 
 Meanwhile the Hansa towns appealed for help to the Federa- 
 tion (June 16, 1817), and the Bundestag became emboldened to 
 the appointment of a special committee. Count Goltz thought 
 it necessary to offer an excuse for this unprecedented audacity, 
 and assured his king that " Neither now nor in the future is 
 it or can it be the intention of the assembly to intervene 
 unasked in matters of European policy ; this action ,': is not 
 taken out of presumption, but in the firm conviction that 
 your majesty and the great powers of Emrope will be inclined 
 to excuse what has been done in view of its purpose and of 
 the good faith which guides our action."^ No less humble 
 than the wording of this excuse, was the committee's proposal 
 that the Bundestag should request Austria and Prussia, in their 
 turn, with the assistance of France, Russia, and the other naval 
 powers, to induce the English court to join in common measures 
 against the Barbary corsairs. Among all the German courts 
 there was one only which felt all the shame of such a proposal. 
 Presumably an opinion had been despatched by Nebenius, or 
 another of the numerous capable young officials in Carlsruhe, 
 to Mandelsloh of Wiirtemberg, who held Baden's proxy at the 
 Bundestag ; however this may be, in the name of Baden, 
 Mandelsloh was the first to moot the idea of a German navy, although 
 as yet in extremely indefinite outlines. He asked whether it 
 coxild be considered proper to suggest to the naval powers that 
 they should protect German commerce at their expense ; and 
 whether the nation which had once destroyed the pirate league 
 of the Vitalie Brethren was not in a position to launch a 
 1 Goltz, Report to the king, June 17, 1817. 
 
History of Germany 
 
 few frigates of its own, and to drive " one or two miserable 
 pirate ships " from the German seas ? Why, even httle Portu- 
 gal knew how to protect her own skin against the Barbary 
 corsairs ! The inland stupidity of German federal policy found 
 no answer for such questions. Six months later (December 
 22nd) the Bundestag requested the committee to continue its 
 labours, and therewith the matter was shelved as far as the 
 Federation was concerned, although Prussia had declared herself 
 ready to despatch a few war-ships to the Mediterranean.^ The 
 Barbary corsairs continued to rob at pleasure. Vainly did the 
 Anti-Pirate League which had been constituted in the naval 
 harbours besiege the Viennese ministerial conferences three 
 years later with its petitions. After repeated severe losses, the 
 Hansa towns wrote at length, in the year 1829, a humbly 
 worded despatch " to the sublime and glorious monarch, the 
 mighty and most noble prince, his imperial majesty Sultan 
 Abd-ur-Rahman " of Morocco, offering through England's media- 
 tion to negotiate for the payment of tribute. But before this 
 negotiation had been completed, the French conquerors entered 
 Algiers, enforced peace upon the North African coast, and thus 
 brought to a conclusion the most odious episode in the odious 
 history of the eastern question. 
 
 The Bundestag was Hkewise intolerably remiss in its dealings 
 with the numerous grievances and petitions of the mediatised 
 imperial estates. At the Vienna congress, Prussia had proposed 
 that the mediatised should be given a few curiate or collective 
 votes at the Bundestag, so that the much misused high nobiUty 
 might become reconciled with the new order of German affairs, 
 and might emerge once more from its unnaturally isolated 
 position. The proposal was shipwrecked by the jealousy of 
 the Rhenish Confederate courts. By article 14, the federal act 
 promised the mediatised a long series of privileges in matters 
 of taxation, jurisdiction, etc. — privileges which conflicted with 
 modem ideas of national unity and equahty before the law, and 
 thus made public opinion adverse even to the just claims of 
 the old estates of the realm. Regarding the curiate votes, 
 article 6 of the federal act merely declared that the federal 
 assembly should take this question into consideration when 
 discussing the fundamental laws. The promises of article 14 
 were, it will readily be understood, far more cheerfully carried 
 out by the great states than by the petty princes, to whom the 
 
 * Raumer's Memorial concerning the Barbary corsairs, December, 1817. 
 
 438 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 mediatised seemed dangerous rivals. In Austria, the classic 
 land of the privileges of caste, the high imperial nobility had 
 always been graciously favoured, if only for the reason that 
 from early days its members had invariably belonged to the 
 imperial party. The king of Prussia, too, regarded it as his 
 princely duty to compensate the discrowned for the injustice 
 they had suffered ; and on July 21, 1815, he issued an 
 ordinance which went far beyond the promises of the federal 
 act, and granted to the mediatised, in almost too generous a 
 spirit, very notable privileges, including enfranchisement from 
 all direct taxation. Less favourable was their situation in 
 Bavaria. Montgelas and his bureaucracy could not refrain 
 from making these serene highnesses feel at times the collar 
 of subjection ; they were forced to have their patents of 
 nobility entered at the herald's office on the payment of high fees, 
 and when the prince of Waldburg-Zeil refused to pay the fee, 
 he was oflftcially addressed as plain Herr Waldburg. None the 
 less the Bavarian mediatised nobles continued to possess a 
 tolerably secure legal basis, in a royal ordinance of the year 
 1807, which had served as an example in the prescriptions of 
 the federal act. 
 
 In Wiirtemberg, on the other hand, and in Baden, Nassau, 
 and the two Hesses, the dispute was interminable ; all these 
 courts foresaw that the Fiirstenbergs, Leiningens, Lowensteins, 
 and Hohenlohes, could never regard themselves simply as 
 Badenese or Wiirtemberg subjects. With brutal roughness. King 
 Frederick of Wiirtemberg had ordered the princes and counts 
 of Waldburg and Konigsegg to hold their tongues, when they 
 combined to remind him in an address of " the glorious example 
 of the king of Prussia." Thereupon " the most humble estates 
 of the reahn of Wiirtemberg, offering themselves up as innocent 
 sacrifices to the state," under the leadership of the prince of 
 Waldburg-Zeil, combined for the common defence of the rights of 
 the estates ; they applied to their " sometime overlord of the 
 realm who diffuses general happiness," Emperor Francis, and to 
 many other sovereigns as well, demanding that the Federation 
 shotdd give them curiate votes, and should arrange to carry 
 article 14 into effect. Undeniably some of their wishes went 
 beyond the rights which a well-ordered state can allow its 
 subjects. But the Swabian despot had his ears everywhere ; 
 he learned of the intrigues of his high nobility from his 
 plenipotentiary at the Bundestag, von Linden, a notorious 
 
 439 
 
History of Germany 
 
 emissary of the Napoleonic police, who had recently made his 
 appearance in BerUn as ambassador, and had been unceremo- 
 niously given his papers by Hardenberg. The king immediately 
 intervened with a dehor tutor ium, had Prince Waldburg roughly 
 cross-examined, and then suppressed the union of the mediatised 
 as " null and treasonable." At the same time he raised the 
 alarm at the courts of his neighbours, and Hacke, the Badenese 
 minister, gladly declared his willingness to adopt common 
 measures " against the spirit of revolt and insubordination 
 which is manifesting itself among the large proportion of the 
 nobility." Prince Waldburg had actually ventured to ^^address 
 the sovereign prince of Biickeburg as " highly honoured cousin " l^ 
 
 When the Bundestag was opened, the great majority of the 
 federal states showed themselves^ so suspicious of the rebels 
 among the high nobility, that Hardenberg instructed his envoy 
 to drop, for the time being, the proposal to secure curiate votes 
 for the mediatised, since it was completely hopeless. The 
 petitions of the mediatised were shelved. It was not until 
 January, 1818, that the envoys to the Bundestag began, in their 
 reports home, to discuss the carrying into effect of article 14, 
 and subsequently, on October 2nd, the inevitable committee was 
 appointed to draw up common principles of action. There was 
 no longer any talk of curiate votes, and since the desired 
 common principles of action were never discovered, the rights 
 of the mediatised were left to the laws of the individual states, 
 although the majority of the old houses which had formerly 
 constituted estates of the empire had territory in several of the 
 federated states. The particularist spirit which had already 
 destroyed so many of the priceless energies of our nation, had 
 no idea what to make of an aristocracy which belonged only 
 to the whole of Germany, and which stood above the pettiness 
 of the system of little states. The mediatised were forced to with- 
 draw in dudgeon from political life, so that all they could do was 
 from time to time to give the German nation unwelcome 
 reminders of their forgotten existence, by complaints about the 
 infringement of their privileges. 
 
 In the first two years of its existence the BundestEig 
 succeeded in bringing to fruition only one moderately useful law, 
 the arbitral ordinance of June 16, 1817. Even this determina- 
 
 1 Petition of the prince of Waldburg-Zeil to the king of Wiirtemberg, September 
 29, 1815 ; to Emperor Francis, April 2, i8i6 ; to the prince of Biickeburg, 
 March 23 ; Minister von Hacke to Count Wintzingerode, April 8, i8i6, 
 
 440 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 tion bore, indeed, the stamp of the loosest federaUsm ; no one 
 ventured to return to the idea of a permament federal jurisdic- 
 tion which Prussia had so obstinately defended in Vienna. 
 None the less it was a distinct gain that the members of the 
 Federation should undertake a mutual pledge that in the first 
 instance their disputes should be referred to the mediation 
 of the Bundestag ; should this mediation fail of effect, the 
 decision was to be left to the supreme court of one of the 
 federated states, to be selected by joint agreement between the 
 disputants. In this manner, numerous minor negotiations 
 between the federated states were in fact peacefully settled, 
 and settled more promptly than of yore by the imperial courts. 
 But this appUed only to disputes of trifling importance. For 
 Prussia, at the very first discussion of the matter, laid down 
 the principle which since then has always been firmly maintained 
 by Berlin, that the arbitral authority was entitled to decide 
 upon legal questions alone, and had no jurisdiction where 
 poUtical interests were concerned. This reservation, which was 
 adopted by the minor states only after lively protest, was 
 legally contestable, but poUtically necessary ; for never could a 
 European power agree that the major questions of its policy 
 should be decided in accordance with the principles of civil 
 jurisdiction, by such a body as the court of appeal of Zerbst 
 or Jena. 
 
 If a conference of delegates pursues serious aims, the party 
 attitude of the members is in the long run always determined 
 by the sentiments of their mandataries ; but at the Bundestag 
 the personality of the individual envoys found free play, for 
 the courts concerned themselves little about the futilities of 
 Frankfort. Thus there gradually came into existence an 
 extremely unnatural arrangement of parties, which rested solely 
 upon the personal views of the envoys. Smidt and Berg were 
 both regarded in Vienna as "a thoroughly bad lot," although 
 neither the senate of Bremen nor the grand duke of Oldenburg 
 deserved the reproach of possessing hberal sentiments. With 
 these were associated Plessen, Eyben, Martens, and Wangenheim, 
 and the new Bavarian envoy Aretin, also inclined to liberal 
 views. But it was the inexhaustible garrulousness of the good 
 Gagem which gave the greatest trouble to the presidential 
 envoy. This remarkable legitimist of the ancient imperial law 
 was willing to recognise " only the abdication of an emperor, 
 but not that of an empire," and ingenuously demanded for 
 
 441 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the Germanic Federation all the powers that had been 
 possessed by the imperial majesty. " Everything that is 
 German " was to be at the disposal of the federal assembly. 
 He even considered that emigration should be subject to the 
 supervision of the Bundestag ; and in his zeal for duty " in 
 the service of the human species," he sent an agent to America 
 to study this new social phenomenon, whose significance the 
 talented man had understood earlier than most of his contem- 
 poraries. In many cases it was difficult for the audience to 
 preserve its gravity when, in his learned speeches, packed with 
 quotations and allusions, he revived all the imperial patriotic 
 phrases of the days of Rati^bon, all the intricate flourishes of 
 the legal system of the Holy Empire, dragged in even the ox 
 that was roasted whole at the coronation festival ! No failure 
 disturbed the good-natured man in the confidence of his patriotic 
 hopes. In the summer of 1817, when the Bundestag began its 
 first recess, the envoy of Luxemburg made an emotional closing 
 speech in honour of the federal constitution, exclaiming^ with 
 enthusiasm : " This Federation is not so much apprehensive as 
 formidable." To the dissatisfied liberals he said : " What have 
 we gained ? We have gained this, that the mother carries 
 her child cheerfully beneath her heart, relieved of the anxiety 
 that she will have to bring up a slave, and foreseeing that 
 she will give a free man to the fatherland ! " To this Luden's 
 Nemesis bitterly rejoined: "What have we lost? We have 
 lost our belief in the honesty of all chiefs and leaders ! " 
 
 The muddle-headed enthusiasm of the imperial patriot could 
 not fail at times to come into sharp conflict with the obstinate 
 reahty of German particularism. This happened, for example, 
 in the deUberations concerning article 18 of the federal act. 
 The article promised German subjects freedom of domicile, 
 provided that " another federal state should declare its wilHng^ 
 ness to accept them as subjects." These were empty phrases 
 which sounded like mockery ; Gagern maintained that they 
 constituted a general German civil right ; this civil right could, 
 however, be secured only if all Germans should adequately fulfil 
 their military duties in one federal state as in another ; "if 
 the fatherland were defended here as it is defended there ! " 
 What a demand to make of Prussia, so long as in one part of 
 Germany universal military service and in another part substi- 
 tution or recruiting, so long as in one part a term of service 
 of nineteen years and in another of six years, was vaUd ! When 
 
 442 
 
Opening of the German Bundestag 
 
 Goltz raised this counter-consideration, Gagern innocently 
 rejoined : " Why should not the Federation determine that with 
 the completion of, say, the seven-and-twentieth year of Ufe, 
 the principal military duty of every German should be regarded 
 as fulfilled ? " He added, with all the pride of a Luxemburger : 
 " Changes in this or that special muster-roll are indeed of trifling 
 significance, in comparison with the most important national 
 rights ! " Naturally Goltz stood firm, and the childishly iimo- 
 cent attack upon the foundation of the Prussian military system 
 WEis repulsed. Notwithstanding all this, Hardenberg continued 
 to regard his old Viennese comrade with easy-going humour, 
 and instructed Count Goltz on several occasions to treat the 
 excellent patriot with respect, for he could do no serious 
 harm.* 
 
 The other courts were less considerate. When Gagem had 
 repeatedly called attention to the promise of representative 
 institutions, when he had annoyed the sensitive new king of 
 Wiirtemberg by sharp observations regarding the Swabian consti- 
 tutional struggle, and had, unasked, offered his services as 
 mediator,^ when by the infantUe ignorance of the liberal 
 press he was even hailed as a tribune of the people, the 
 faithful advocate of federaUsm, the saviour of particularism, soon 
 came into the odour of Jacobinism, and Mettemich determined 
 to suppress the dangerous demagogue. A hint to the Nether- 
 land court sufficed. For a httle while the king of the Nether- 
 lands had been in serious difficulties, for it had just come to 
 Ught that the ambitious prince of Orange, hardly without prior 
 knowledge on the part of his royal father, had been engaged 
 with the French refugees in Brussels in a revolutionary con- 
 spiracy against the throne of the Bourbons. All the more gladly 
 did the monarch seize the opportunity of proving to the great 
 powers that he was animated with conservative sentiments, and 
 without hesitation he cashiered the statesman who had contri- 
 buted so much to the formation of the new united state of 
 the Netherlands. What did he care for the Bundestag, and 
 for the dreams of German imperial patriots ? In April, 1818, 
 Gagem was recalled, and took his leave with the naive declaration 
 that the cause of his dismissal was rather to be regarded as a 
 compliment to himself than as a manifestation of contempt for 
 his office. He was replaced by Count Griinne, a Dutchman, 
 
 ^ Instructions to Goltz, April 2rand July 12, 1817. 
 " Hatzfeldt's Report, The Hague, November 29, 1817. 
 
History of Germany 
 
 who had so profound a knowledge of German affairs that he 
 proposed in all seriousness that France should be accepted into 
 the Germanic Federation on account of Alsace. The Hofburg had 
 no objection to offer to Gagern's recall. The threat uttered by 
 Metternich in December, 1817, was now for the first time fulfilled. 
 The Bundestag knew henceforward that every " mutinous " 
 word would speedily lead to " the recall of the unfaithful 
 envoy." 
 
 Shortly after his departure, Gagern, in his invincible good 
 humour, published a work entitled Germany's Future and Germany's 
 Federal Constitution, designed to reconcile the Germans with their 
 Bundestag. The motto of the book was Ut amaris amabilis 
 esto ! The nation accepted the confident appeal in a mood of 
 fierce mockery. Even men of moderate views had long ago 
 turned away full of disgust from the spectre of the Eschen- 
 heimer Gasse ; and the time had already arrived when, to this 
 loyal and law-abiding people, no expression of scorn seemed too 
 strong, no insult too gross, to apply to the one and only 
 authority whose name recalled the unity of Germany. 
 
 444 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PRUSSIAN STATE. 
 
 I. PERSONALITIES AND PARTIES AT THE COURT. 
 
 After the conclusion of peace there began for Prussia, as 
 formerly in the days of Frederick William I, a period of repose, 
 uninteresting and jejune, poor in great events, but rich in work 
 and tranquil prosperity, a period in which the entire poUtical 
 life of the nation was absorbed in the work of administration, 
 and in which the royal officialdom once more exhibited its 
 fine state-constructive energy. Notwithstanding its diplomatic 
 defeats, the Prussian state was associated more closely than ever 
 before with the life of the entire nation. Prussia now ruled 
 over no more than 2,000,000 Slav subjects ; with the exception 
 of the Bavarians and the Swabians, all the German stocks were 
 represented within her frontiers ; she was, in addition, affected 
 more strongly than before by the contrasts in the religious 
 hfe of the nation, for now two-fifths of her population belonged 
 to the CathoUc church ; finally, in the great communities on 
 the shores of the Baltic and in Rhineland, Prussia acquired 
 new civilising elements which brought the country into closer 
 approximation with the neighbouring German lands, and 
 which, rapidly increasing in population, were gradually to exercise 
 a transforming influence upon the entire character of the national 
 life. But what a gigantic piece of work to fuse with the old 
 provinces this new domain, almost all of which passed unwill- 
 ingly under Prussian rule. Never in recent history has a great 
 power had such difficult administrative problems to solve ; even 
 the position of the kingdom of Italy after the annexations of 
 i860 was incomparably less difficult. 
 
 To the 5,000,000 inhabitants who were still left to the 
 monarchy in the year 1814, there was now suddenly added a 
 population of 5,500,000, — dwellers in a confusion of territorial 
 
 445 
 
History of Germany 
 
 fragments dispersed from the Prosna to the Meuse, which until 
 quite recently had belonged to more than one hundred distinct 
 governmental areas, and which subsequently had been subjected 
 to the laws of France, Sweden, Saxony, Westphaha, Berg, 
 Danzig, Darmstadt, and Nassau. In addition, there were 
 numerous minor areas which Prussia had secured by exchange 
 with her neighbours, in order to round off her territory ; the 
 smallest of the new governmental districts, that of Erfurt, 
 contained fragments from eight different states. Moreover, 
 the Old Prussian provinces which now returned to Prussian rule, 
 had, under the Napoleonic dominion, lost their ancient institu- 
 tions, almost to the uttermost trace. Already in the actual 
 occupation of the new provinces there broke out everywhere 
 disputes with ill-wishing neighbours. As late as the spring of 
 the year 1815, the Russian government in Warsaw ordered 
 extensive sales of the domains in Posen ; Darmstadt did the 
 same thing in the duchy of Westphalia ; while the Austro- 
 Bavarian administration in the territories on the Moselle and 
 the Nahe, before withdrawing, collected rents and taxes in 
 advance, and had the forests at Boppard cut down. Nassau, 
 in defiance of the treaties, refused to evacuate the circle of 
 Siegen, until Hardenberg threatened to occupy the land in the 
 absence of any formal cession. It was with reluctance that 
 even Danzig was handed over by the Russians ; while in Thorn, 
 notwithstanding urgent representations, the Russian garrison 
 remained until September 19, 1815. Years elapsed before the 
 new territorial status could be legally secured by treaties with 
 the rancorous neighbour states. It was not until 1816 that a 
 boundary agreement was concluded with the Netherlands, and 
 not until 1817 with Russia ; with the profoundly mortified 
 court of Dresden, minute and laborious negotiations regarding 
 the new frontier had to be carried on until the year 1819, and 
 it was not until 1825 that all the outstanding property disputes 
 between the two neighbours were finally settled. 
 
 The task now presented itself of subjecting to a uniform 
 administration the domain thus laboriously wrung from the 
 jealousy of Europe ; what was needed was to overcome the 
 pro-foreign spirit in home life, the particularist spirit in the 
 great state, to inspire with a living sense of the state all these 
 fragments of the German nation which as yet had in common 
 one with another Httle more than German speech. If the 
 work of political fusion could be[^ effected in this half of Germany, 
 
 446 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 an actual demonstration would have been given of the futility 
 of particularism, and the soil would have been prepared for 
 the upbuilding of the German united state ; it was the com- 
 pletion of the Prussian unified state which gave its true signifi- 
 cance to this epoch in our political history. The task was all 
 the more difficult because the monarchy, at the time when these 
 new provinces were acquired, was itself imdergoing a dangerous 
 process of transition ; in almost all the fields of legislation, 
 comprehensive reforms had been but half completed, and there 
 was lacking the true guiding hand of one strong enough to 
 subject to a single will the overplus of talents which served 
 the state. No other country of those days numbered among 
 its officials such a crowd of exceptional men : men of high 
 administrative abihty, such as Vincke, Schon, Merckel, Sack, 
 Hippel, and Bassewitz ; financiers, such as Maassen and Hoff- 
 man ; technicians, such as Beuth and Hartig ; jurists, such as 
 Daniels and Sethe ; among diplomats, Humboldt, Eichhom, 
 and Niebuhr ; and in addition to all these, the generals of 
 the War of Liberation, and the great figures of science and 
 art. All of them were accustomed to give utterance to relent- 
 lessly frank criticism in respect of the actions of the government 
 this being regarded as a privilege of the high officialdom, as a 
 substitute at once for popular representation and for freedom of 
 the press ; and they now carried over as an evil inheritance 
 into the days of peace, the old party struggle which had never 
 been completely stilled during the time of the war — a mass of 
 personal hatred and of opposition in respect of matters of detail. 
 From these circles, fault-finding and scandal made their way 
 through every class of society ; the state, which with all its 
 errors and defects still possessed the best and most thrifty 
 administration in Europe, was, in the letters and talk of its 
 own faithful servants, criticised with immeasurable severity, as 
 if, under the guidance of a rout of knaves and fools, it was 
 going down hopelessly to destruction. 
 
 Four parties, by no means clearly distinguished one 
 from another, contended within the govenmient. The old school 
 of absolutist courtiers and officials had now but few adherents, 
 but it gained powerful allies from among the ancient opponents 
 of Hardenberg, the feudalists, who secured their principal 
 support from among the nobles of the Electoral Mark, and 
 who were led by Marwitz and the ex-minister Voss-Buch. 
 The youthful officials, on the other hand, and nearly all the 
 
 447 
 
History of Germany 
 
 privy-councillors, were adherents of Hardenberg's bureaucratic 
 liberalism, though this did not prevent them in many cases 
 from being violent personal opponents of the chancellor. Yet 
 another line was taken by the small body of aristocratic 
 reformers who still clung firmly to the ideas of Stein. Among 
 the experienced business men of the high oificialdom, the enthu- 
 siasm of the Teutonising youth found many indulgent judges, 
 but not a single whole-hearted disciple. Nevertheless that 
 gloomy suspicion which all the courts, both in Germany and 
 abroad, cherished against the Prussian people and the Prussian 
 army, had an inevitable reaction upon Prussia herself. Since 
 Schmalz had raised his cry of disaster, there had been no end 
 to calumnies and poisoned whispers. Not merely Stein, Amdt's 
 outspoken well-wisher, but even the chancellor himself, was 
 accused of a secret understanding with the Teutonomaniacs, 
 although Hardenberg regarded the youthful enthusiasts for 
 unity as inconvenient disturbers of his dualistic policy, and, 
 even in his private journal, always referred to them in terms 
 of angry criticism. 
 
 The considerate good-nature of Frederick Wilham rendered it 
 impossible for him to keep such sharp contrasts under firm 
 discipline. With undue tenderness for his counsellors, he allowed 
 the party struggle at the court to go on far too long, interven- 
 ing only at intervals with a word of warning. If some new 
 talent was summoned to the government, it was usual to divide 
 a ministerial department in two, simply to avoid offending the 
 old minister, who was often an opponent of the new one. 
 Complete unanimity among the ministers was still regarded 
 as indispensable, for in the end the monarch decided according 
 to his own free judgment. How many storms had passed across 
 the country in the brief twenty years since Frederick William 
 had assumed the crown ; in retrospect it seemed as if the 
 opening of his reign must have been several generations back. 
 The loyal population of the old provinces already spoke of the 
 king, although he was still in his prime, as "the old gentleman," 
 and had a thousand stories to tell of his embarrassed and yet 
 so cordially benevolent kindliness. His Berliners lived with 
 him, and regarded it as a right that he should often walk 
 through the Thiergarten in a simple mihtary uniform; that at 
 mid-day, when the guard was changed, he should show himself 
 at the well-known comer window of his inconspicuous palace ; 
 and that in the evening, half hidden in his box, he should attend a 
 
 448 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 comedy, an opera, or a ballet — for he cared little for tragedy, 
 of which he had had more than enough in his own life. 
 
 The experiences of a great epoch had somewhat strengthened 
 his self-confidence ; he seemed firmer and more secure, but 
 also more serious and more taciturn, than in former years. His 
 friendly features exhibited a tranquil sadness, an expression 
 which disappeared only on rare occasions, as when he gave a 
 picnic to his happy children and to the grand duke Nicholas 
 upon the Pfaueninsel. The easy-going rationaUsm instilled 
 into him in youth had long ceased to satisfy his mind ; 
 already during the heavy days in Konigsberg he had found 
 consolation in a firm faith in Holy Writ, and had formed a 
 friendship with the excellent bishop Borowski. Now, from year 
 to year, his yearning towards the eternal increased ; pious 
 reflections and theological studies occupied a considerable propor- 
 tion of his leisure hours. Although he never overcame his 
 sorrow for his lost wife, there happened in his case also what 
 so frequently happens to profoundly distressed widowers ; the 
 solitude of unmarried hfe became intolerable to him. He 
 displayed a lively inclination for an amiable young French- 
 woman, the Countess Dillon, who passionately responded to his 
 affection, and for a considerable time he seriously thought of 
 contracting with her a morganatic marriage — since for his people 
 Queen Louise was always to remain the queen. But he was 
 unwilling to do anything that his Prussians might take amiss ; 
 and since in matters of conscience he had no confidence in the 
 counsels of the light-minded chancellor, he privately enquired of 
 Gneisenau and Schon, two men from whom he expected to 
 receive a perfectly frank answer, how his marriage with the 
 Catholic Frenchwoman would be regarded by the army and the 
 nation. Since both his advisers gave strongly adverse advice, 
 the king, profoundly affected, gave up his design. His days 
 passed sadly and monotonously. He answered all petitions with 
 the old punctuahty, after a conscientious examination, and 
 continued to retain the rudder in his own hand ; but personal 
 association with his highest officials remained uncongenial to 
 his retiring spirit ; he seldom saw the chancellor, and still 
 more rarely the other ministers. 
 
 In a far more intimate personal relationship with the king 
 was his daily companion. Colonel Job von Witzleben, who in 
 the year 1816, at the age of thirty-three, was made leader of 
 the military cabinet, and who two years later was appointed 
 
 449 2 G 
 
History of Germany 
 
 major-general and adjutant-general. What a contrast between 
 the solid efficiency of this man and the indolent pedant Kock- 
 ritz, who, up till 1806, had enjoyed the monarch's confidence; 
 the very choice of his friends showed that Frederick WiUiam 
 had grown with the growing time. The king's attention was 
 first attracted by Witzleben's mihtary gifts, and only gradually 
 did he learn how many-sided was the culture of the young 
 guardsman ; how he was on friendly terms with Wilhelm Hum- 
 boldt and other great men of science ; how as a musician he 
 displayed exceptional talent ; how he was also well instructed 
 in the theological matters in which the king was so greatly 
 interested ; and how, with all these endowments, he remained 
 so unpretentious, utterly free from a self-seeking spirit, pious 
 without any wordy display, a happy father of a family. The 
 new adjutant-general soon acquired the king's absolute confidence. 
 He could say everything to the monarch, because he always 
 knew how to control the natural vivacity which flashed out of 
 his dark eyes, and because in his honourable frankness he 
 never forgot his cordial respect for his royal friend. He served 
 as intermediary between the king and his ministers, was asked 
 advice in important affairs of state, and day after day, smoking 
 in his simple room, got through a colossal amount of work 
 with an unceasing diligence which wore out his frame prema- 
 turely after a couple of decades. In the pressure of business, 
 he rarely found time to describe the experiences of the day ; 
 often for months in succession his diary exhibits nothing but 
 blank pages or brief records of journeys ; but where political 
 matters are mentioned, there is always displayed a level soldierly 
 understanding, a sound knowledge of detail, and perfect upright- 
 ness. Although he did not consider himself a statesman, and 
 although he cautiously held aloof from the parties of the court, 
 none the less he did not hide his light under a bushel. With 
 sound political judgment, he regarded the new military constitution 
 as the firm bond of the unity of the state ; he considered the 
 completion of the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg to be indis- 
 pensable ; and (a thing which in these days of secret whispers, 
 counted most) he knew and loved the Prussian people. Nothing 
 seemed to him more contemptible than an attempt " to awaken 
 suspicion in the pure soul of the king " ; nothing disturbed 
 his confident belief that there was ^ no more sterhng loyalty 
 than that which was to be found in Prussia. 
 
 The tranquil influence of this faithful intermediary was all 
 
 4SO 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 the more valuable because, since the ill-success of the congress 
 of Vienna, the king had no longer treated the chancellor with 
 his old confidence, and yet found him indispensable. When 
 Hardenberg celebrated his seventieth birthday, Goethe wrote 
 to his old fellow-student : 
 
 " Thought transcends the power of speech 
 When we contemplate your life, 
 Spirit free, spite bonds of earth. 
 In action firm and confident." 
 
 And unquestionably to the end of his life, Hardenberg remained 
 a free spirit. Just as under the oppression of the foreign 
 dominion he had held with unalterable firmness to the ^idea of 
 the Uberation of the fatherland, so now he unceasingly pursued 
 the plan of crowning the work of internal reform by the 
 promised representative constitution ; this was to [be his political 
 [^egacy, the conclusion of his long career. In personal inter- 
 course he continued to preserve his charming amiability, and 
 displayed so [youthful an enthusiasm for aU that is beautiful 
 and great, adopted every new idea so lovingly and so 
 intelligently, [that even severe judges like Gneisenau and Clause- 
 witz could ^not, despite numerous occasions f or j| discord, feel 
 ill-disposed towards this man of many services. [But even in 
 his more vigorous days he had not always succeeded in acting 
 firmly ; and now that in old age he clung to his high office 
 he rarely found courage to show a bold front to his enemies, 
 and frequently believed that he was leading, when his opponents 
 were making a tool of him. The dictatorial power of the 
 chancellor had worked for good so long as he himself continued 
 to hold in his own hands all the ministries with ■'one or two 
 exceptions ; but since he had limited himself to the^conduct 
 of the ministry for foreign affairs^ and had hadj five separate 
 ministers as his subordinates, he had gradually lapsed into a 
 position no less untenable than that held |^in former days by 
 the reporting cabinet councillors. Disputes ^^with the ministers, 
 and complaints regarding the postponement ^of business, became 
 unavoidable, for the chancellor alone (with the exception of 
 Boyen, Witzleben, and the cabinet councillor Albrecht) reported 
 regularly to the monarch, and yet Hardenberg demanded from 
 the ministers that they should assume full responsibility for 
 their respective branches of the administration. 
 
 It was only an ignorant and fault-finding spirit which could 
 
 451 
 
History of Germany 
 
 accuse the old statesman of sloth. All well-informed persons 
 knew what an enormous number of memorials and marginal 
 notes, orders and reports, this rapid pen, always brilliant and 
 adroit, committed to paper. But he had never had a talent 
 for punctuality, and the burden of these activities, comprehend- 
 ing the entire hfe of the state, became too heavy for his 
 shoulders after the enlargement of the Prussian domain. Urgent 
 work was often shelved for months when the prince buried 
 himself in his castle at Glienicke, and then by fits and starts, 
 as chance or caprice might dictate, took up this paper or that 
 from the mountain of accumulated documents. Anyone who 
 there beside the dreamy Havel Lake wandered through the beauti- 
 ful park, or who at Neuhardenberg in Neumark contemplated 
 the choice art collection, and the new church built by Schinkel, 
 could not but feel that a noble and highly-cultured man dwelt 
 here. But how mortifying to contemplate the loose society 
 of the frequenters of these distinguished places, who made a 
 mock of the large-minded host at his own well-supphed table : 
 the scandal-mongers of literature, Scholl and Dorow ; the 
 magnetic healers, Koreff and Wohlfart ; the somnambulist, 
 Friederike Hahnel, later Frau von Kimsky. Hahnel was a 
 cunning cheat who had first met the prince at a seance at 
 Wohlfart's, and by her convulsive ecstasies had taken his soft 
 heart by storm. ^ Since then she had never left him, and she 
 became the curse of his old age. Inexhaustibly skilled in the 
 production of mysteries and morbid phenomena, and in the 
 gentle art of plunder, she accompanied him everywhere, even 
 to the congresses of the monarchs, and did not rest until his 
 third marriage, like the two first, had actually been broken. 
 About this time the chancellor arranged a marriage between 
 his only daughter, the divorced countess Pappenheim, now of 
 mature age, and the virtuoso of elegant profligacy, young Prince 
 Piickler-Muskau. The evil reputation of the Hardenberg house- 
 hold offered abundant material for the numerous spies whom 
 Mettemich maintained in Berlin, and furnished the enemies of 
 the chancellor with a dangerous weapon. They observed with 
 delight how the king became more and more estranged from 
 the statesman who respected his own white hairs so little ; and 
 since the busy Koreff also sometimes occupied himself as a 
 liberal author, there actually came into existence at court the 
 party-fable that Hardenberg's constitutional plans were the work 
 
 1 Hardenberg's Diary, February, i8i6. 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 of his notorious plebeian entourage. When one of the prince's 
 friends warned him against this rabble, Hardenberg answered 
 with a smile : " Even if I am often cheated, it is such a 
 delightful feeling to display confidence." 
 
 Among the ministers, Hardenberg had only one enlightened 
 adherent, Boyen, and even Boyen was too independent in his views 
 to follow the prince's leadership imconditionally. Kircheisen 
 showed himself expert in the organisation of the courts of 
 justice in the new provinces, and held aloof from poUtics. 
 Schuckmann, on the other hand, minister of the interior, a rigid 
 bureaucrat, active, well-informed, autocratic, " the philistine of 
 the old time," as W. Humboldt termed him, resisted all plans 
 for reform just as suspiciously as did Mettemich's confidant, 
 the police minister, Wittgenstein. How many years did the 
 unsuspicious Hardenberg require before he saw through the blunt 
 roughness of the last-named sly courtier, who long ago, by the 
 overthrow of the Dohna ministry had opened Hardenberg's own 
 way to power, and who therefore seemed to the chancellor 
 worthy of the most faithful friendship. To the monarch, 
 Wittgenstein was indispensable as an able administrator of the 
 royal private property. He was highly respected, too, at the 
 other German courts, being asked to advise in all sorts of 
 princely family affairs, so that even the opinionated elector of 
 Hesse sometimes Ustened to his counsels. To innocent observers 
 the Uvely old gentleman with his trivial jokes seemed perfectly 
 harmless ; even Heim, the popular BerUn physician with a 
 profound knowledge of men, was completely deceived by the 
 prince's agreeable manners, and was devoted to him. But 
 nothing escaped the watchful glance of these false blue eyes. 
 With irreconcilable, silent hatred, Wittgenstein tracked every- 
 thing which recalled Stein and the stormy national movement 
 of the years of war, and before long this led him to regard 
 even the chancellor as suspect of Teutonising Jacobinism, so 
 that Wittgenstein began unnoticed to follow all Hardenberg's 
 footsteps. It is true that after the peace the infamous "hired" 
 police, which Justus Gruner had once instituted as a last resort 
 against the Napoleonic spies, had been abolished ; but many 
 of the secret agents of this force still remained actively at 
 work, and it was upon their reports that Wittgenstein based his 
 opinions of the sentiments of the nation. 
 
 The young minister of finance. Count Biilow, Hardenberg's 
 cousin, stood alone among his colleagues. This was a handsome 
 
 453 
 
History of Germany 
 
 blonde man who, with his distinguished worldly charm and his 
 easy, even frivolous, adroitness in affairs, reminded the chan- 
 cellor of his own youth, so that Hardenberg loved him like a 
 son. After the peace of Tilsit, like many another excellent 
 official of the Magdeburg region, he had unwillingly entered 
 King Jerome's service, since his old home had no occupation 
 for him and, as Westphalian minister, he had done much to 
 facilitate internal intercourse and to carry into effect the 
 principles of a reasonable commercial policy, until he was at 
 length dismissed from office on account of his German senti- 
 ments and his independent way. Nevertheless he was regarded 
 as a traitor by the Old Prussian officials ; nor could Prussian 
 arrogance forgive Hardenberg for having introduced one of 
 Jerome's servants into the ministry while the war against 
 Napoleon was still in progress. Billow had not remained alto- 
 gether unaffected by the views of the French bureaucracy ; he 
 admired the Napoleonic fiscal system, and among the West- 
 phalian prefects had acquired a dictatorial tone, and had become 
 accustomed to arbitrary methods of carrying out his views 
 which seemed unendurable to the Prussian officials. Before 
 long he had quarrelled with several of the lord-Ueutenants ; 
 he quarrelled even with his cousin and well-wisher, for an 
 orderly national economy was utterly impossible so long as the 
 chancellor could dispose freely of whatever sums he pleased 
 without consulting the minister of finance. This continuous 
 friction embittered the irascible man, and soon in his irritable 
 and quarrelsome manner it was hardly possible [to recognise 
 any longer the old amiabiHty. 
 
 The reactionary party of the ministry found [powerful 
 support at court in the commanding officer of the guard, Duke 
 Charles of Mecklenburg. The brother of Queen Louise had 
 distinguished himself on the battle-field and on the drill-ground 
 as an efiicient officer, but he completely lacked understanding 
 for the reforming ideas of his sister's friends. He had a hand- 
 some and distinguished appearance, in social life he was agree- 
 able and well-informed, at court festivals he was much admired 
 as a talented poet and amateur actor, was an extremely vigorous 
 worker in the council of state, as he was in his profession as 
 a soldier, but he was disliked by most of the officers, and was 
 utterly detested in the cultured society of the capital. For, in 
 the officers' corps of the guard, he encouraged arrogant manners 
 which were repulsive alike to civiUans and to the troops of the 
 
 4S4 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 line ; and, though still a young man, he remained a professional 
 soldier of the old school, a firm opponent of the new miUtary 
 organisation. In politics he adhered closely to Wittgenstein, 
 and, like the latter, resisted every innovation which might 
 possibly be displeasing to the court of Vienna. 
 
 Still more powerful was the quiet influence of Ancillon. 
 This theologian, an all-round man, was, in the year 1814, as 
 privy-councillor, placed in charge of foreign affairs, and now 
 once more floated contentedly on the surface, although the 
 success of the war had given the lie to all his pusillanimous 
 warnings. Hardenberg imagined that this nomination served 
 to build a bridge between science and politics, for Ancillon owed 
 to his learning, which though shallow was many-sided and well- 
 equipped for drawing-room conversation, a high repute, and was 
 able to impose upon men of considerably greater inteUigence. 
 The diplomats admired his Socratic composure, the urbane mild- 
 ness of his manners ; even Schon, who criticised everybody, 
 thought well of Ancillon, whilst in later years, young Leopold 
 Ranke looked up to him with admiration. At the close of the 
 old century, he had adroitly suited the effeminate taste of the 
 time as fashionable preacher to the French congregation, and 
 subsequently, as professor of political science at the miUtary 
 academy, he had advanced his commonplaces in so ceremoniously 
 stilted a manner, voicing them with a smile of such convinced 
 statesmanlike superiority, that Nesselrode, one of his audience, 
 was altogether charmed. At court he understood how to 
 maintain his place among men of fashion by a servile zeal. It 
 was of momentous importance for a later day that even Queen 
 Louise and Baron von Stein were bUnded by the fraudulently 
 acquired reputation of the smooth-tongued semi-Frenchman, and 
 entrusted to him the education of the young heir to the throne. 
 Thus it happened that the extravagantly-gifted but over-imagina- 
 tive and arbitrary spirit of the prince, who needed above all 
 strict discipUne, and instruction regarding the hard realities of 
 life, passed under the control of a characterless rhetorician, who 
 hardly knew himself how much of his activities were the out- 
 come of inborn timidity, and how much of worldly-wise calcula- 
 tion. Since then, Ancillon had frequently been asked advice 
 in political matters, and now, in his cramped and inelastic 
 handwriting, he unweariedly wrote a mass of memorials, diffuse 
 observations without energy or incisiveness, all of which seem 
 just as empty as his books, and yet continually arouse 
 
 455 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the impression that some profound meaning must be concealed 
 amid the torrent of verbosity. It was through his instrumentality 
 that the art of weaving empty words to constitute a glittering 
 tissue was first introduced into Prussian politics — an art altogether 
 unknown under the strict old absolutism, but one which at a 
 later date, in the parhamentary epoch, was to display its most 
 luxuriant blossoms. Innately a lover of repose and of the 
 traditional order, in June, 1789, he had personally seen at Ver- 
 sailles how the representatives of the third estate arrogated to 
 themselves the rights of a National Assembly, and thus prepared 
 the overthrow of the monarchy. Since then he had been 
 filled with dread of the revolution, and when the revolution- 
 ary world-empire had at length been overthrown, without, 
 indeed, any co-operation on Ancillon's part, the faintheart 
 immediately adopted the views of Mettemich, and obediently 
 followed every hint given by the Hofburg. He diligently 
 promulgated in court society the accusations voiced by the 
 Schmalzian pamphlet, and since although he refrained from 
 open opposition to the chancellor, he now spoke with sus- 
 picious zeal of the immeasurable difficulties in the way of 
 the constitutional plan, no one who knew the man could fail 
 to recognise that he secretly belonged to Wittgenstein's party. 
 
 The nation first began to notice the covert party-struggle 
 at court when, soon after the peace, certain unexpected changes 
 took place in the Rhenish provinces. On the Rhine, the 
 glorious mood of the years of war had not been dissipated so 
 quickly. The Prussian officers and officials, who were now to 
 incorporate into German national hfe this French land which 
 had been bought at so high a price, looked around them with 
 the lofty feelings of the conqueror ; they luxuriated in the 
 charms of the beautiful landscape and in the serene and lively 
 atmosphere of Rhenish society. It seemed to them as if the 
 heroic energy of the north was here being happily wedded to 
 the grace of the rich south. Around Gneisenau, who commanded 
 in Coblenz, there assembled a happy circle of distinguished 
 men and beautiful women, who forced even from the frivolous 
 inhabitants of the ancient episcopal town the admission that 
 the new rulers had at their disposal very different intellectual 
 forces from those formerly exhibited by the electoral court 
 of Treves, or by the prefect of Napoleon. Here were Clause- 
 witz and Barsch, one of Schill's companions, Hellwig, the 
 foolhardy hussar, and the gigantic Carl von der Groben, who 
 
 456 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 formerly as Gneisenau's confidant had travelled from land to 
 land in order to pave the way for the holy war, leading a life 
 almost as adventurous as that of his ancestor the African hero 
 of the days of the Great Elector ; here also were the 
 romanticist enthusiasts. Max von Schenkendorf, Werner von 
 Haxthausen, Sixt von Amim, the pedagogue Johannes Schulze, 
 and the learned collector Meusebach. When at eventide 
 Gneisenau had the ladies fetched in Napoleon's carriage, booty 
 taken at Belle Alliance, and serene in his greatness, masterful and 
 yet modest, blushing at his own fame, sat at the festive board, 
 when the songs of Amdt and Komer resounded, when the 
 warriors related their experiences, and Meusebach made everyone 
 roar with laughter with the primitively forceful humour of his 
 brilliant verses, Schenkendorf exclaimed in his deUght : 
 
 " Such figures moved through boyhood's dreams — 
 Ladies and knights of yore ! " 
 
 In the countryside, too, the frank hero had won all hearts ; 
 when he went up the Moselle, the countrymen rowed out from 
 every village, singing choruses, to offer him a ceremonial 
 cup of welcome. 
 
 This joyful aftermath of the great war-time was not long 
 to endure. When the Schmalzian pamphlet appeared, Gneisenau 
 warned the chancellor that this first blow would be followed 
 by heavier ones, and had now to learn that at court he was 
 himself slandered as the chief of the Tugendbund, whilst his 
 hospitable table was described as " Wallenstein's Lager." These 
 calumnies cut him all the more profoundly because at this 
 moment he was attacked by that morbid relaxation of tension 
 which so often afflicts men of action when quiet days come ; 
 in peace service he felt hke a fish out of water, and as early 
 as September, 1816, he resigned his Rhenish command, partly 
 for reasons of health, partly in order to prove to his opponents 
 that he did not cherish any ambitious designs.^ Not even 
 then did the backbiting at court cease ; but the king remained 
 inaccessible to these malicious whispers, and Uttle more than two 
 years later, Gneisenau, after he had restored his health in the 
 Silesian mountains, was appointed governor of Berlin. 
 
 At the same time Lord-Ueutenant Sack was transferred 
 from the Rhine to Stettin. For a year and a half he had 
 
 * Gneisenau to Hardenberg, March 26 and April 21, 1816 ; February 6, 1821. 
 
 457 
 
History of Germany 
 
 carried on the provisional government of his Rhenish home with 
 ability and circumspection ; but just as once before, when lord- 
 lieutenant of Brandenburg, he had been at odds with the feudal 
 nobihty, so now it was impossible that the rough and vigorous 
 official should lack enemies. Wittgenstein, Schuckmann, and 
 Billow, complained of his insubordination ; he was in open feud 
 with the military governor. General Dobschiitz. Baron von 
 Mirbach, and other members of the proud nobility of the Lower 
 Rhine, complained of his bureaucratic harshness and of his 
 disdainful treatment of the nobles ; not even his friends coxild 
 deny that he allowed himself to be praised in the newspapers 
 more than was proper for a Prussian official, and that he had 
 given too many of his numerous relatives posts in the Rhenish 
 administration. Complaints were so numerous that Hardenberg 
 found it advisable to transfer the deserving man to another 
 sphere of activity ; he persisted in this intention although Sack 
 felt profoundly injured, although the great majority of the 
 Rhinelanders were annoyed at the withdrawal of their compatriot, 
 and although numerous communes in the province urgently 
 petitioned that his transfer should be cancelled.^ 
 
 The ardent patriot Justus Gruner, who had hitherto 
 administered Berg in the name of the allied powers, was coolly 
 received when, with Gneisenau's warm recommendation, he 
 desired to re-enter the Prussian state-service. It was a remark- 
 able turn of fate that the founder of the Prussian secret police 
 should suffer most of all from the reports of secret agents. In 
 the Hofburg he was regarded, next to Stein and Gorres, as the 
 chief of the German Jacobins. In the summer of 1812, on 
 Metternich's orders, he was sent to the fortress of Peterwardein, 
 because from Prague he had planned a rising against Napoleon, 
 and because he was in secret correspondence with Jahn's 
 " Deutscher Bund."" He was not set at liberty until October, 
 1813, and subsequently, as governor of Berg, he alarmed the 
 Austrians and the Rhenish Confederates once more by the 
 passionate language of his speeches and manifestoes, while at 
 the outbreak of the war of 1815 he had actually founded a 
 secret league, which indeed never did any practical work, and 
 which broke up soon after the peace, but which through its 
 motto, " Germany's unity under Prussia," had filled all timid 
 
 ^ Kircheisen to Hardenberg, June 5 ; Cabinet Orders to Sack, January 15 and 
 March 13 ; Sack to the king, March 24, to Hardenberg, March 24 and May 16, 
 1816 ; Mirbach to Hardenberg, November 29, 1815. 
 
 " Gruner to Hardenberg, November 27, 1819. 
 
 458 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 souls with horror. In view of all this, the chancellor considered 
 it impossible to entrust the much-abused man with an influential 
 administrative post, and Gruner had to content himself with 
 the modest position of envoy in Berne. All these incidents 
 made a very painful impression upon public opinion, especially 
 since they were almost simultaneous with the suppression of 
 the Rheinische Merkur, and since they followed so closely upon 
 the publication of the Schmalzian pamphlet. The suspicious 
 world sought for a secret connection, although Gneisenau 
 regarded the prohibition of Gorres's paper as perfectly in order 
 while Sack was a declared opponent of Gruner. The atmosphere 
 became more troubled day by day. Whilst at court the current 
 talk was of the secret intrigues of the demagogues, the liberals 
 were complaining of the outbreak of reaction. 
 
 § 2. REORGANISATION OF THE ADMINISTRATION. 
 
 Notwithstanding this friction within the government, the 
 work of reorganising the administration, so inconspicuous and 
 yet so weighty with consequence, made steady and secure 
 progress. As soon as the extent of the newly-acquired territory 
 could to some extent be foreseen, the king while still in Vienna, 
 on April 30, 1815, approved an ordinance concerning the 
 better organisation of the provincial governments effecting a 
 division of the state domain into ten provinces and twenty- 
 eight districts. Two of the provinces. Lower Rhine and 
 West Prussia, were subsequently united with the neighbouring 
 provinces of Jiilich-Cleves-Berg and East Prussia respectively. 
 The six others, Brandenburg, Pomerania, Silesia, Posen, Saxony, 
 and WestphaUa, remain unaltered to this day. It was the 
 work of the king that the office of lord-lieutenant, which in 
 the year 1810 had been abolished by Hardenberg, was re-estab- 
 lished. Frederick WiUiam desired that the peculiarities of 
 land and people should be allowed free development, in great 
 and vigorous provinces ; it was his wish that the cautious 
 impartiaUty of the coUegial governments should be supplemented 
 by the individual prestige of the officials placed at their head, 
 so that the administration should thus combine the advantages 
 of the coUegial and of the bureaucratic systems. At the same 
 time he already cherished the design of placing a commanding 
 general beside the lord-lieutenant, in such a way that, as in 
 
 459 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Austria and Russia, the military subdivision of the country 
 should be adapted to the civil administration. Billow's proposal 
 that the governmental colleges should be replaced by prefects, 
 was definitely rejected by the king, and he also rejected the 
 plan of instituting independent financial colleges beside the 
 governmental colleges.^ They retained their collegial form ; but 
 were immediately subdivided into two sections, one of which 
 dealt with matters of prerogative, poHce, and communal affairs, 
 under the supervision of the minister of the interior, whilst the 
 other dealt with finance and industry, under the supervision of 
 the minister of finance, so that each minister should have, as 
 far as possible, instruments connected with the work of his own 
 department and dependent upon him alone. 
 
 In the dehmitation of the new administrative districts, the 
 government proceeded with extreme caution, with that regard 
 for the historic past which has from the first been characteristic 
 of Prussian statecraft. Whenever a village was to be separated 
 from its old circle, two ministries had to give their opinions 
 upon the matter ; the king himself made the final decision, and 
 did this wherever possible with due respect to the wishes of 
 the inhabitants. Nevertheless, the disturbance of many custom- 
 ary relationships was inevitable, for the newly-acquired terri- 
 torial areas were confusedly intermingled with one another and 
 with the older domains. Not one of the ancient provinces 
 could retain its former boundaries unaltered. Immediately, 
 therefore, there began an outcry against the government. The 
 incredible force of particularism, just as strong in Prussia as in 
 the petty German states, uprose in alarm ; the myriad tenacious 
 interests of local life, which the storms of this gigantic age had 
 passed over unnoticed, now clamoured for help. In innumerable 
 petitions, this rigid conservative sentiment resounded on all 
 hands. Everjrwhere was voiced the same cry of distress : " We 
 do not wish to be separated from our brothers who have shared 
 with us the joys and sorrows of this arduous time." When it 
 was proposed to remove the central authority of the Freystadt 
 circle to Neusalz, there was a rain of petitions, and a deputation 
 was even sent to the king ; old Kalckreuth wrote to Harden- 
 berg that it would be the ruin of him if the board wasVno 
 longer to meet in the neighbourhood of his property, the tramps 
 would steal the cabbages and potatoes from his fields. In a 
 
 ' Proposal for an " Ordinance for the Institution of Provincial Governments 
 and Financial Colleges," spring, 1815. 
 
 460 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 word, there was an insuperable passive resistance. The 
 monarchy learned in a hundred instances what was subsequently 
 again to be shown in the case of all reforms of local adminis- 
 tration, that in Germany it is far easier to fuse two states than 
 two circles or communes. 
 
 Everywhere, in the nation as upon the thrones, the 
 differences between the various territorial areas and the distinc- 
 tive national subdivisions were still grossly exaggerated. When 
 the royal officials in Pomerania expressed the modest hope that 
 in the course of long years " a gradual approximation between 
 the two nations " of Swedish Pomerania and Old Pomerania 
 might become possible, when even Sack in his administrative 
 reports declared that the population of JiiUch, Aix-la-ChapeUe, 
 Cologne, and the lands of the Moselle, differed from one another in 
 character as completely " as if they had been different nations," 
 it is not surprising that among the common people neighbourly ill- 
 will frequently increased to the pitch of passionate aversion. 
 
 All the territorial divisions of Old Prussia regarded it as a 
 scandal when it was proposed to incorporate them in the new 
 provinces. When the government desired to allot Lower Lusatia 
 and the Old Brandenburg domain of Beeskow to the province 
 of Saxony, the estates of the Beeskow-Storkow circle assailed 
 the king with such loud and stormy complaints as had been 
 voiced from the same region long before, under Marwitz's leader- 
 ship, against Hardenberg's agrarian laws. " First of all we 
 have to speak of the matter which is to us the most sacred 
 and the most important, which, however, is quite left out of 
 account by your majesty's officials, and is perhaps even regarded 
 by them as an advantage, because they are not accustomed to 
 consider the sentiments of the people — ^we are to cease to be 
 Brandenburgers and Prussians! Are we to remain Branden- 
 burgers and to preserve our nationality ? In that case it 
 would fare with us as it once fared with the remnant of 
 the Wendish people in our neighbourhood, who still continue 
 to spend their lives in a state of unceasing mistrust, in a state 
 of eternal separation from their neighbours, and subject to the 
 continual hostility of the latter. Are we, on the other hand, 
 to assiune the Saxon national characteristics ? But this would 
 be impossible, not because we regard the Saxons as imworthy, 
 but because we are Brandenburgers ! " » Since the estates of 
 
 » Petition of the Circle-Estates of Beeskow-Storkow to the king, October 31, 
 1815. 
 
 461 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the reacquired territory of Kottbus were in no less fierce revolt 
 against any community withl the Saxons, the chancellor gave 
 way, and had the boundary of the province of Brandenburg 
 moved further south. The inhabitants of Altmark were less 
 fortunate. They also demanded their reunion with the Electoral 
 Mark, demanded it as an incontestable right. The government, 
 however, held fast to its determination to incorporate the cradle 
 of the Brandenburg state with the province of Saxony, for by its. 
 geographical position the region was associated with Magdeburg, 
 and since the fall of the Westphalian government had had 
 nothing more to do with the administration of the public debt, 
 which was a matter of so much importance to the Electoral 
 Mark ; moreover its methods of local government were no longer 
 in accordance with Brandenburg customs. 
 
 In the duchy of Prussia it was still remembered that long 
 ago the towns of the Vistula had been the first to raise the 
 banner of revolt against the Teutonic knights, and that they 
 had summoned the Poles into the country ; the valiant people 
 were accustomed to look down upon their West Prussian neigh- 
 bours as traitors, and were profoundly hurt in their feelings 
 when a portion of East Prussia was allotted to the province of 
 the Vistula. Through vehement appeals to the king, the circles 
 at least of Mohrungen and Neidenburg secured permission to 
 remain in East Prussia. On the other hand, a petition of the 
 Pohsh nobility in Michelau and Culmerland, demanded that 
 this ancient tribal land of the Teutonic knights should be 
 assigned to the grand duchy of Posen. The loyal German 
 towns, however, opposed a vigorous contradiction, and the 
 government rejected the suspicious proposal.* The inhabitants 
 of New Hither Pomerania also adhered obstinately to their 
 " rights, privileges, and liberties " which, in the treaties with 
 Sweden and Denmark, the king had promised to maintain. 
 After the German manner, they understood by these terms all 
 existing institutions, the Swedish customs-system, and the old 
 coinage, as well as the old officials, and they defended their 
 independence so obstinately that not until the year 1818 did the 
 chancellor venture to incorporate the small governmental district 
 of Stralsund with the province of Pomerania ; in addition, 
 the deputies of the circles and towns complained bitterly to the 
 king about infringements of privilege. They declared that the 
 
 1 Report of President von Hippel to the chancellor, Marienwerder Tune 21 
 1815. 
 
 462 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 government order issued by the Swedish chancellery in 1669 
 was inviolable, and did not cease to complain until the king 
 had given them a definite answer to the effect that no province 
 could, imder the excuse of especial rights, demand for itself a 
 position of exception from the general administrative ordering 
 of the state. 1 In the western provinces, the introduction of the 
 new administrative ^districts encountered less resistance, since 
 the separatist spirit of the towns and the territorial areas had 
 in this region long before been broken by the hard fist of 
 Napoleonic ofiicialdom ; yet even here there was a passionate 
 struggle about the meeting place of the authorities, and the 
 attempt was occasionally made to disinter long forgotten feudal 
 claims from the dust of centuries. County Werden did not 
 desire to be separated from County Mark ; the town of Herford 
 declared to the chancellor, in a pompous address, that it neither 
 could nor would belong to any circle, for it possessed a legal 
 right [to continued .independence and immediacy, adding that 
 it was only under [this proviso that Herford had once [paid 
 homage to the Great Elector.^ 
 
 By far the greatest difl&culties were offered by the reorgani- 
 sation of what had formerly been Saxon territory. This was 
 a region where in any case there was almost as much hostihty 
 to the new regime as that manifested by the Poles. Everyone 
 complained bitterly about the destruction of the Saxon nation. 
 In Naimiburg, the mob tore down the black eagles and threw 
 them into the mud ; even those of more quiet spirit regretfully 
 described themselves as Musspreussen [Must-be-Prussians], a 
 phrase which remained in use in a number of regions for many 
 years to come. As long as there was still a prospect of acquir- 
 ing the entire kingdom of Saxony, Hardenberg had ventured 
 to think only of a personal union under the sovereign. Now, 
 when it had been necessary to accept half of the country instead 
 of the whole, it was obvious from the first that this fragment 
 could not remain as a separate province. Under the sleepy 
 feudal regime of Electoral Saxony, hardly the beginnings of 
 national unity, or of a uniform modem poUtical order, had been 
 created ; the lands which were spoken of as the duchy of 
 Saxony, consisted in reaUty of seven loosely associated territories : 
 the margravates of Upper and Lower Lusatia, the two bishoprics 
 
 1 Report of the Circles and Towns to the king, January 9, 1819. Cabinet 
 Order of May 24, 1819. 
 
 '^ Petition of the Town of Herford to Hardenberg, November 6, 1816. 
 
 463 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of Merseburg and Naumburg, the princedom of Querfurt, the 
 county of Henneberg, and a portion of the Saxon patrimonial 
 dominions. Nevertheless the representatives of the nobility, 
 when in the autumn of 1815 a Saxon deputation went to Berlin, 
 petitioned for " the maintenance of the integrity and nationality 
 of the duchy of Saxony." Others, among them the burgo- 
 masters, protested against this, declaring that they had complete 
 confidence in the friendly government of Prussia.^ At the same 
 time the estates of Lower Lusatia petitioned for the preservation 
 of their privileges ; whilst the estates of Upper Lusatia demanded 
 that the province of Lusatia, should not be united with any 
 other portion of the monarchy, but that the two Lusatias 
 should combine to form an independent realm, with Gorhtz as 
 the capital." 
 
 How was it possible to do justice to all these particularist 
 clamours, many of which were absolutely contradictory ? More- 
 over, the territories were widely dispersed from GorUtz to 
 Langensalza, detached from their natural centre, the region of 
 Meissen, which had remained with Saxony. After long hesita- 
 tion the government therefore determined to unite with Branden- 
 burg the region of Lower Lusatia, which lay far to the east, 
 to allot Upper Lusatia to Silesia, and to unite the remaining 
 portions of the duchy of Saxony with Altmark, the duchy of 
 Magdeburg, and Eichsfeld (formerly part of Electoral Mainz), 
 to constitute a new province. Thus the regions which had 
 previously formed part of Saxony came to constitute three 
 provinces and six governmental districts. Is it surprising that 
 they complained loudly, and that they felt that all the distresses 
 of the partition of their homeland had to be experienced once 
 again ? Petitions and complaints continued for a long time. 
 The Saxon official district of Belzig, close to Potsdam, stormily 
 demanded that it should remain part of the Wittenberg circle ; 
 all the landowners of Eichsfeld, claimed as a chartered right, 
 that a court of appeal for Eichsfeld should be established in 
 Heiligenstadt. Even three years later, the principal landlord 
 of the region. Count Schulenburg, expressed to Klewitz the 
 expectation that all the Old Saxon domains should be united 
 to constitute a single province, for otherwise " these wounds 
 will continue to bleed for ever." Even to the present day the 
 town of Gorlitz feels itself part of Upper Lusatia, and not of 
 
 ^ ^ Schuckmann's Report to Hardenberg, November 15, 1815. 
 
 * Petition of the estates of Upper Lusatia to the chancellor, June 28, 1815. 
 
 464 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 Silesia. As a matter of fact, the province of Saxony was the 
 only thoroughly artificial structure among the new great adminis- 
 trative districts. Whereas in the constitution of all the other 
 provinces scrupulous regard was paid to local interests and 
 memories, so that every one of them displayed a well-marked 
 tribal character, here, thanks to the unhappy half-measures 
 which had been adopted at the congress of Vienna, many an 
 ancient historical bond was forcibly severed, Thuringian, Upper 
 Saxon, and Lower Saxon tribal stocks being arbitrarily jumbled 
 together. Yet even here, by the enduring patience, the loyalty, 
 and the justice of the officials, the wilderness was gradually 
 cleared, and the hostile populations were trained to feel a 
 healthy spirit of commimity. In this way the idea of practical 
 German unity gradually estabUshed itself in a struggle daily 
 and hourly renewed against the remnants of particularism. 
 
 As soon as the administration of the provinces had been 
 fairly settled, Hardenberg resumed the long interrupted work 
 of legislation. By the ordinance of March 20, 1817, there 
 was at length instituted the council of state, that supreme 
 advisory board to the monarchy which had been repeatedly 
 promised since the year 1808 — although its powers were less 
 extensive than Stein had formerly planned. All legislative 
 proposals were submitted to the deliberations of the council of 
 state, and so were the general principles of administration ; the 
 same with disputes regarding the spheres of activity of the 
 different ministries, with the dismissal of officials, and with all 
 the grievances of subjects when these were assigned by the 
 king to the council for consideration, so that effective Umitations 
 might be imposed upon the power of the new specialised 
 ministers, which was Hable to abuse. The king himself, or the 
 chancellor, was president, whilst the formal conduct of business 
 was in the hands of von Klewitz, the new secretary to the 
 council. The members were : the royal princes, the ministers 
 and the chiefs of the other independent central authorities, the 
 field-marshals, the commanding generals and the lord-lieutenants, 
 and, finally, thirty-four men honoured by the king with his 
 special confidence and selected from all branches of the public 
 service — ^the best energies of the officialdom, for there were 
 very few among them who had not, in one way or another, 
 displayed qualities above the average. Among statesmen of 
 note, two only had been passed over, men whose ruggedness 
 
 465 3 H 
 
History of Germany 
 
 seemed dangerous to the chancellor : Stein, and the ultra- 
 conservative ex-minister Voss-Buch. The two churches were 
 represented by the bishops. Sack and Spiegel ; science, by 
 Savigny. Thus was revived the old privy council, which had 
 continued to exist from tJie days of the elector Joachim 
 Frederick to those of Stein, although lately only as a shadow ; 
 but it was revived in new forms which assured the legal course 
 of the administration without paralysing its speed and efficiency. 
 It was to the new council of state that Prussia owed the 
 advantage that the laws of the last years of Frederick William 
 III were stronger, more thorough-going, and more practical than 
 the labours, sometimes over-hasty, of the great period of reform, 
 and that yet, notwithstanding the abundant deliberation of 
 which they were the outcome, they were not, as were subse- 
 quently the laws of the parliamentary epoch, stamped with the 
 contradictory characteristics of laboriously secured party 
 compromises. This was the last brilliant embodiment of the 
 ancient absolute monarchy, a union of talent, knowledge of 
 affairs, and imperturbable straightforwardness, such as could 
 not be displayed by any other state of those days except 
 England, a body whose efficiency sufficed to show that aU the 
 odious criticisms against Prussia, which now again were freely 
 circulated throughout the German minor states, were unfounded. 
 But the work of the council of state was done in private, and 
 even in Prussia the nation knew Httle of its existence. 
 
 On March 30, 1817, Hardenberg opened the sittings of the 
 council of state with a speech in which there once again was 
 sounded the confident tone of earher years. He said that the 
 task which lay before them was " wisely to accommodate the 
 traditional order to the present circumstances of the state, to 
 the culture of the nation, and to the demands of the age. 
 The Prussian state," he said in conclusion, " must prove to the 
 world that true freedom and legal ordering, that equality before 
 the law and personal security, that the well-being of the individual 
 and of the whole, that science and art, that, finally, if it should 
 prove inevitable, bravery and endurance in a struggle for the 
 fatherland, thrive best and most certainly under a just mon- 
 archy." 1 Thereupon the finance minister's proposals for a 
 new finance law were handed over to a committee. 
 
 Meanwhile the lord-lieutenants, assembled in the council of 
 state, engaged in confidential deliberations regarding the results 
 
 1 Minutes of the Council of State, first sitting. 
 466 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 of the new administration. Stein's work, the unity of the 
 supreme administration, was not as yet generally accepted as 
 an irrevocable fact ; the true dividing line between the inaUen- 
 able rights of the central authority and the excess of centrifugal 
 energies, was so difficult to discover that, even within the bosom 
 of the government, lively disputes upon the subject still 
 joevailed. Shortly before, Klewitz, a well-meaning man. 
 thoroughly experienced as an official of the old school in the 
 provincial administration of his Magdeburg homeland, had 
 proposed in all good faith to the chancellor a terribly retrograde 
 step, the restoration of the provincial ministries. The state, 
 he said, in its great lack of hom(^eneity, could not endure a 
 more rigid centralisation, and the power of the new specialised 
 ministers might very readily d^enerate into dangerous 
 de^xjtism.* This demand for the re-establishment of the 
 provincial ministries soon became the war-cry of the feudal 
 nobles, whose party was the stronghold of particularism, and 
 gained some support also from the lord-heutenants. Thrae 
 high officials all felt uneasy in their difficult intermediate posi- 
 tion, whose boundari^ were as yet far from clearly established, 
 between the ministries and the district governments. Proud 
 of the energy they had displayed, they opposed their chiefs 
 with that d^ant official zeal which had from the first been 
 characteristic of Prussian officialdom, and since in their provinces 
 they had received almost nothing but complaints regardii^ 
 the unaccustomed conditions, they outbade one another in 
 melancholy reports, reinforced one another mutually in their 
 discontent, and gradually passed imder the leadership of Schon, 
 the man in whom were embodied all the fruitless vexations of 
 this period of transition. 
 
 In the early days of Hardenberg's administration, Schon, 
 like Sack and munerous other vigorous officials, had advised 
 the introduction of the prefectoral S3rstem. Since he had him- 
 self becrane lord-lieutenant of West Prussia, he recommended 
 no less zealously an almost unrestricted independence for the 
 provincial authorities. What attitude, therefore, could satisfy 
 this ever-discontented man ? Dependence upon the ministers 
 was all the more disagreeable to his excessive self-satisfaction 
 because he had already constructed for himself an ideal picture 
 of the histcay of recent years, in the for^;round of which he 
 
 * Klewitz. Memorials to Haidenberg, September 24, 1816, and February 
 20, 1817. 
 
 467 
 
History of Germany 
 
 occupied a conspicuous position amid his Old Prussian friends. 
 In Ws mind, a restless, imaginative energy was strangely asso- 
 ciated with dialectical perspicuity. When he was talking, which 
 he often did for hours at a stretch with inexhaustible liveliness 
 and ardour, his hearers speedily came to feel that his imagina- 
 tion was running away with him. It was through his work, 
 he declared, that Stein, a man without ideas, had been furnished 
 with the leading thoughts of the whole work of reform ; whereas 
 Schon in reality had taken an effective part in one only of 
 these fundamental laws, the edict regarding the aboUtion of 
 hereditary servitude. He alone, he declared, in the spring of 
 1813, had rescued the province of Prussia from Stein's Muscovite 
 plans of conquest ; it was through his friends, the leaders of 
 the Konigsberg diet, that the great soldier of the line, Scham- 
 horst, had against his will been compelled to undertake the 
 formation of the Landwehr. Such fables he was accustomed 
 obstinately to repeat, in writing and by word of mouth, until 
 at length he had come to believe them himself. He hardly 
 understood what a crime he was committing against the reputa- 
 tion of greater men. Luxuriating in vain self-praise, he 
 ingenuously applied to himself the sa5dng : "Do good and 
 throw it into the sea ; if the fishes don't see it, God will ! " 
 Talented, eloquent, a man of many-sided culture, pupil of 
 Kant, friend of Fichte and Niebuhr, he was in regular and 
 lively intercourse with the learned world, so that even in the 
 minor states of Germany, where in general people paid little 
 attention to Prussian men and things, the name of Schon was 
 everywhere mentioned with respect ; yet at the same time he 
 remained a man of affairs, with a thorough knowledge of agri- 
 culture and industry, an active official, one who did justice to 
 the good schoohng of the admirable old provincial minister von 
 Schrotter, and one who on occasions would act inconsiderately 
 and even despotically. Almost the whole of his years of service 
 were spent in the administration of his Old Prussian homeland; 
 there was not a farm held by the Salzburg exiles in Lithuania, 
 or a fisherman's hut upon the dunes of the Kurische Nehrung, 
 with which he was not acquainted. Thus it was that with the 
 twofold pride of the Kantian and of the experienced man of 
 practice, he looked down contemptuously upon the dusty wisdom 
 of the boardroom, and since all the Prussian statesmen. Stein 
 just as much as Wittgenstein, were found by him to be of 
 short weight when tried in the balance of his categorical 
 
 468 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 imperative, he overwhelmed them all, with very few exceptions, 
 with the caustic fires of a fierce criticism which had Uttle in 
 common with Kant's philanthropic wisdom. We need men, 
 he said again and again, who are inspired by the force of 
 ideas, men who stand before the people and hve with the 
 people. The religious excitement of the years of war left his 
 spirit critical through and through, left him just as cold as did the 
 patriotic enthusiasm of the Teutonisers, for he was never wiUing 
 to recognise anything more in " nationality " than a bUnd force 
 of nature which must be kept in control by the "idea" of 
 the state. 
 
 Some years before, he had set forth his programme in the 
 so-called pohtical testament of Stein. This memorial, heretofore 
 known only to a few high officials, had just (1817)^ been 
 pubUshed by an unknown hand (though hardly without the 
 author's knowledge) in the Oppositionsblatt of Weimar, and 
 had been loudly acclaimed by the South German Uberals. 
 A declared enemy of all the privileges of the nobles, Schon 
 regarded it as indisputable that the promises of this testament 
 — ^the right of representation for all active citizens, the aboUtion 
 of the territorial poUce and of patrimonial jurisdiction — ^voiced 
 the wishes of the entire nation ; it was his pleasure to conclude 
 his fierce attacks against those " who wish to force the nation 
 back into the machine-service of the days before the year 1806," 
 with the exclamation, vox popuU, vox Dei. Even his fanatical 
 hatred of Russia added to his reputation in the liberal world. 
 How often in his letters to Hardenberg did he express the 
 desire for a fortunate war against these barbarians, " who stand 
 at the lowest stage of development, who are only among the 
 prolegomena." On one occasion, when reporting to the chan- 
 cellor the nrniour of an attempted assassination of the czar, he 
 trimnphantly declared to his friend his delight " that this people 
 imposes such terrible burdens upon itself, and spreads abroad 
 intelligence of its own doings, wMch express the greatest shame 
 of the nation. Praise be to God ! " * His fellow-countrymen 
 of Old Prussia esteemed him highly, although his bluntness was 
 pleasing to no one. The rationaUstic tendency of his spirit 
 expressed the sentiments which had long prevailed in the town 
 of pure reason, and all were aware how ardently he loved his 
 home and with what perspicuity and courage he advocated 
 
 ^ Schon to Hardenberg, February 14, 1816 ; September 26, 1818 ; November 
 I. 1819. 
 
 469 
 
History of Germany 
 
 before the throne all the interests of his- native region. The 
 example of his depreciative criticism had an unfortunate effect 
 upon the people of this region, naturally prone to fault-finding ; 
 it was through the administration of Schon, lasting for many 
 years, that the excess of power of the extreme party in our 
 eastern march first became established. In Berlin, people secretly 
 made fun of his immeasurable arrogance, reporting to one 
 another with a smile how, on one occasion, immediately before 
 his homeward journey, he had refused an invitation of Harden- 
 berg, with the words : " My province cannot do without me 
 for an hour longer." Yet no one willingly came out into the 
 open field against this contentious man with the severely critical 
 glance. Witzleben, Klewitz, and Vincke, had a high opinion 
 of him ; even the king, knowing Schon's devotion, put up with 
 many a sharp word. 
 
 As soon as Schon learned from the proceedings of the 
 council of state about the disunion among the ministers, he 
 immediately regarded the situation of Prussia as no less des- 
 perate than it had been before the battle of Jena, and he urgently 
 advised the chancellor to form a new ministry, which, like that 
 of the English cabinet, should consist only of persons of the 
 same way of thinking, and which, hke the EngUsh cabinet, 
 would be sustained by " the respect of the nation." To Schon, 
 England always remained the archetype of liberalism, although 
 the high tory cabinet of that day could not be more indifferent 
 to anything than it was to the respect of the nation. To 
 give expression to his proposals, Schon then laid before the 
 assembled lord-lieutenants the draft of a common petition which 
 should enlighten the monarch regarding " the atrophied state 
 of the administration." This remarkable writing, full of drastic 
 phraseology, described in crude colours, arbitrarily mingling true 
 with false, how the composite state could be held together only 
 by the spirit, whilst this spirit was now suppressed. The police 
 were manifesting themselves only as a force of oppression, uni- 
 versal military service was burdening the country, justice was 
 now no more than a laboriously working machine in the hand 
 of the ministers, whilst nothing whatever was being done for 
 church or school. There were added serious complaints regard- 
 ing the arbitrary and neghgent procedure of the minister of 
 finance and also an expression of the justified grievances regard- 
 ing " the French practice, in accordance with which all the 
 current affairs of provincial administration are unrestrainedly 
 
 470 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 attracted towards the centre." So powerful was the peevish 
 discontent of the time that seven of the ten lord-lieutenants 
 agreed to subscribe this long register of indefinite and to a 
 large extent groundless complaints (June 30th). Zerboni, a 
 friend of Hardenberg, and the ultra-conservative Heydebreck, 
 refused their signatures, while the lord-lieutenant of Saxony, 
 brother of the finance minister, was not approached. 
 
 The chancellor was at first much incensed at the opposition 
 of the leading provincial officials, and among his confidants 
 actually spoke of their intervention as a conspiracy. But he 
 soon recovered self-command, recognised that some of the griev- 
 ances were justified, and demanded in the case of others more 
 exact proof, whereupon the complainants were forced to with- 
 draw their accusations. The king, too, contented himself with 
 a gentle criticism of the exaggerations of the memorial, thanked 
 the signatories for this new proof of their zeal in the service, 
 and announced to them that he had just provided a remedy 
 for the complaints regarding over-centralisation.^ The monarch 
 in fact, in order to effect at length a definite delimitation of 
 the activities of the provincial authorities, issued on October 
 23, 1817, instructions for the lord-lieutenants and the govern- 
 ments, two admirable laws, which had already for a long time 
 been in preparation, concluding the reconstruction of the 
 supreme administration, and establishing administrative prin- 
 ciples which held good for half a century to come. Harden- 
 berg, cured of his preference for Napoleonic administration, 
 now returned to the ideas of Stein. The new administrative 
 law was closely similar to, and even verbally identical with, 
 the legislation of the year 1808. The lord-Ueutenants were 
 to travel through the entire province at least once a year, 
 everywhere remed3dng defects and redressing grievances with 
 the guidance of personal observation ; they received such wide 
 powers of independent activity that Vincke in Westphalia, 
 Merckel in Silesia, and Sack in Pomerania, were soon revered 
 much as if they had been sovereigns, and were enabled to 
 leave permanent traces of their activity in almost the entire 
 public life of their respective provinces. But when, in June, 
 1818, Hardenberg asked the higher administrative officials of 
 the provinces to express candid opinions regarding the working 
 
 ' Memorial of the lord-lieutenants, dated June 30, 181 7, with Marginal 
 Notes by the chancellor. Memorandum of Justification by Ingersleben, September 
 14, by Auerswald, October 15, 1818, etc. Cabinet Order to the lord-lieutenants, 
 November 3, 1817. 
 
 471 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of the new instructions, objections made themselves heard in 
 all directions. SchOn after his manner, expressed his discontent 
 with " the bureaucratic abortion." Vincke could now see 
 salvation only in the re-establishment of the provincial ministries. 
 Motz, on the other hand, recommended a change to a moderate 
 prefectoral system ; coUegial administration was suited only 
 to an absolute monarchy, whereas Prussia was in the act of 
 undergoing transformation into a constitutional state. ^ The 
 task of holding together the artificial state by an administration 
 which was not to suffer from lack of liberty, seemed to this 
 generation one of insuperable difficulty. Many years were still 
 to pass before the officialdom could recognise that the chancellor 
 had once again displayed his secure poUtical insight, and had 
 happily adopted a middle course between the bureaucratic and 
 the coUegial systems. 
 
 Meanwhile, in the committee and in the plenumTof the 
 council of state, a struggle was being fought out more serious 
 and more weighty with consequences than many of the much- 
 admired parUamentaryJproceedings of those days. Nor were 
 there lacking here the '[ passion and the [oratorical stimulus of 
 parliamentary debates. How astonished] was Gneisenau when 
 he first became acquainted with the graceful and yet perfectly 
 relevant oratory of Humboldt, Maassen, Eichhom, and Ferber; 
 and when he saw so striking a refutation of the general 
 prejudices of the day which denied to the shy Germans the 
 gift of fluent oratory. Immediately after the peace, the king 
 had demanded of the finance minister the compilation of a 
 comprehensive plan of fiscal reform ; " the new subjects," he 
 wrote, " must feel that they belong to me." As soon as the 
 task was approached, it speedily became apparent that the only 
 possible thing was a juster distribution of the burden of taxation, 
 since no alleviation was possible. The extraordinary expenditure 
 of the state for war purposes had been, as was subsequently 
 established, 206,000,000 thalers for the years 1806-1815 ; in the 
 next four years, additional sums amounting to 81,000,000 thalers 
 were disbursed. The national debt had already increased to 
 132,000,000 thalers in the year 1812, and since then, by the 
 War of Liberation, and by the addition of 45,000,000 of foreign 
 debts which had had to be taken over with the new provinces, 
 had (in 1818) increased to 217,000,000. The credit of the state 
 * Motz, Memorial to the chancellor regarding the governments, November, 1818 . 
 
 472 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 was so profoimdly depressed that Hardenberg, in the year 1817, 
 had to regard Wmself as lucky when he was able to secure 
 a five per cent, loan from England at a discount of 72 ; at 
 the same time, the four per cent, state bonds were quoted 
 at 71-73 on the BerUn bourse, and yet later were even lower, 
 having fallen to 65. What a venture was it, in this condition 
 of general impoverishment, to impose new burdens upon the 
 exhausted nation, which, after the German manner, always 
 bore fiscal pressure less patiently than pohce coercion. The 
 reaUsable value of the great landed properties was now hardly 
 half as high as it had been in the year 1806, whilst in certain 
 regions it had fallen to a quarter of its former amount. When 
 in June, 1816, the king at length withdrew the moratorimn 
 which had been granted during the years of war, he had, 
 in the case of the indebted groimd-landlords of the eastern 
 provinces, to approve a special alleviation of pa5?ment down to 
 the year 1819, and in Old Prussia even down to 1822. 
 
 The worst of it was that no one supervised the condition 
 of the national economy. It was still quite impossible to calcu- 
 late the arrears of pa5nnent due for war services and suppUes 
 and for manifold obligations taken over with the new provinces ; 
 even three years later the government of the Uttle district of 
 Erfurt had unpaid bills belonging to the war period to the 
 number of 2,141.* Count Billow therefore declared that it was 
 impossible for him to give the coimcil of state any detailed 
 valuation ; and without precise calculation he reckoned the 
 deficit for the year 1817 at 1,900,000 thalers. The members of 
 the committee, accustomed to the painfully precise Old Prussian 
 methods of calculation, were simply unable to believe the unwel- 
 come conununication ; they sought the cause of the deficits 
 solely in Billow's neglect, and put forward an opposing estimate 
 which furnished a surplus of 4,000,000 in extraordinary and 
 2,000,000 in ordinary income. Thus, in a budget of about 
 50,000,000, the estimates of the ablest financiers differed one from 
 another to the extent of 8,000,000.^ Schon, always immoderate 
 in controversy, even wished to demonstrate the existence of 
 a surplus of 21,000,000. The event proved that Billow, who 
 was supported by Schuckmann alone, had judged the position 
 more accurately than had his confident opponents. But he was 
 
 1 Motz, Memorial regarding the simplification of the administration, Erfurt, 
 June 29, 1820. 
 
 2 Schuckmann's Report to Hardenberg, July 11, 1817. 
 
 473 
 
History of Germany 
 
 now unable to prove that he was right, and when the referendary 
 of the committee, Councillor Friese. came to examine the 
 details of the budget with a penetrating knowledge of the 
 situation, there was made manifest in all branches of the financial 
 administration the existence of gross disorder which could no 
 longer find excuse in the confusions of the years of war. Led 
 by Humboldt, the entire committee massed itself hke one man 
 in opposition to the minister of finance, overwhelming him with 
 reproaches. Biilow rejected the accusations in a passionate 
 speech, throwing all the blame upon the intolerable cost of the 
 new military system, and in his anger gave vent to some sharp 
 expressions regarding the careless extravagance of his cousin. 
 Here was a strange transposition of parties ! Simultaneously 
 Hardenberg was attacked by his favourite Biilow, and defended 
 by his rival Humboldt. 
 
 The minister of war at once accepted the challenge. He 
 noticed with concern that the secret struggle on the part of 
 the civil officialdom against the army, which in the decade 
 prior to 1806 had done so much harm, now threatened to be 
 renewed when the war was over ; he knew also that Biilow had 
 already asked an opinion from General Lingelsheim regarding 
 the re-establishment of the Frederician military organisation. 
 In order to check such efforts, and to enlighten the council 
 of state once for all regarding the economic advantages of the 
 new military system, Boyen composed a brilliant memorial 
 Exposition of the Principles of the Former and of the Present 
 Prussian Military Organisation (May, 1817), which demonstrated 
 with convincing clearness that Prussia had never before possessed 
 an army at once so strong and so inexpensive. But the state 
 had gradually expanded ; with each increase of its domain the 
 convulsive hypertension of its physical forces diminished. Under 
 Frederick Wilham I the army had cost five times as much, and 
 under Frederick the Great almost thrice as much, as the whole 
 of the rest of the administration ; now for the first time the 
 civil service, including, indeed, the costly administration of the 
 national debt, absorbed the larger moiety of the national income. 
 Boyen estimated the cost of the military system at 21,000,000 
 (this figure being somewhat too low), and showed that the state 
 could put 238,000 more men in the field than had been 
 possible in the year 1806, and yet in time of peace, if the 
 various payments in kind of the old time were estimated at 
 their value in money, the total cost of the army was now 
 
 474 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 2,000,000 thalers less than it had been in 1806. He concluded 
 with the energetic declaration that the strength of the forces 
 could not be determined by financial considerations alone, 
 since it must depend upon the position of the state in the 
 world, and upon the power and the disposition of its neighbours. 
 
 The chancellor, too, was wounded by Billow's accusations, 
 " wounded as chief, friend, and near relative," and took his 
 accuser seriously to task. Since the alarmed minister of finance 
 thereupon saw his last prop trembling, he cautiously changed 
 front, and refrained from bringing before the throne his by no 
 means groundless complaints regarding Hardenberg's negUgence. 
 " I would rather," he wrote, " that the king should visit me 
 with his displeasure, I would rather lose everything in the world, 
 than burden my soul with ingratitude, and enter into open 
 dispute with your excellency." ^ But the friendly relationship 
 between the cousins had been disturbed, and Billow's position 
 became more untenable day by day. 
 
 Simultaneously the council of state was conducting equally 
 stormy discussions regarding fiscal reform. Of the two proposals 
 for legislation which the minister of finance brought forward, 
 one, the customs-law, secured almost universal support, whereas 
 the other, the law regarding internal taxation, was immediately 
 received with hostiUty. Billow's idea was that, in addition to 
 the trade licences and stamp duties, the existing land taxes 
 should also be temporarily maintained, imtil the provincial diets 
 had been summoned ; the oppressive old excise, on the other 
 hand, which in any case could no longer be continued after 
 the introduction of industrial freedom and of the customs-law, 
 was to be aboUshed, and in its place taxes upon flour at the mill 
 and upon meat were to be introduced both for town and country, 
 and also on tobacco, beer, and brandy. His proposals were 
 closely similar to the system of taxation of the Frederician 
 days, which had raised seventy per cent, of the entire revenue 
 by indirect taxes. They displayed the hand of a skUled man of 
 business who, without any thoughts of reform, simply desired 
 to fill the state treasury in the customary manner; and to the 
 opposition, whose leadership was resumed by Humboldt, they 
 seemed all the more suspicious since they proceeded from a 
 Napoleonic minister, and agreed almost word for word with the 
 views which Billow's former colleague Malchus had recently 
 
 ' Biilow to Hardenberg, July lo, 13, 14, and 16 ; Hardenberg to Biilow, 
 July 12 and 17, 1817. 
 
 475 
 
History of Germany 
 
 expressed in his work upon the financial administration of 
 Westphalia. 
 
 Among the Prussian officials, who had almost all received 
 their economic training in the school of Adam Smith and Kraus, 
 the indirect taxes of Bonapartism were in evil repute ; Adam 
 Smith, for example, had described a tax on flour at the mill 
 as "this most ruinous of all taxes." The committee therefore 
 expressly attacked the taxes on articles of consumption, and 
 based its criticism more especially on the ground that the 
 minister of finance had not also proposed a law for the institu- 
 tion of direct taxes ; for the objectors held that to effect a 
 just distribution of the burden of taxation, the inequality of the 
 land taxes must first of all be abolished, or must at least be 
 charged to the individual provinces. In putting forward these 
 views, they expressed merely what the great majority of the 
 bourgeoisie desired. The extraordinary variety of the land taxes 
 was an old complaint. Therein was seen most clearly of all 
 how laboriously this state had grown into existence out of a 
 medley of independent territories. The more strictly the kings 
 of Prussia pursued the idea of national unity in the uppermost 
 strata of the administration, the more carelessly had the old 
 feudal methods been tolerated in the country districts. In 
 the monarchy there were no less than thirty-three distinct 
 systems of land taxation, most of them extremely old ; in the 
 province of Saxony alone, there were eight, each of which 
 exhibited numerous local differences and privileges. East and 
 West Prussia paid a land tax of 639 thalers per square mile 
 [German], while Rhineland paid 4,969 thalers, certainly upon 
 a much more valuable soil. It is not surprising that the 
 Rhinelanders murmured loudly about the comparative exemption 
 of the east from taxation, and that Silesia, where in the days 
 of Frederick II a cadaster had been instituted, regarded itself 
 as placed at a disadvantage when compared with the other old 
 provinces where no cadaster had been undertaken. And yet 
 for the moment reform was impossible. Since in the course 
 of centuries the old land taxes had assumed the characteristics 
 of rent, equalisation could be effected only after compensation 
 of the enfranchised. But where were the means for 
 such compensation now to be obtained ? Where was to 
 be found the technical aptitude necessary to effect a cadaster 
 for the entire land ? Moreover, would it be right that 
 the landed gentry, who in the eastern provinces still had 
 
 476 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 to bear almost unaided the costs of the territorial police, 
 patrimonial jurisdiction, and the patronage of the church, should 
 have new burdens imposed upon them at a moment when, 
 exhausted by severe sacrifices on behalf of their country, they 
 were hardly able to maintain themselves in possession of their 
 properties ? Humboldt would not hear a word of all these 
 serious considerations. He contented himself with unsparing 
 criticism, describing the inequality of the existing land taxation 
 and insisting on the defects of all indirect taxation, doing 
 this not without doctrinaire exaggeration. 
 
 Nor was the opposition entirely devoid of particularist 
 arrieres pensees. In Saxony, Posen, and on the Rhine, the 
 inhabitants hoped that taxation would be allotted in such a 
 way that the estates of each province might contribute to the 
 necessities of the state a share to be decided by their own 
 estimate. This incredible proposal, which threatened to trans- 
 form the monarchy into a loose federation of states, was 
 approved by several of the lord-Ueutenants, and above all by 
 Count Solms-Laubach in JiiUch-Cleves-Berg.i The plan, how- 
 ever, failed to secure a majority in the council of state, for 
 Billow intervened vigorously on behalf of the threatened national 
 unity, and Schuckmaim showed in a lengthy memorial that if 
 the Prussian state were to leave this vital question to the 
 discretion of ten provincial diets, the country would soon find 
 itself in a similar situation to that occupied by France in the 
 days of Calonne.^ Nor did the committee venture to adopt 
 Humboldt's proposal that the co-operation of the diets should be 
 invited in the establishment of the new fiscal system ; it was 
 felt that the inteUigence of the crown still greatly exceeded the 
 political sagacity of the nation, and that a thorough-going fiscal 
 reform could be effected only by the direct exercise of royal 
 authority. Moreover, the promised new diets did not as yet 
 exist, and there was absolutely no prospect of successful negotia- 
 tion with the old estates of New Hither Pomerania and Saxony, 
 which defiantly appealed to their chartered freedom from taxa- 
 tion. Consequently, to the report of the committee there was 
 merely appended the extremely ambiguous conclusion that in 
 order to tranquillise the nation it appeared to be necessary 
 " to bring the new plan of taxation into some sort of connection 
 
 1 Solms-Laubach, Memorial concerning the system of taxation on the Rhine, 
 January, 1817. 
 
 ^ Scbuckmann, Memorial to the ministry of state, June 4, 181 7. 
 
 477 
 
History of Germany 
 
 with the measures concerning the diets." On June 20th the 
 report was sent to the king ; he approved the customs-law, 
 and the drawing up of a new and comprehensive plan for 
 internal taxation. 
 
 The king did not conceal from the committee that he had 
 expected not merely keen criticism but definite counter-proposals; 
 none the less, he approved the plans, and ordered the lord- 
 lieutenants to ask the opinions of inhabitants of repute, so that 
 public feeling in the provinces might be ascertained regarding 
 the plan of taxation. In August and September, assemblies 
 of notables were held in all ten provinces, and every one of 
 them expressed itself strongly adverse to the taxes on flour 
 at the mill and on meat. Stormy incidents were not lacking. 
 The notables of the grand-duchy of Posen, nine Pohsh nobles 
 and three German bourgeois, maintained with Sarmatian exaggera- 
 tion that this tax would destroy " all civic or human freedom, 
 and that an attack upon such a sanctuary would dissolve 
 the bonds of human society." They then bluntly asserted the 
 gross untruth that the yield of taxation in Posen was employed 
 to enrich the old provinces. " Muskets have been laid aside, 
 people have shaken hands ; is the duchy to have no share in 
 the advantages of peace ? " The Silesian notables even added 
 to their opinion a significant legal protest. They declared, upon 
 the proposal of Count Dyhrn, that they were expressing only 
 their personal opinion ; that approval of the new tax laws 
 must be reserved for the future diets. ^ Here was seen a shadow 
 of coming events, the first evil indication of the political con- 
 fusion which was to result from the premature promise of 
 constitutional rights. 
 
 None the less a great deal of sound intelhgence was 
 displayed ; and ultimately, although each province brought 
 forward its own pecuUar grievances, there was manifest a 
 remarkable harmony of views. The notables first answered 
 the difficult question what was to be instituted in place of the 
 rejected indirect taxation. During recent years the thought 
 of a poll-tax, graduated in a few great classes, had quietly 
 made its way — an idea which had been mooted in the days of 
 Hardenberg's first administration by one of the permanent 
 officials of the treasury, von Prittwitz-Quilitz, an agriculturist 
 of repute. This proposal was in harmony with the dominant 
 
 ' Memorial of the notables of Posen to the chancellor, August 17, 1817. 
 Proceedings of the Silesian notables, Wnttke, The Silesian Estates, pp. 219 e't seq, 
 
 478 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 economic doctrine, as well as with the general detestation of 
 the French indirect system of taxation, and it seemed as if it 
 would be easy to carry it out, since the mass of the population 
 was still immovably fixed in patriarchal conditions of hfe. No 
 one ventured to think of an income tax, for by the idolised 
 Adam Smith, and recently also by von Raumer, this had been 
 branded as tyrannical, and had been completely discredited 
 when the attempt at its introduction, in the bitter need of the 
 year 1812, had ended in failure. In the council of state, the 
 learned statistician, J. G. Hoffmann, first expressly proposed 
 a graduated poll-tax, and secured support from most of the 
 lord-Heutenants. When the assemblies of notables were vainly 
 seeking some tax to replace those on flour at the mill and on meat, 
 their chairmen directed their attention to this way out. Thus 
 it happened that the majority of the assembhes recommended 
 the introduction of a graduated poll-tax — " a fixed tax 
 on consumption," as the Silesians termed it. Supported by 
 these opinions, Hoffmann thereupon (October 27th) drew up 
 a memorial upon the graduated poll-tax, and thus opened for 
 Prussian fiscal pohcy a new path, which was, indeed, not entered 
 without hesitation, and then only after two years of negotiation. 
 Whilst all the other great powers continued, in various ways, 
 to depend predominantly upon indirect taxation, Prussia devoted 
 herself more and more to the development of direct taxation. 
 The fiscal policy thus initiated was the proposal of a pro- 
 foundly impoverished state which had to find money where it 
 could ; it was the pohcy of a benevolent despotism, which had, 
 indeed, already created the beginnings of self-government, but 
 which did not as yet possess any clear idea of the monetary 
 needs of great towns ; it was the method of a peace-loving 
 government which reckoned upon long years of undisturbed 
 repose, and therefore was not afraid of utilising in time of 
 peace that system of direct taxation which is apt to be the 
 last resource of times of war. 
 
 The long struggle in the council of state had, to Schuck- 
 mann's distress, not remained unknown to " the hsteners at 
 the door, Usteners with writers' talons." The Berhnese mocked 
 loudly at the unhappy minister of finance, half of whose fiscal 
 plans had been frustrated, whose entire method of conducting 
 business had been pitilessly exposed, and who, by the roughness 
 of his methods and by his attacks upon the new military 
 organisation, had increased the hostiUty of the opposition to the 
 
 479 
 
History of Germany 
 
 degree of hatred. The members of Humboldt's party had for 
 a long time not concealed their feeling that nothing but the 
 dismissal of Biilow could satisfy them. It was in this sense 
 that Schon and Klewitz wrote several times to the chancellor, 
 whilst Sack demanded that at least the arbitrariness of the 
 minister of finance should be restricted by a co-ordinate 
 committee. Schuckmann who throughout the dispute had 
 stood by Biilow, was involved in his colleague's defeat. Since 
 now there suddenly appeared a prospect of a complete change 
 of ministry, Schon, the hotspur of the opposition, directed a 
 passionate attack against Wittgenstein, who had taken hardly 
 any part in the negotiations of the council of state. Once 
 again with boundless exaggeration, he reproached Wittgenstein, 
 not merely with the evil arts of the secret police, but also 
 with the maintenance of the gendarmerie instituted in the year 
 1812. This was everywhere working satisfactorily, but Schon 
 insisted that the force was a weapon for making war upon 
 the people, and that it was utterly superfluous considering the 
 size of the army. 
 
 When Hardenberg saw that a concession to the general 
 discontent of the high officialdom was inevitable, he first endeav- 
 oured to induce his old opponent Humboldt to enter the govern- 
 ment. But Humboldt, on July 14th, made a sharp rejoinder, 
 to the effect that he could never agree with Biilow and Schuck- 
 mann, could not even come to any understanding with them, 
 " since by one the material interests, and by the other the 
 moral energies, of the state are endangered " ; only Hardenberg 
 himself and Boyen still possessed the confidence of the nation, 
 only in miUtary affairs were seriousness, order, and a patriotic 
 spirit still displayed ; the ministry lacked internal unity and 
 independence vis-i-vis the chancellor. Boyen's exhortations 
 were yet more urgent : " The Zeitgeist demands that trust- 
 worthy men should occupy the higher posts " ; it would never 
 do to wait until the nation itself demanded Biilow's dismissal ; 
 " such an administration, such a man, cannot fail in the long 
 run to work indescribable injury to the fatherland." * i 
 
 Hardenberg, however, was unwilling to abandon the rights 
 of his office as chancellor ; and he [had no wish to sacrifice 
 his cousin, nor yet Wittgenstein, who had made himself indis- 
 pensable at court and in whom he himself continued to retain 
 
 1 Humboldt to Hardenberg, July 14 ; Boyen's opinion regarding the 
 financial administration, August 10, 1817. 
 
 48Q 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 absolute confidence. Still less did the king desire a thorough 
 change of ministry : "In effecting changes of office," he 
 declared, " great caution is necessary, for we run the danger 
 of being unjust." In September, Humboldt, to his astonish- 
 ment, received orders to betake himself to his post in London. 
 On November 3rd and December 2nd there followed a recon- 
 struction of the ministry, which effected changes in every depart- 
 ment except those of war and poUce, and yet only half corres- 
 ponded to the wishes of the opposition. Biilow handed over the 
 ministry of finance to Klewitz, and was himself assigned, under the 
 title of minister of commerce, the simple conduct of commercial 
 pohcy — a task which corresponded better with his gifts and 
 experience. The department of public instruction, which had 
 been completely neglected under Schuckmann, was separated 
 from the ministry of the interior as a ministry of spiritual and 
 educationaljl^affairs, and was placed under the leadership of 
 Altenstein. In Uke manner, a ministry for the revision of the 
 laws and for the organisation of justice in the new provinces, 
 was detached from the ministry of justice ; Beyme was appointed 
 head of the new department, a man who had long possessed the 
 confidence of the king, who had been cabinet councillor, and who 
 now was generally considered a decided hberal. Finally, in 
 order to secure imity of will in the reform of the national 
 finances, ]^Hardenberg estabUshed a board of control for the 
 scrutiny of all national expenditure, and also a ministry of the 
 treasury, to deal with exchequer, debt, and extraordinary 
 expenses, retaining for himself the supreme leadership of both 
 these departments. 
 
 Thus not one of the ministers was completely dismissed 
 from office. The men who had heaped the severest reproaches 
 upon one another agreed to remain in office, because the chan- 
 cellor had after all to decide independently, irrespective of the 
 majority of votes. In the committee of the council of state 
 which had to complete the reform of the fiscal system, the two 
 opponents, Biilow and Klewitz, sat jointly as presidents. The 
 dimensions in the government were accentuated rather than 
 moderated ; above all, the subdivision of the ministry of 
 finance into three departments possessed of equal authority soon 
 proved to be a grave mistake. Since the energies of the 
 chancellor were inadequate for the performance of this excess 
 of work, he abandoned the administration of the national debt 
 entirely to his confidant Rother, an able financier, whose gifts 
 
 481 2 I 
 
History of Germany 
 
 had raised him from the position of a yellow hussar to one of 
 the highest offices of state. In the board of control, the presi- 
 dent, Privy-councillor von Ladenberg, soon gained unrestricted 
 power. He was an official of the old school, a man of iron 
 diligence and imperturbable self-confidence, who obstinately 
 opposed fiscal reform, and desired to return to the old excise 
 system. German wilfulness and German zeal for duty had 
 always evoked violent friction among the Prussian authorities. 
 Now, when the natural connection of the national finances had 
 been arbitrarily severed, embittered disputes became inevitable. 
 Klewitz, the minister of finance, did not secure the necessary 
 respect from the other ministers, because they did not need 
 his approval for their expenditure, and he therefore found it 
 impossible to draw up any precise estimates for the budget as 
 a whole. The times were full of ill-humour and suspicion, 
 and public opinion consequently gave ready credence to every 
 detestable fable that was circulated regarding the mysterious 
 situation of financial affairs. 
 
 None the less it was under this extraordinarily disintegrated 
 administration that was effected the great transformation of 
 Prussian commercial pohcy, the most momentous political deed 
 of the epoch. The services of the new minister of finance were 
 appraised at their full value only in the circle of his intimate 
 advisers ; the ugly httle man, with his good-natured phihstine 
 countenance, could not do justice to himself, and often served 
 the young crown prince as a butt for unrestrained jests. A 
 man of conservative nature, slow to decide, poor in original 
 ideas, Klewitz nevertheless understood how to elaborate the 
 reforming schemes of others with thoroughness and thoughtful 
 deUberation ; what he had once made his own, he retained 
 firmly, with tenacious patience and imperturbable equanimity. 
 Just as formerly in Konigsberg he had cheerfully co-operated in 
 the aboUtion of hereditary servitude, so now he saved from the 
 shipwreck of Billow's proposals the most valuable portion, 
 the customs-law, and unconcernedly conducted the revolutionary 
 innovation to harbour in spite of the passionate opposition he 
 encountered both at home and abroad. ^ 
 
 Amid the storms of the great period of reform, little had 
 
 ^ Among other sources of information I here avail myself of a manuscript 
 essay by L. Kiihne, entitled Who was the Founder of the Customs-Union? (1841) 
 from the papers of von Motz. 
 
 482 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 been effected for the transformation of the old excise system ; 
 it had seemed enough to impose a few of the urban taxes in 
 the country districts, and in Old Prussia to permit the introduc- 
 tion of articles of foreign manufacture upon the payment of 
 an ad valorem duty of 8^ per cent. In addition, in the old 
 provinces, there still existed seven-and-sixty different tariffs, 
 dealing with approximately three thousand different commodities ; 
 there was also the Electoral Saxon general excise in the duchy 
 of Saxony, the Swedish customs-system in New Hither Pome- 
 rania, and, finally, in Rhineland, since the aboUtion of the 
 Napoleonic douanes, there had existed absolute anarchy. And 
 yet, since any regular control of imports on the frontier was 
 still lacking, this intolerable burdening of commerce failed to 
 secure any protection against foreign competition. A chaotic 
 monetary system served also to accentuate the dependence of 
 the impoverished state upon the foreign world : in Posen and 
 Pomerania forty-eight, and in the provinces leftward of the Elbe 
 seventy-one, foreign varieties of money were officially recognised 
 and valued. The king had long noted with concern how pro- 
 foundly the law-abiding sentiments of the nation were injured 
 by the persistence of the obsolete prohibitive system. Since 
 the establishment of bourgeois industry in the lowlands, 
 smuggling had increased to an incredible extent. In the year 
 1815 the taxes paid on coffee in the old provinces were levied 
 on no more than two pounds per grocer's shop per diem. 
 
 The intolerable state of affairs on the eastern frontier also 
 required immediate attention. As soon as Prussia, Poland, 
 and Russia began at Warsaw, in March, 1816, to negotiate 
 regarding the carrying out of the treaty of Vienna of May 3, 
 1815, it speedily became clear that in Vienna Hardenberg had 
 been outwitted by Prince Czartoryski. The apparently harmless 
 clauses in the treaty regarding free transit and free trade in 
 the domestic produce of all the territories which had formerly 
 been PoUsh, served almost exclusively to impose obUgations 
 upon the Prussian state, without any corresponding advantages, 
 since Prussian territory constituted the land of transit. In order 
 to carry out the agreement to the letter, Prussia would have 
 had to separate her Polish provinces from the rest of her terri- 
 tory by a customs-barrier, whereas Russia, in conflict with the 
 terms of the treaty, left unaltered her old customs-barrier which 
 separated Polish Lithuania from Warsaw, whilst Austria, too, 
 was by no means inclined to permit commercial independence 
 to her Polish crown-lands. The Polish negotiators saw in the 
 
 483 
 
History of Germany 
 
 treaty a welcome means for conducting a nationalist propaganda 
 in Prussia's Polish territories through the intermediation of 
 commercial agents settling in the country. They were arrogant 
 enough even to dispute Prussia's unrestricted sovereignty over 
 Danzig, and they put forward such preposterous demands that 
 the king answered with a definite refusal when Czar Alexander, 
 after his manner, in an affectionate and friendly letter endeav- 
 oured to sustain the claims of the Poles. The unsatisfying 
 course of these negotiations enforced the determination to place 
 the Polish territories on exactly the same footing as the other 
 provinces of the east. On the other hand, the experiences at 
 Frankfort showed that a federal customs-law was quite impossible 
 of attainment, and that Prussia must therefore in the first place 
 secure order in her own household. 
 
 In the year 1816, the initial steps to this end were taken. 
 The prohibition of the export of money was withdrawn, the 
 royalty on salt was equalised throughout all the provinces. 
 The ordinance of June nth aboUshed on principle all water-dues 
 and all inland and provincial duties, and promised the introduc- 
 tion of a general and simple frontier customs-system. At the 
 beginning of the following year the new customs-law was com- 
 pleted. But as soon as reports were spread regarding the 
 details of the proposal, a cry of distress from the alarmed 
 producers arose throughout the country. Impassioned petitions 
 from the cotton-spinners and weavers of Silesia and Berlin, 
 although they suffered severely under the existing order of 
 affairs, confirmed the old truth that the selfishness of men is 
 the worst enemy of their own interests. The agitation became 
 so threatening that the king thought it necessary to appoint 
 a special commission to examine this question. On this commis- 
 sion the old Frederician school once more gained the upper 
 hand. The chairman, Lord-Heutenant von Heydebreck, regarded 
 it as the highest task of national policy " to maintain the 
 standard of the currency " ; the majority determined to advise 
 the crown to re-establish the old prohibitive system, as it had 
 existed down to the year 1806. But to the majority report 
 was attached a vigorous minority report, compiled by Councillor 
 Kunth, the tutor of the brothers Humboldt, a worthy represen- 
 tative of Old Prussian official pride, who had often defended 
 the rights of the bureaucracy against the aristocratic contempt 
 of his friend Stein. Thoroughly acquainted with manufacturing 
 conditions, as the outcome of personal observation, he Hved 
 
 484 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 and worked amid the ideas of the new economic doctrine. 
 " Property and freedom, this comprises everything ; there is 
 nothing more wanted " — such was his pithy phrase. It seemed 
 to him that the worst defect of Prussian industry was the 
 astonishingly inadequate culture of most of the manufacturers, and 
 this he regarded as an evil fruit of the preponderance of the 
 learned classes, a preponderance which could be remedied by 
 degrees only, through the influence of foreign competition ; even 
 among the leading manufacturers of BerUn there were some who 
 found it hard work to write their names. 
 
 Kunth's opinion secured almost undivided support in the 
 council of state ; it could no longer be ignored that the removal 
 of the prohibitions of trade were no more than the necessary 
 completion of the reforms of 1808. On July 3rd, when the 
 plenum of the council of state was discussing the customs-law, 
 the poHtical opponents Gneisenau and Schuckmann unanimously 
 advocated the liberation of commerce. Lord-lieutenant Merckel 
 and Privy-councillor Ferber, an able political economist formerly 
 in Saxon service, declared that the impoverished condition of 
 industry in Silesia and Saxony could be remedied in no other 
 way than by freedom. In the end, three only of the iifty-six 
 who were present voted against the law — Heydebreck, Ladenberg, 
 and Beguelin.i On August ist, the king, who was at Carlsbad, 
 approved " the principle of free import for all future time." 
 New and arduous negotiations now followed, for at first it 
 seemed impossible to introduce the new order simultaneously 
 in both halves of the Prussian domain. Finally, on May 26, 
 1818, the customs-law came into effect, for the entire monarchy. 
 
 Its author was the director general, Carl Georg Maassen, 
 an official of wide knowledge, devoted body and soul to affairs, 
 a man who concealed beneath a childlike and unpretentious 
 manner the bold daring of the reformer, and who was inspired 
 with a profound and free conception of social life. Bom at 
 Cleves, he had first been a Prussian official in his homeland ; 
 had then for a time, when in the service of Berg, studied 
 the great manufacturing industries of the Lower Rhine ; and 
 subsequently, under the Potsdam government, had acquired a 
 knowledge of the economic life of the north-east ; he had thus 
 learned by widespread practical experience to supplement the 
 theories of Adam Smith, to which he had early adhered. The 
 result was that his proposals for a customs-law were not the 
 ^ Minutes of the council of state. Fouth sitting, July 3, 1817. 
 
 48S 
 
History of Germany 
 
 outcome of a ready-made doctrine, but proceeded from the 
 experience acquired in three different fields of practical statecraft. 
 The problem to be solved was, first of all, to establish a lively 
 community of interests throughout the entire monarchy by the 
 Hberation of internal trade ; secondly, to open new sources of 
 income for the state ; and finally, to secure for domestic 
 manufacture an effective protection against the superior force 
 of English industry, and yet to avoid completely removing the 
 wholesome stimulus of foreign competition. Where the wishes 
 of the manufacturers were in conflict with the requirements 
 of the state treasury, the interests of national finance must come 
 first ; this preference was dictated by the needs of the national 
 economy. 
 
 The two first paragraphs of the law announced freedom 
 of ingress, egress, and transit, for the entire territory of the 
 state. In this way a full half of non-Austrian Germany was 
 united to form a free market, to constitute an economic com- 
 munity, which, if results were favourable, could extend to the 
 other half of the nation. For the crassest contrasts of our 
 multiform social life lay within the Prussian borders. If it 
 should prove possible to subject Posen and Rhineland to 
 the same economic regime without injuriously affecting their 
 economic peculiarities, this would suffice to prove that such a 
 regime, with a few alterations, would suffice for Baden and 
 Hanover. As Maassen frequently said, Prussia had precisely 
 the same problems to solve as all the other German states 
 seriously desiring customs-unity ; and owing to the multiplicity 
 of her economic interests, Prussia could more readily than the 
 other states find the true solution. But the carrying out of 
 the idea, the removal of all customs-dues to the boundary of 
 the state, was more difficult in Prussia than in any other realm ; 
 at first, indeed, it seemed altogether impracticable. It was 
 necessary to supervise a customs-line of 1,073 German miles 
 (there was a mile of frontier for every square mile of national 
 territory) ; and this had to be effected under the most 
 unfavourable circumstances conceivable, for the minor German 
 states, whose boundaries marched with those of Prussia, pos- 
 sessed for the most part no ordered customs-system, and many 
 of them even favoured smuggling on principle. The necessities 
 of the case compelled the Prussian ministers of finance to 
 establish a simple and lucidly arranged tariff, by which com- 
 modities were classified in a small number of extensive groups. A 
 
 486 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 comprehensive and complicated tariff, like that of England 
 or France, would have required a numerous staff of officials, 
 such as in Prussia would have cost more than the yield of 
 the duties. For the same reason, Maassen decided that the 
 duties should be regulated by the weight of the goods, whereas 
 in all other states there prevailed the system of ad valorem 
 duties which alone was in accordance with the dominant 
 economic theory. The gradation of pa5nnents by value would 
 have enormously increased the cost of the customs administra- 
 tion ; moreover the levying of a high tax on valuable goods 
 offered a strong temptation to smuggling, and this could not be 
 ventured by a state whose frontiers were so difficult to supervise. 
 In the great question also of commercial pohcy, financial 
 considerations were determinative. The state had the choice 
 open between two ways.' It was possible to follow the example 
 of England and France and to introduce prohibitive duties, 
 in order subsequently to use these as a means of negotiation 
 with the western powers, and in this way, step by step, to 
 facilitate trade through differential tariffs. The other alternative 
 was immediately to estabUsh in Prussia a system of moderate 
 duties, in the hope that the pressure of circumstances would 
 force a similar course upon the great neighbour realms. 
 Maassen had sufficient courage to follow the latter method, 
 being guided especially by the consideration that the exiguous 
 yield of high protective duties would be hkely to prove inade- 
 quate for the needs of the state treasury. The only 
 commodities whose import was prohibited were salt and playing- 
 cards ; raw materials were as a rule duty-free, or paid very 
 trifling duties. A moderate protective duty, not exceeding 
 ten per cent., was imposed on manufactured articles, this figure 
 being about the usual profit upon smuggUng transactions. 
 Colonial produce, on the other hand, was subjected to a more 
 lucrative duty, rising to twenty per cent., for Prussia was able 
 to tax these products effectively on her easily watched sea-coast. 
 This economic law, the freest and most advanced of the 
 epoch, differed so widely from dominant prejudices that in 
 foreign countries people at first made a mock of the 
 good-natured weakness of the Prussian doctrinaires. The states- 
 man's lot in an absolute monarchy is an ungrateful one. How 
 greatly esteemed in modem England is William Huskisson, 
 
 1 It was thus that in retrospect Eichhorn described the situation, in a minis- 
 terial despatch dated February 7, 1834. 
 
 487 
 
History of Germany 
 
 spoken of as " one of the world's great spirits " ; all civilised 
 nations admire the free trade speeches of the great Englishman. 
 But the name of Maassen is to this hour known in the 
 fatherland only to a small circle of learned men. Yet the great 
 free trade movement of our centvuy was initiated not in England, 
 but in Prussia. The restored French monarchy, in the tariff 
 established in 1816, obstinately maintained the Napoleonic 
 prohibitive tariff against foreign manufactured articles. The 
 selfishness of the emigres led to the imposition of yet more 
 severe duties upon all the| produce of the land, especially upon 
 beeves and upon wool. Even in England it was only a small 
 section of the commercial classes which had been won over 
 to the doctrines of free trade. The landlord class was still 
 faithful to the high corn-duties, shippers continued to support 
 Cromwell's navigation act, and manufacturers held fast to the 
 rigid prohibitive duties. The majority of the cultured classes 
 continued to take the same view of Adam Smith as had formerly 
 been taken by Burke, namely, that such abstract theories were 
 good enough for the Glasgow professorial chair. It was the 
 bold proceedings of the statesmen of Berlin which first encouraged 
 the English free-traders to speak their minds openly. The free- 
 traders" petition from the city of London, which Baring sent to 
 parliament in May, 1820, appealed to the " shining example 
 which Prussia had set the world." It was of Prussia that 
 Huskisson thought when he made the famous observation: 
 " Commerce is not an end in itself ; it is a means for the 
 diffusion of well-being and comfort among the nations," and 
 when he exclaimed to his fellow-countrymen : " England cannot 
 stand still when other countries are advancing in culture and 
 industry." 
 
 The new law seemed inadequate to the free trade views 
 of the Prussian statesmen. In the ministry of finance, people 
 were well aware, as J. G. Hoffmann frequently admitted, that 
 the greater part of the yield of the tariffs was derived from the 
 most marketable colonial goods, and that the treasury secured 
 but little advantage from the other duties. But it was also 
 recognised that rigid limits are imposed upon every system of 
 taxation by the sentiments of those who have to pay the taxes ; 
 public opinion of those days would [never have pardoned the 
 government if it had taxed coffee and left tea free of duty. 
 Maassen rejected one-sided favouring] of one branch of produc- 
 tion ; he counted upon the harmonious co-operation of agricul- 
 
 488 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 ture, industry, and commerce, and regarded protective duties 
 as no more than a temporary expedient, adopted in order to 
 enable German industry gradually to attain to its full powers. 
 Even on the occasion of the first revision of the tariff, in the 
 year 1821, a further step was taken towards free trade, the 
 tariff being simplified and several duties abrogated. Whilst the 
 law of 1818 had estabUshed a special tariff for the western 
 provinces, with somewhat lower rates, now all difference between 
 the provinces was abohshed. In form and appHcation, the tariff 
 of 1821 constituted the basis for all the subsequent tariffs of 
 the customs-union. 
 
 While the council of state was engaged upon this reform, 
 the economic immaturity of the age led to the outburst of 
 numerous complaints. The masses declared that it would be 
 impossible to endure the rise in the cost of living; manufac- 
 turers considered that the door was being opened " to EngUsh 
 commercial despotism," and besieged the throne with such 
 despairing petitions that the king, although he was personally 
 quite in agreement with Maassen's plans, nevertheless commanded 
 a further examination of the law which had already been signed. 
 It was not until September i, 1818, that the customs-law was 
 pubhshed, and the new frontier custom-house oiiicers did not 
 enter upon their functions until the new year of 1819. On 
 February 8, 1819, was issued the supplementary law regarding 
 the taxation of articles of consvmiption produced at home, in 
 accordance with which only wine, beer, brandy, and tobacco 
 were subject to taxation, the taxes in question having to be 
 paid by the producer, so that the consumer was reheved from 
 direct taxation. 
 
 On the whole, the new legislation adopted a happy middle 
 course between free trade and protection. In one direction 
 only did it depart strikingly from the principles of moderate 
 free trade ; it burdened transit commerce with comparative 
 severity. The hundredweight of transit goods had on the 
 average to pay a toll of half a thaler, but on certain important 
 commercial routes a great deal more than this — unquestionably 
 an extremely oppressive burden for ordinary commodities, 
 especially when they had to cross Prussian territory several 
 times. The immediate cause of this severity was to be found 
 in financial needs. Prussia controlled some of the most 
 important commercial routes of Central Europe : the connection 
 between Holland and the highlands of Central Europe ; the old 
 
 489 
 
History of Germany 
 
 route of export of Polish grain ; the intercourse of Leipzig with 
 the sea, with Poland, and with Frankfort. It was calculated 
 that fully one-half of the goods entering Prussia were in transit 
 merely. Thej exhausted treasury was not in a position to 
 renounce the ^^sole advantage which could be secured from the 
 inconvenient extension characteristic of the Prussian domain. 
 Moreover, all those well acquainted with customs affairs were 
 agreed in the opinion, which at that time was well founded, 
 that it was only by [the taxation of transit trade that the 
 financial yield of the frontier tariff system could be secured. 
 If duty-free transit were permitted, the door would be opened 
 to all kinds of fraud, and an enormous smuggling traffic from 
 Hamburg, Frankfort, and Leipzig would actually be invited, 
 so that the whole success of the reform would be endangered. 
 But the inequitable severity of the transit dues and the tenacious 
 insistence of the government upon rates which were intolerable 
 for the German neighbouring lands, are explicable on pohtical 
 grounds alone. Transit dues served the cabinet of Berlin as 
 an effective means of negotiation in order to induce the minor 
 German states to adhere to the Prussian commercial policy. 
 
 The dreams of a universal German commercial policy, which 
 during the Vienna congress had been entertained by the Prussian 
 plenipotentiaries, had in Berlin long been abandoned. The 
 impossibility of such plans was manifest, not alone from the 
 futility of the federal constitution, but owing to the internal 
 relationships of the federated states. Hardenberg knew that 
 the court of Vienna would make no change in its traditional 
 system of provincial duties, and that it would be simply impos- 
 sible for Austria to subordinate its non-German crown-lands to 
 a federal customs-system. But the rest of Germany also 
 preserved numerous vestiges of the shameful cosmopolitan epoch 
 of our past. Hanover was still dependent upon England, and 
 Schleswig-Holstein upon Denmark ; Luxemburg remained in 
 immediate geographical union with the unified state of the 
 Netherlands. How was a general German customs-system con- 
 ceivable so long as such foreign dominion persisted ? Moreover, 
 the constitutions of several of the states of the Germanic Federa- 
 tion offered insuperable hindrances. Prussian tariff reform rested 
 upon the idea of the common law. Who could expect the 
 Mecklenburg nobles to renounce their freedom from duties, or 
 the Saxon nobles to abandon the general excise which was so 
 closely associated with their feudal privileges, so long as the 
 
 490 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 feudal oligarchy continued in these countries to rule undisturbed ? 
 How was it possible to introduce into Hanover the Prussian 
 tariffs which presupposed the unity of the national economy, 
 since in Hanover the royal domain-treasury and the feudal 
 tax-treasury continued to exist independently side by side ? 
 Moreover, the customs-system was closely connected with the 
 taxation of articles of home consimiption ; only if the minor 
 states should determine to establish a system of indirect taxa- 
 tion upon the Prussian model, or should at least approximate 
 to the Prussian method with an honourable system of mutual 
 accommodation, would a permanent customs community become 
 possible. Was such a willingness for sacrifice to be expected 
 at a time when the Confederation of the Rhine and the 
 intrigues of the congress of Vienna had morbidly stimulated 
 the selfish arrogance of the dynasties and had deprived them 
 of all shame ? Even those states to which goodwill was not 
 lacking, could not immediately accept the severe proposals which 
 Prussia had to put before them in order to secure an adequate 
 yield from her taxes. As Eichhom subsequently declared, 
 people had to get used to the changed situation, had to make 
 a rough estimate of the poUtico-economical needs of their 
 respective coimtries, and of the sacrifices necessary to cover 
 the national expenditure : " Before clarity upon these matters 
 had been secured, no useful results could be expected from 
 common deUberations, and least of all from a discussion at the 
 Bundestag concerning Germany as a whole." ^ 
 
 In such a situation, Prussia was forced to take independent 
 action without any consideration for her German neighbours. 
 Among good-natured folk the opinion prevailed that Prussia 
 ought to leave her frontiers open to imports from all the rest 
 of Germany, and to impose duties only on the produce of 
 foreign lands. This childish proposal, if carried out, would 
 have made all control of imports on the frontier impossible, 
 and would have absolutely frustrated the financial and economic 
 aims of customs reform. It was even impossible to tax German 
 products less severely than others. It was indeed the German 
 petty states, with their intricate, defective, and sometimes quite 
 uncontrolled frontiers, which seemed the most dangerous enemies 
 to the Prussian treasury. Certificates of origin, furnished by 
 such authorities, could give no adequate security to the precise 
 calculations of the Berlin bureau. Every alleviation of duty 
 
 1 Eichhorn, Instructions for the envoys at the German courts, March 25, 1828. 
 
 491 
 
History of Germany 
 
 along these frontiers would encourage frauds, so long as a 
 perfectly ordered customs administration was lacking in the 
 neighbour states. Moreover, if Prussia were to give special 
 advantages to the minor German states, unquestionably foreign 
 countries would retaliate, and the nation would gradually be 
 forced into a system of differential tariffs which was absolutely 
 contrary to the aims of the Prussian statesmen. To the 
 ministry of finance, differential tariffs seemed far more undesir- 
 able than protective tariffs, for the latter burden trade for the 
 advantage of native producers, while differential tariffs do so 
 for the advantage of foreign producers. 
 
 If the new customs-system was to come into existence at 
 all, the only possible way was, that, to begin with, all non- 
 Prussian goods must be treated on equal footing. It was true 
 that by this measure the German neighbours would be very 
 hard hit. They were accustomed to carry on a lively smuggling 
 traffic into Prussia, but this was now prevented by the strict 
 supervision of the frontiers. The customs-barriers on the 
 frontier of the new provinces disturbed old estabhshed commerce 
 in many ways. The kingdom of Saxony suffered severely 
 when Prussian customs-barriers were erected just outside the 
 gates of Leipzig. The small Rhenish states were witnessing 
 close at hand the increase in strength of the Prussian national 
 economy ; what was on one side an advantage was on the 
 other a disadvantage. It will readily be understood that it 
 was precisely in the immediate neighbourhood of Prussia that 
 ill-feeKng was most marked. Moreover, the institution of the 
 tariff by weight was especially burdensome to the German 
 neighbour states, for foreign countries for the most jiart sent 
 bulky commodities to Prussia, whilst from other parts of 
 Germany the imports were usually heavy goods. 
 
 Nevertheless, if it was not possible for the moment to give 
 special privileges to the minor states, the reform of the customs 
 was from the first designed to draw the German neighbours 
 gradually into the Prussian customs-union. "Recognising the 
 impossibility of a union for the entire Federation, Prussia 
 endeavoured to secure the same end by means of separate 
 agreements" — such was the brief and exhaustive phrase in 
 which, ten years later, Eichhorn summed up the essential ideas 
 of Prussian commercial policy. The disintegration of its territory 
 forced Prussia to pursue a German poKcy, making it impossible 
 for her self-sufficingly to sever herself from her German 
 
 492 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 neighbours, or to conduct her administration without coming 
 to an understanding with these. For the moment, a consider- 
 able part of Prussia's Thuringian possessions, forty-one square miles 
 [German] in extent, had to be excluded from the customs-line. 
 It was absolutely essential to extend the customs-barriers at 
 leEist so far that the entire domain of the state could be equably 
 taxed. In the customs-law itself (section 5) the intention was 
 declared to favour mutual trade by means of commercial 
 treaties. The severe taxation of transit trade gave palpable 
 expression to this hint. Hardenberg spoke still more definitely 
 concerning the aims of the law before it actually passed into 
 operation. When the manufacturers of Rheidt and other 
 Rhenish towns petitioned the chancellor to abolish the German 
 internal customs-dues, he answered, on June 3, 1818, that the 
 government was not unaware of the advantages which might 
 proceed from the union of several German states to constitute 
 a common manufacturing and commercial system, and that the 
 king's plan was pursued with unceasing consideration for this 
 point. " It is in the very spirit of this design, at once to 
 retaliate against foreign restrictions of commerce, to repay 
 complaisance, and to favour a neighbourly co-operation for the 
 common good." Similarly he declared to the manufacturers 
 of Elberfeld that the Prussian customs-barriers were intended 
 " to pave the way for a general extension, or for a union 
 effected in some other way." 
 
 Here was a definite announcement that the state which 
 for a long time had wielded the sword of the old emperordom, 
 was now also resuming the commercio-poUtical reforming ideas 
 of the imperial pohcy of the sixteenth century, and was ready, 
 by gradual steps, to secure for the nation that unity of economic 
 life which had hitherto been lacking throughout the course of 
 its history. Hardenberg hoped that this goal, which could not 
 be attained in a single leap, would be reached step by step 
 through a process of cautious approximation, by means of 
 agreements between separate states. In this century of toil. 
 Mars and Mercury are the stars which chiefly determine the 
 destiny of nations. The military system and the commercial 
 pohcy of the Hohenzollems henceforward constituted the two 
 titles upon which Prussia's claim to hegemony in Germany 
 reposed. This commercial pohcy was the exclusive work of 
 the crown and its officialdom. Even at a later date, when its 
 ultimate aims had been fully disclosed, it always encountered 
 
 493 
 
History of Germany 
 
 a blind resistance from the nation. In the epoch of the Refor- 
 mation, the economic unification of the fatherland had been 
 frustrated by the resistance of the imperial towns ; in the 
 nineteenth century, unification was recommenced and completed 
 in definite opposition to the desires of the majority of the 
 Germans. 
 
 All parties in Germany were united in the struggle 
 against the Prussian customs-law, Kotzebue's WochenblaU no 
 less than Luden's Nemesis. Vainly did J. G. Hoffmann, in 
 the Preussische Staatszeitung, employ his thorough knowledge 
 of the subject in the refutation of the almost invariably value- 
 less politico-economical diatribes of the press. The very same 
 protectionists who were demanding help for German industry, 
 inveighed against the intolerable rates of the Prussian tariff, 
 which now provided the protection they desired. The very 
 same liberals who mocked the Bundestag as an utterly useless 
 institution, demanded from this institution a creative act of 
 commercial policy. When Hoffmann proved that the new law 
 was a benefit for Germany, Politz, Krug, and other Saxon 
 publicists rejoined that no state had the right to force benefits 
 upon its neighbours. Ridiculous stories were retailed with the 
 most absolute assurance, and were greedily accepted by ignorant 
 readers. In one place it was asserted that a poor hawker of 
 Reuss, pushing his barrow laden with vegetables to the weekly 
 market of Leipzig, had had to pay a thaler for transit dues to 
 the Prussian customs — the only lack of verisimilitude about 
 the story being that the Prussian tariff did not impose any 
 duty upon these goods. Sentiment was also called into 
 the field against Prussia, for the Germans always have recourse 
 to sentiment when ideas fail them. It was reported that on 
 the very first day on which the unhappy law passed into 
 operation, a custom-house officer in Langensalza had been stabbed 
 by an infuriated patriot of Gotha, whereas the man had really 
 committed suicide. It was distressfully declared that King 
 Frederick WilUam undoubtedly cherished philanthropic intentions, 
 but that " financial considerations poison the best intentions " ; no 
 one seemed to have any understanding of the hard necessity 
 of these financial considerations. Among the Uberal patriots 
 there was gerieral agreement that the desired unity of the 
 German market could be attained only if the already completed 
 unification of half Germany should be once more disturbed. 
 
 Unaffected by the general hostihty, Klewitz firmly upheld 
 
 494 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 the work of customs reform. But in its industrial policy the 
 government displayed less firmness against the ultra-conservative 
 prejudices of the time. In the Staatszeitung, expert officials 
 had again and again to describe to incredulous readers the 
 advantages of free industry. Nevertheless it was not ventured 
 to introduce into the new provinces the industrial law of 1811, 
 and a contradictory state of affairs, which was out of harmony 
 with the imity of the Prussian market, was allowed to persist 
 \mtouched during an entire generation ; in Saxony the old 
 guUd system was retained ; in the Rhenish Westphalian terri- 
 tories and in the old provinces, industrial freedom prevailed, in 
 the former in accordance with Prussian, and in the latter in 
 accordance with French laws. 
 
 The last epoch of the reign of Frederick William III 
 resembled the reign of the first Frederick William in this respect 
 also, that the legal system of the country was least of all 
 influenced by the reforming activities of the national authority. 
 The old rule remained in operation that this state was never 
 in a position to effect vigorous progress in all domains of life 
 simultaneously. Savigny was right when he denied to his own 
 age the vocation for effecting a reform of the civil law. The 
 great codification of the common law was now a generation old, 
 and by the majority of members of the Old Prussian knighthood 
 was still regarded with comprehensible pride as a master-work ; 
 but while science had long outgrown the views of Suarez, no 
 new acquisitions had hitherto been made. With his usual 
 sound sense, the king was aware that the old subdivision of 
 the estates, which underlay the civil code, had long before been 
 abolished by the reforms of 1807 ; and since civil and criminal 
 legal procedure were both urgently in need of reconstitution, 
 Beyme was charged with the revision of the Frederician law- 
 books. But notwithstanding Beyme's reputation as a liberal, 
 his work now proved just as barren as it had formerly been 
 in the Dohna-Altenstein ministry, when the king had so 
 often vainly exhorted him to aboUsh patrimonial jurisdiction ; 
 and during two years in office he effected nothing of import- 
 ance. The time was not ripe for a thorough transforma- 
 tion of the Frederician law-books, and yet it would not do to 
 impose upon the entire state-domain this half obsolete legisla- 
 tion, whose defects the crown itself did not deny. Consequently, 
 in the regained old provinces, the Prussian civil code was, indeed, 
 
 495 
 
History of Germany 
 
 immediately introduced, side by side with the ancient organisation 
 of the law courts, but not without numerous exceptions. In 
 Westphalia, patrimonial jurisdiction was to be restored only 
 when those authorised to exercise it made a special demand 
 to that effect, and this took place in no more than four 
 instances. In Posen, owing to the untrustworthy character 
 of the PoUsh nobles, the establishment of these patrimonial 
 courts was entirely renounced ; whilst oral procedure was per- 
 mitted in the case of simple legal disputes. In Saxony, on 
 the other hand, a country with a reputation for interminable 
 litigation, everyone was pleased when the legal system was 
 directly established upon the Old Prussian footing ; it was only 
 the innumerable lawyers who complained loudly about the 
 decline of their industry. Finally, in New Hither Pomerania, 
 the common law and the anciently celebrated court of appeal 
 of Greifswald were retained, because the people regarded these 
 institutions as among their ancient liberties, guaranteed in the 
 peace of Kiel. 
 
 Great and unexpected difficulties appeared in the way of 
 the reconstitution of the legal system on the Rhine. President 
 Sethe was entrusted with the temporary organisation of the 
 Rhenish law courts. This was a loyal Prussian patriot from 
 Cleves, who had once, with a heavy heart, entered the state 
 service of Berg, and had there become intimately acquainted 
 with French law. He discharged his task with insight and 
 freedom from bias, unconcerned by the anger of the feudal 
 party, which accused him of Bonapartism, and equally uncon- 
 cerned about the endless complaints of the Rhenish populace, 
 which, with memories still fresh of the days of the Cologne 
 clique, was everywhere suspicious of nepotist intrigues. ^ Shortly 
 afterwards, in June, 1816, a special commission assembled in 
 Cologne, of which Sethe was president, and of which Simon, a 
 former judge of the territory, was also a member. Its function 
 was to examine whether it was possible to harmonise the 
 Rhenish law with the Prussian, and it received express instruc- 
 tions from the king " to make use of what was good wherever 
 it could be found." 
 
 In the early days of the intoxication of victory, the aboli- 
 tion of the code Napoleon was by all Germanophils, even in 
 Rhineland, regarded as an indispensable demand of national 
 honour. Everyone had agreed with Savigny when he spoke 
 
 1 Kircheisen to Hardenberg, December 7, 1815"; to Sethe, January 5, r8i6. 
 
 496 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 of the five codes as a political disease which had been lived 
 through. So completely had the legal history of the fatherland 
 been forgotten, that to the zealous Teutonisers even the public 
 oral procedure characteristic of the ancient Teutons, which had 
 been revived in the French legal system, seemed an arbitrary 
 revolutionary innovation. In the interim, however, the senti- 
 ment of the country had completely changed. The provincial 
 spirit had awakened, and had begun to extol everything that 
 existed as a valuable pecuharity of the homeland ; the code was 
 the Rhenish law, and for this reason it was admirable if 
 only legal procedure had been less costly. If anyone spoke 
 about Prussian law, people thought immediately of that 
 cumbrous legal organisation which had formerly existed in 
 Electoral Cologne and Electoral Treves; never again was Rhine- 
 land to relapse into this chaos. The pubUcity of the proceed- 
 ings seemed, above all, the bulwark of territorial freedom, for, 
 amid the restless changes of their political destiny, the inhabi- 
 tants of Rhineland had long ago learned to distrust every 
 government, simply because it was a government. When the 
 crown now summoned local experts to give their opinions, 
 as had been done in Prussia before the promulgation of the 
 civil code, the great majority declared themselves in favour of 
 retaining the code Napoleon. The town councils of Cologne, Treves, 
 Coblenz, and Cleves, appealed directly to the king, and even 
 Lord-Ueutenant Solms-Laubauch, an opponent of the French 
 legal system, expressly declared that, in view of the general 
 sentiment of the province, the abohtion of public procedure was 
 impossible.^ Sethe earnestly desired a vmified legal system for 
 the entire state, but he also saw that this goal was still remote, 
 and gladly recognised the great advantages of the neo-French 
 legal system. The code Napoleon, which had arisen out of an 
 amalgamation of Roman law with the general customs (mainly 
 of Teutonic origin), could not, on German soil, be regarded 
 simply as a foreign legal system, for Roman law had long been 
 domiciled with us ; its precision and brevity, its incisiveness 
 and logical clearness, bore comparison extremely well with the 
 casuistic verbosity of the Prussian civil code ; and in these 
 thoroughly bourgeois Rhenish territories where was now to be 
 discovered a foundation for the patrimonial coiurts, or for the 
 rigid feudal law of Frederician days ? 
 
 1 Solms-Laubach, Account of the conditioDs in Julich-Cleves-Berg, August i8, 
 1819. 
 
 497 2K 
 
History of Germany 
 
 After deliberating for two years, the commission laid before 
 the monarch the result of its negotiations. It recommended 
 that the Rhenish legal system should be maintained until the 
 Prussian law-books had been revised, and in a detailed opinion 
 it described how trial by jury kept the legal idea alive among 
 the people, inspired love for the law, restricted the arbitrariness 
 of officials, and enlarged the narrowness of juristic culture by that 
 free knowledge of the world and of men which was characteristic 
 of the laity. Kircheisen. who lived and moved amid the ideas 
 of the old judiciary, was profoundly disturbed by this memorial. 
 He feared more especially that in the old provinces public confi- 
 dence in the courts would be impaired if the jury system 
 were to be retained on the Rhine, and, in a rejoinder, he 
 angrily criticised the " detestable distinction between public and 
 private procedure." Even in the old provinces, he said, the 
 decisions were not private ; the old German adage " where 
 the courts are, there shall the best be," was more adequately 
 fulfilled in Prussia, where judges were selected with so much 
 care, than it was in France ; in every question of fact a legal 
 question was also involved, and the latter was comprehensible 
 to the legal expert alone ; it could never be allowed that the 
 judge should arbitrarily enfeeble the laws when they conflicted 
 with public opinion ; and how could the state renounce the 
 right, in case of incomplete proof, of visiting the accused with 
 extraordinary punishment ? ^ The minister carefully marshalled 
 all the sound and unsound technical objections to trial by jury 
 which were dominant in the minds of jurists of the old school 
 accustomed to definite rules of evidence. He was not influenced 
 by political anxieties, for the jury system had not yet been 
 adopted as part of the liberal programme. 
 
 Beyme, however, took the side of the commission, and 
 secured the king's approval. Upon the left bank of the Rhine, 
 and in Berg, the French legal system remained temporarily 
 in operation ; and on June 21st a supreme court of appeal 
 for the Rhenish land was constituted in Berlin, under the presi- 
 dency of Sethe. Daniels, equally distinguished as judge and 
 as man of learning, became president of the court of appeal 
 in Cologne. Everyone on the Rhine was acquainted with the 
 talented man ; all spoke of his personal resemblance to Socrates ; 
 everyone related anecdotes of his colossal memory, and of his 
 
 1 Kircheisen, Opinion concerning the organisation of justice in the Rhenish 
 provinces, July, i8i8. 
 
 498 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 Ulpian-like penetration. In his personality was incorporated 
 that remarkable combination of German and of French culture 
 which the Rhinelanders were at that time still accustomed to 
 claim. So profound was his knowledge of French law that by 
 the French themselves Daniels was regarded as the leading 
 expert in this subject, and yet he remained a German jurist, 
 for everyone who wished to find his way through the labyrinth 
 of the ancient law of Electoral Cologne had recourse to Daniels' 
 university note-books, now yellow with age. Under his leader- 
 ship, there gradually came into existence the modem caste of 
 Rhenish lawyers, men richly endowed with talent, proud of the 
 legal system of the Rhine, and of the forensic eloquence which 
 flourished in this region ; but men who, while extremely 
 receptive for the formal political wisdom of the French, were 
 without understanding of the just peculiarities of the German 
 north-east. This caste constituted an entirely new force in 
 Prussian poUtical hfe, and one whose power increased as the 
 years passed, and as hberalism began to extol trial by jury 
 as a palladium of popular freedom. 
 
 Among the numerous pressing cares of Prussian policy was 
 the question whether the bold venture of an inspired and warlike 
 time, the army law of 1814, would now stand the test in the 
 days of relaxation and poverty. The great majority of the 
 generals held firmly to the ideas of Scharnhorst and Boyen. 
 Gneisenau, more particularly, was never weary of referring to 
 the Landwehr as the " sanatorium " which alone could keep 
 the state on its feet amid its stronger neighbours ; no other 
 nation could rival Prussia in this respect, for no other possessed 
 so loyal, self-sacrificing, and highly-cultured a population. On 
 the other hand, the foreign envoys all expressed adverse 
 opinions against the new mihtary organisation — some because 
 they secretly feared universal military service and the incalcu- 
 lable force of this national army, and others because they 
 genuinely regarded the bold innovation as an idealistic dream. 
 Schamhorst's ideas had as yet found no acceptance in foreign 
 lands. The old professional soldiers of France, forgetful of the 
 blows they had recently suffered, regarded the Prussian " army 
 of children " with contempt. Czar Alexander spoke in good 
 faith when he continually warned the Prussian generals that 
 with such half-soldiers it was impossible either to conduct a 
 war or to repress a rising. 
 
 499 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Even the high officials had been by no means completely 
 convinced by Boyen's able memorial. Whilst Biilow and Beyme 
 openly demanded a return to the old miUtary system, others, 
 without distinction of party, came forward with bland pro- 
 posals to make things easier for the upper classes. Schuck- 
 mann regarded it as indisputable that a young man of culture 
 could be transformed into an efficient infantry soldier in six 
 weeks at most ; Solms-Laubach advised that the students of 
 Bonn and Diisseldorf should be summoned merely to occasional 
 drills on Sunday. Schon looked down with philosophic dis- 
 dain upon the parade-ground arts of the handicraftsmen of 
 war ; he desired that all the officers of the Landwehr up to 
 the colonels should be appointed by the circle-estates, and was 
 of opinion that three days' training per annum was amply suffi- 
 cient for the military education of a volunteer.* So profoundly 
 had the contempt for a strict military training which foimd 
 expression in Rotteck's works, permeated the circles of the 
 statesmen. 
 
 Among the notable publicists of Prussia there was hardly 
 one to be found who displayed an understanding of the essen- 
 tial preconditions of a military system truly fit for war. Even 
 Benzenberg, the intelligent Rhenish patriot, wrote bluntly to 
 his well-wisher Gneisenau to the effect that Belle Alliance had 
 taught the nation how imnecessary was all the torment of the 
 parade ground. Arndt desired wherever possible to content 
 himself in peace-time with a permanent general staff ; the 
 Landwehr would do the rest. The no less patriotic author of 
 the widely-read writing Preussen uber Alles wenn es mil (1817) 
 also regarded a standing army as superfluous, and thought that 
 the country could get along very well with a Landwehr main- 
 tained by the communes. Even the particularists who enthusi- 
 astically advocated the proportional allotment of taxation, 
 endeavoured to exploit the national army for their special 
 purpose, and recommended the construction of ten independent 
 provincial Landwehr corps under the supervision of the provincial 
 diets. The Polish nobiHty, in particular, took up the idea 
 with suspicious zeal. " Without national sentiment a Landwehr 
 is impossible " — such were the words employed by von 
 Bojanowski and other landlords of Posen in repeated memorials ; 
 
 ^ Memorials to Hardenberg sent by Schuckmann, July 11, 1817 ; Schon, June 
 21 ; Solms-Laubach, September 21, 1818. Sch5n to General Borstell, June 29, 
 
 1818. 
 
 500 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 if the king would grant the grand duchy an independent 
 Landwehr the Polish nobles would joyfully flock to the 
 colours. 1 
 
 When the authorities began to put the army law into operation, 
 nowhere was less resistance displayed than on the Rhine, this 
 being contrary to all expectation. In Rhineland the common 
 people regarded the short period of service as an alleviation 
 after the severe Napoleonic conscription, and even the upper 
 classes accepted their miUtary obligations without murmuring, 
 since these were in accordance with the idea of general equality 
 before the law. Loud, on the other hand, were the complaints 
 voiced by those in the east who had formerly enjoyed special 
 privileges, by the great towns which had been free from military 
 obUgations, and by the proud nobihty of New Hither Pomerania 
 and Saxony. Three times did the municipal delegates of Berlin 
 defiantly demand the re-estabUshment of the ancient military 
 freedom of their commune, until the king threatened to publish 
 the names of the signatories in the newspapers ; and when, 
 in the summer of 1817, the time came for the Landwehr of 
 Breslau to take the miUtary oath, disorders broke out in the 
 streets, though unquestionably the maladroitness of some of 
 the officials and the notorious pugnacity of the Breslau mob 
 were larger factors in these disturbances than any resistance on 
 the part of the men called to arms. Nothing but the authority 
 of the absolute crown could make a way through this thorny 
 thicket of opposition, nothing else could rescue for Germany 
 the principles of the new military organisation. Beyond 
 question, a general Prussian diet, if summoned at such a 
 moment, would have immediately begun a fight against universal 
 military service. 
 
 In carrying out the work, serious technical difficulties were 
 encountered, which seemed to confirm all the doubts and 
 anxious considerations of the foreign world. The mere provi- 
 sion of weapons for the Landwehr had to proceed at a very 
 slow pace owing to the deplorable condition of the finances. For 
 the first levy, Boyen, in a continual struggle with the minister 
 of finance, had at length secured the necessary means, so that, 
 in December, i8ig, of the prescribed equipment of arms there 
 were still lacking no more than 8,415, muskets ; many circles 
 voluntarily furnished their soldiers with side-arms and busbies. 
 But nothing had yet been done to supply the needs of 
 
 * Klewitz, Report from Poland, September 24, 1817. 
 
 SOI 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the second levy, which of 174,080 muskets, still required 
 
 135.559- ' 
 
 It was owing to the same lack of funds that the strength 
 
 of the standing army was from the first established at too low 
 a figure. The army law had promised that the number of the 
 troops of the line should be regulated by the existing circum- 
 stances of the nation. The supplementary Landwehr-ordinance 
 of November 21, 1815, declared more modestly : " To the 
 standing army of moderate size will, in the future, be superadded 
 the Landwehr." Consequently the peace strength of the army 
 was temporarily established at barely one per cent, of the 
 population ; including the army corps in France, this strength 
 was 115,000 men, no more than in the year 1806. Beyond 
 question, the men who were now summoned received, in three 
 years of uninterrupted service, a far more careful training than had 
 been effected during the closing years of the older army organi- 
 sation, when furloughs became so frequent that the majority 
 of the soldiers, notwithstanding their liability to service for 
 twenty years, remained only about twenty-two months with 
 the colours Moreover, the concentration of the army in 
 fortresses and large towns was beneficial to training, and this 
 concentration was maintained, although the abandoned minor 
 garrison towns besieged the throne with petitions. But this 
 weak peace army, with its thirty-eight (subsequently forty-four) 
 infantry regiments, was far from making adequate provision for 
 the military education of the entire youth competent to bear 
 arms. It was all the more inadequate because the population 
 underwent a very rapid increase, as regularly happens in the 
 case of vigorous nations at the close of devastating wars. In 
 addition, an entire third of the standing army was still composed 
 of re-enlisted men, of those who voluntarily continued to serve 
 after their three years' term had expired ; the ancient customs 
 of the professional soldiery continued to operate, and in this 
 time in which it was difficult to gain a livelihood, military 
 service seemed to many a tolerably satisfactory occupation. 
 Consequently a very large proportion of those fit to bear arms 
 could not be accepted for service, and at the outset the rejec- 
 tions were often effected with a lamentable lack of consistency. 
 In one place the supernumeraries were by an easy-going 
 committee completely discharged from further military service, 
 whilst in another, an officer in whose blood the old Prussian 
 
 ^ Arms-report of the Landwehr, December, 1819. 
 502 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 preference for " the tall fellows " still lingered would select his 
 men by their stature. Ultimately, selection by lot was intro- 
 duced, and those who were thus discharged from the regular 
 term of three years' service were scantily trained for three 
 months, as Landwehr recruits, by officers of the line specially 
 appointed for the purpose, and were then apportioned to the 
 Landwehr. 
 
 Consequently the Landwehr consisted in part of veteran 
 soldiers, in part of imperfectly trained reservists, whilst its 
 officers' corps, which still existed quite independently beside 
 that of the army of the line, deteriorated year by year. The 
 officers experienced in warfare were gradually eliminated, whilst 
 the young Einjdhrigers [Einjahrige-Freiwilligen, soldiers serving one 
 year at their own expense], who now obtained commissions after 
 one year of service and a few short drills, showed themselves, 
 in most cases, to be even more inexperienced than their troops. 
 The sole connecting link between the army of the Une and 
 the Landwehr was constituted by the Landwehr-inspectors, who 
 were subordinate to the commanding generals of the line, there 
 being one inspector to each governmental district. The king 
 did all he could to increase the mihtary self-confidence of the 
 Landwehr ; he bestowed colours on this body, constituted a 
 Landwehr-guard, and nominated the princes of the blood as 
 commanders of the squadrons of this force. The generals 
 became accustomed after manoeuvres to shower praise upon the 
 Landwehr, this offering a remarkable contrast with the strict 
 discipline that obtained in the army of the line. The old 
 fables of the battles fought by the Landwehr in the War of 
 Liberation had gradually obtained credence throughout the 
 nation; the Landwehr was considered the true national 
 army, the supporting pillar of Prussian power. Dehghted 
 crowds gathered to watch the Landwehr manoeuvres, and the 
 bureaucracy shared this preference, for a considerable propor- 
 tion of the Landwehr officers were derived from the class of 
 the officials. 
 
 But, to the keen mihtary insight of the king, it was clearly 
 evident to what an extent these national troops were still 
 inadequately characterised by warlike efficiency ; even General 
 Kleist and other friends of the Landwehr could not conceal 
 from the war-lord that the cavalry was not worth much, and 
 that even the infantry, when extensive manoeuvres were in 
 progress, showed itself efficient only under the leadership of 
 
 503 
 
History of Germany 
 
 specially assigned officers of the line.» Yet. owing to the small 
 size of the army of the Une, the reserve army would in case 
 of war have immediately to be led against the enemy. That 
 which in the summer of 1813 had been a policy enforced by 
 the extremest need, was now to become the rule. Should 
 mobihsation be ordered, the field army would immediately be 
 increased to 298,000 men, of which the larger moiety (seven 
 classes among twelve) would consist of Landwehr men of the 
 first levy ; even if nothing more were in view than a military 
 demonstration for diplomatic reasons, the state would be forced 
 to call immediately to the colours all those fit to bear arms 
 up to the age of three-and-thirty, to deprive thousands of 
 families of their bread-winners, and seriously to disturb the 
 entire civic life of the country. It is true that, owing to the 
 cumbrous means of communication of those days, the greater 
 part of the army would be at least five weeks on the march 
 before it could draw near the enemy ; but would this brief 
 respite suffice to supplement the defective training of the Land- 
 wehr recruits ? How much more unfavourable, too, was now 
 the military situation of the national territory ; the state was 
 no longer protected against the first hostile onslaught by the 
 old outworks of Poland and the Rhenish lands, for its frontiers 
 now marched directly with those of three great powers. Here 
 was ground enough for serious anxiety. Profoundly concerned, 
 the king tmceasingly endeavoured to discover the right solution 
 for all the military, poUtical, and economic problems which 
 were comprised in the one great question of universal military 
 service, and discussed the matter with Witzleben. The most 
 deplorable defect of the new system, the impossibiUty of passing 
 the entire youth of the country through the school of the 
 army, was unfortunately at present irremediable ; the outlay 
 requisite for the necessary increase of the army of the line 
 was disproportionate to the national revenue and the economic 
 capacity of the people. But was it impossible in peace-time 
 to weld the Landwehr with the army of the Hne in so intimate 
 a fashion that the field army would no longer consist of two 
 quite unequal portions ? The organisers of the Prussian army 
 had now to face the same task which formerly Camot had 
 solved after his manner when he amalgamated the white regi- 
 ments of the line, dating from the old regime, with the blue 
 
 • Kleist's Report to the king concerning the Landwehr manoeuvres in Saxony, 
 November 24, 1817. 
 
 504 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 national guards of the republic, to constitute his new half- 
 brigades. 
 
 In these discussions there soon became manifest a difference 
 of opinion between the king and the ministers of war. Although, 
 naturally, Boyen did not believe the popular fables about the 
 Landwehr, he overestimated the military efficiency of this body. 
 His judgments were based upon his experiences in Billow's 
 corps ; here the Landwehr had always made a good showing, 
 for under the slack leadership of Bemadotte, and subse- 
 quently in the easy Dutch campaign, the troops had rarely 
 had to undertake forced marches or to suffer any extraordinary 
 hardships. The king, on the other hand, stUl clearly remem- 
 bered how httle tenacity had been displayed by the Landwehr of 
 Kleist's corps during the terrible rainy days after the battle 
 of Dresden ; he knew also that in the campaign of 1815, of 
 the troops which had been dispersed by the enemy, three-fourths 
 had belonged to the Landwehr. In order to avoid the recurrence 
 of such disasters, it was the king's wish that the Landwehr 
 should always drill and manoeuvre in co-operation with troops 
 of the line, that one brigade of the Une and one of the Land- 
 wehr should combine to form a single division, that numerous 
 officers of the line should be detached for command of the 
 Landwehr, and that the higher commands in the Landwehr 
 service should be regularly entrusted to officers of the line ; 
 whereas Boyen advised that the system of complete separation 
 of the two officers' corps should be retained, that friction 
 between soldiers and civilians might be avoided, and that the 
 peculiar spirit of the Landwehr might remain undisturbed. 
 
 Meanwhile Duke Charles of Mecklenburg ventured the first 
 open attack against the principles of the new military system. 
 In the spring of 1818, he sent his royal brother-in-law a lengthy 
 memorial wherein, without putting forward any proposals of 
 his own, he described in gloomy colours the serious dangers 
 threatening the throne, the licence of the press, the presumption 
 of the students, and, above all, Boyen's system of military 
 organisation ; this system was pressing arms into the hands of 
 those who were likely to rise in revolt ; the Landwehr arsenals were 
 not forgotten, places which could so readily be seized by a 
 mutinous force. » The reactionary party at length ventured to 
 
 * The main contents of this memorial can be ascertained from Witzleben's 
 Rejoinder of January 25, 1818 (Dorow, Witzleben, p. 93). The personality of its 
 author is manifest from a remark in Witzleben's Diary, May, 1819. 
 
History of Germany 
 
 express its heart-felt wishes. Even Knesebeck agreed with the 
 duke, whilst Prince Augustus, who had been one of the first 
 to defend the idea of universal military service, now regarded 
 the undeniable defects of the Landwehr as so serious that he 
 recommended a return to the ancient system of long service 
 with extensive furloughs. Witzleben inveighed with all the anger 
 of his honourable heart against the men " who desired to separate 
 the ruler from the people, the head from the body." Universal 
 military service, he declared in his eloquent rejoinder, is " a 
 bond which unites the entire nation, the ends of this bond 
 being placed in the monarch's own hands." The king was not 
 misled by his brother-in-law's warnings, although in moments 
 of depression he did, indeed, admit that it was a serious matter 
 to make all men soldiers. The responsibiUty for the difficult 
 experiment, which seemed to him by far the most important 
 task of Prussian statecraft, pressed heavily on his conscience. 
 No other state, he said to Witzleben, is laying such heavy 
 burdens upon its people, and yet it is impossible to proceed 
 with strict justice, and to train all those who are competent 
 to bear arms ! ^ In the end he agreed that, with all its 
 defects, the new order was a tolerably satisfactory middle course 
 between the old system and the dilettantists' dreams of an 
 armed nation. He never became unfaithful to the ideas of 
 Schamhorst. But he regarded a closer union between Landwehr 
 and line as indispensable ; and since Boyen obstinately resisted 
 this thoroughly sound plan, there gradually ensued an estrange- 
 ment between the king and the minister of war which ultimately 
 led to Boyen's fall. 
 
 In a few years, and with astonishing rapidity, the nation 
 became fully accustomed to the new military organisation which 
 had at first been so unwillingly accepted. The justice of the 
 principle of universal military service was obvious. The manly 
 view that service in arms is an honour, corresponded to the 
 natural sentiments of a valiant nation ; and however heavy the 
 burden, it did not prove destructive, for in matters of marriage 
 and domicile, in trade and industry, Prussia enjoyed freedoms 
 still almost unknown to the petty states of Germany. With 
 what wonder had the old burghers of Berlin at first shaken 
 their heads when they saw a common soldier driving about in 
 a smart carriage ; soon the Einjdhriger was an everyday sight, 
 and quite spontaneously it became the rule that the Einjdhrige- 
 
 1 Witzleben's Diary, May g, iSig. 
 506 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 Freiwilligen did not, as the legislators had expected, enter the 
 yagers and the guards, but whatever detachment of troops were 
 nearest to their homes, so that the cultured youth became 
 distributed throughout the army. Universal mihtary service 
 showed itself the most effective instrument for the amalgamation of 
 the old and the new provinces. Numerous Saxon, Westphalian, 
 French, Polish, and Swedish officers, who flocked especially 
 to the cavalry regiments, rapidly fused with the Old Prussian 
 officers, when all were engaged together in serious work — for 
 since annually almost one-third of the troops were new recruits, 
 the peace service of the officer was no longer, as it had formerly 
 been, a life of busy idleness. In the school of the army, the 
 undisciplined sons of the Pohsh provinces were trained in order, 
 cleanliness, and good behaviour ; and in this way many of them 
 were first taught to speak German. Although the Rhenish 
 peasant continued as a rule to say commiseratingly of his son 
 serving in the army, "he is in the hands of the Prussians," 
 and although many a soldier of the province of Saxony sorrow- 
 fully complained of being " in foreign service," military 
 discipUne was extremely good for the young men. Amdt, a 
 man with a keen eye for such matters, soon noticed how 
 remarkably the young men of these provinces began to differ 
 from their fellow tribesmen in the petty states. Among the 
 latter there stUl prevailed a good-natured and easy-going philis- 
 tinism, whereas among the former there was seen that stiff 
 " Prussian manner " which WcLs in such ill-repute among the 
 neighbours of Prussia, an abrupt and somewhat arrogant self- 
 assertiveness, which might at times become extremely disagree- 
 able, but which corresponded better with the character of a 
 noble nation than the diffident timidity of the ancient days of 
 undisturbed domestic life. It was through her army that 
 Prussia regained that with which no great nation can per- 
 manently dispense, a national style, a proud sense of a secure 
 footing in the world. And the pride of this nation in arms was 
 German through and through ; it was rooted in the conscious- 
 ness that at long last Germany's destiny was dependent on 
 the black-and-white flag. 
 
 The idea of universal military service originated in a political 
 ideahsm which reminds us of the energy characteristic of the 
 idea of the state in classical days. The same free and broad 
 conception of the state was manifested in the sphere of 
 
 507 
 
History of Germany 
 
 education. Among all those who had kept their minds alert 
 during the experiences of recent years, the conviction had 
 become firmly established that the reconciliation of the Prussian 
 state with the new culture of the nation, a reconciliation at 
 length reahsed, must be secured as a permanent acquirement. 
 What was needed was to carry further the work begun with 
 the foundation of the Berlin university, to realise in its 
 completeness the Old Prussian idea of universal compulsory 
 education, to inspire the lower and middle schools with the 
 spirit of the new science, and thus to acquire for the state of 
 Frederick a position in the intellectual life of the nation that 
 would be worthy of Prussia's renown in arms. During the 
 three-and-twenty years of Baron von Altenstein's administration, 
 this task was for the most part solved. The state which, in 
 the hard struggle for existence, had as a rule allowed science 
 to starve, gradually came to utilise its resources more effectively 
 on behalf of popular education than did any other great power 
 of the day, so that the educational institutes of Prussia might 
 be compared with the best in Europe. Thus a practical demon- 
 stration was afforded of the futility of that remarkable German 
 prejudice, based upon the unwholesome experiences of domestic 
 history, that the intellectual Hfe can flourish only in the narrows 
 of petty states. Altenstein, Franconian by birth, and inclined 
 from the first towards the liberal views of the officials of 
 Hardenberg's school, understood extremely well how to assimilate 
 the ideas of leading minds, so that even Stein, who had so 
 little in common with Franconian views, gladly employed the 
 talented official to draft his legislative proposals, and was always 
 sure of finding his own ideas faithfully reflected in the work 
 of this skilful pen. When, after Stein's fall, Altenstein had 
 himself become leader of the state, he had indeed suffered a 
 lamentable shipwreck ; his fine intelligence was never deceived 
 regarding the dangers of the situation, but his spirit was timid, 
 so that he lacked the energy of resolution. When for hours 
 in succession he presented his considerations and counter- 
 considerations, without ever coming to an issue, his audience was 
 astonished alike at the clear-sightedness and the barrenness of 
 his mind. Subsequently, at the time of the second peace of Paris, 
 he arranged for the restoration of the books and art treasures 
 which had been stolen by the French, executing this task with 
 expert knowledge, and thus by his distinguished culture he 
 again attracted the attention of the king, who had long borne 
 
 508 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 a grudge against him for his pusillanimous proposal to cede 
 Silesia. Consequently, during the changes in the ministry in 
 1817, he at length entered the sphere best suited to his tadents. 
 A friendly destiny enabled him, by the activities of his later 
 years, to erase from the minds of his contemporaries the adverse 
 impressions induced by his disastrous policy in 1809. 
 
 He was at home in all branches of science, and never 
 felt happier than when able to pursue his ideas in a life of 
 quiet contemplation. To him philosophy seemed the queen of the 
 sciences, but even in this department, his favourite, he showed 
 rather a gentle receptivity than the activity of independent 
 thought ; passively he felt the tendencies of the time, and soon 
 turned from the doctrines of Fichte to the rising star of Hegel. 
 He took a lofty view of his new of&ce, one to which " the 
 highest that man can do " was entrusted, and laid before himself 
 the task of transforming the Prussian state in Hegel's sense, 
 in order to make of it a realm of the intelligence. Year in 
 and year out he carried on a good-humoiu'ed contest with the 
 thrifty Ladenberg for the necessary financial resources ; if the 
 board of general control remained inexorable, he availed himself 
 of his own private means, to provide pensions for the widows 
 of preachers and travelling allowances for young artists and men 
 of learning. The freedom of research also found in him a 
 faithful protector. When the zealots of reaction besieged him 
 with complaints and denunciations, he quietly endeavoured to 
 appease them by his favoiuite saying : " Many of the evils 
 of the time, time itself will cure." 
 
 Altenstein's secular sentiments gave him Httle understanding 
 for the newly awakening reUgious Ufe. The demand for a free 
 Protestant congregational organisation seemed to him hardly 
 less dangerous to the state than was the inordinate ambition 
 of the ultramontanes. Had not Hegel shown so clearly that 
 the church, the realm of the imagination, must be definitely sub- 
 ordinated to the state, the realm of the inteUigence ? Consequently 
 in ecclesiastical poUtics he held fast to the moderate territorial 
 system of the civil code. The supreme head of the state should 
 Meetly lead the Protestant church in accordance with Protestant 
 principles, and the Catholic church in accordance with Catholic 
 principles, exercising control also in matters relating to the 
 internal life of these churches, and should endeavour " to adapt " 
 both to the character of the state. Yet he manipulated his 
 system warily in the honourable intention of ensuring that the 
 
 509 
 
History of Germany 
 
 church should herself feel contented under the benevolent tute- 
 lage of the state, and did in fact succeed, in circumstances of 
 exceptional difficulty, in maintaining ecclesiastical peace almost 
 completely undisturbed for two decades. In the council of 
 state, Altenstein presided as representative of the chancellor, 
 and the cautious man was often embarrassed by the violence 
 of party struggles. If a decision was forced upon him, he 
 always took the side of Hardenberg, for whom since Franconian 
 days he had preserved an almost servile devotion. He needed 
 a powerful prop, for Schuckmann could not forgive the subdivi- 
 sion of his department, and soon entered into a conspiracy with 
 the privy-counciUors Kamptz and Schultz to fight against the 
 new minister of public worship and education, whom they regarded 
 as inspired by demagogic sympathies. 
 
 When Altenstein had shaken down a little in his office, 
 he wrote to the chancellor : " My whole department seems to 
 have become indurated and shrunken, it must be reanimated 
 and set in motion once more."^ Certainly Schuckmann had 
 troubled himself very little about the problems of higher educa- 
 tion, which lay far outside his circle of vision. Among the 
 councillors, however, the spirit of Humboldt had not yet died 
 out. Working in the department of education was Humboldt's 
 friend Silvern, from the Teutoburger Wald, a classically trained 
 philologian, who had once been in regular correspondence with 
 Schiller, and who had remained faithful to the ideahsm of the 
 great days of Weimar. At the head of the department of 
 public worship was Nicolovius, the pupil and fellow-countryman 
 of Hamann, a strict and pious Protestant. He hved for the 
 idea of the unity of Christendom, and thanks to his friendly 
 intercourse with the circle of Princess Gahtzin he had learned to 
 recognise the moral energies of the Catholic church. For many 
 years on intimate terms with Goethe, he followed the literary 
 activities of the time with a happy receptivity. In Konigsberg, 
 under Stein's leadership, he had been active in the work 
 of poUtical reform. All the clergy throughout the country 
 remembered the beautiful words in which, at the opening of 
 the War of Liberation, he had exhorted the Christian pastors 
 to the performance of their patriotic duties. 
 
 When he took up office, Altenstein found a difficult piece 
 of work Hearing its conclusion, the foundation of two universities. 
 The Frederick university in Halle had been twice closed during 
 
 ^ Altenstein to Hardenberg, December 26, 1817. 
 510 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 the period of foreign dominion, and had been reopened subse- 
 quent to the entry of the Prussians. After the desolation of 
 the years of war, it needed a thorough reorganisation, more 
 especially since it was now to provide for the Thuringian regions 
 a substitute for the long abohshed university of Erfurt. There 
 had also to be considered the difficult question whether, side by 
 side with the home of Protestant pietism, there could continue 
 to exist in adjacent Wittenberg the ancient enemy, the Frederick 
 university of Electoral Saxony. Nothing lay further from the 
 king's mind than the intention to bring about an atrophy of 
 provincial culture to the advantage of Berhn. It was his hope 
 that, wherever possible, in every province a flourishing university 
 should come into existence, as the intellectual centre of the 
 local life of the territory ; least of all could the faithful Protes- 
 tant desire, without urgent necessity, to interfere with the cradle 
 of the Reformation. But in unhappy Wittenberg there was 
 nothing left to destroy. For two hundred years the university, 
 which had once been the most glorious of all the universities 
 of Germany, had been no more than a caricature of its ancient 
 greatness, the acropohs of a torpid faith in the letter, which 
 fulminated its anathemas ex cathedra Lutheri, and where religion 
 was stifled by theology. When at length, towards the close 
 of the eighteenth century, a freer spirit found its way into 
 the reformer's desecrated lecture-hall, it was too late to avert 
 the fall of the university. The siege of 1813 effected its death- 
 blow ; the students were scattered, the library was broken up, 
 the university buildings were burned, and the little group of 
 professors, who had fled to Schmiedeberg, themselves proposed 
 to the Saxon court that the university should be united with 
 that of Leipzig. 
 
 Was Prussia now to erect a new structure upon these ruins, 
 in a town destined to be a frontier fortress, so close to the 
 three other Saxon universities which already, often enough, stood 
 in one another's light ? The hving present demanded its rights 
 from the glorious past. Halle, notwithstanding its severe losses, 
 still possessed a tolerably complete teaching faculty, numerous 
 institutions, and a rapidly increasing body of students. It was 
 with a heavy heart that the king, while still in Vienna, in April, 
 1815, commanded that the two Frederick universities should 
 amalgamate in Halle. Even the Wittenberg professors did not 
 venture to offer any opposition. In the spring of 1817, seven 
 of them joined the new university of Halle- Wittenberg ; these 
 
 511 
 
History of Germany 
 
 seven were all that remained of the brilliant foundation of 
 Frederick the Wise. But the population of the duchy of Saxony 
 complained bitterly that in thisjubilee year of the Reformation 
 the university of the old town2of ^Luther should be transferred 
 to |_Halle. Angrily they ^declared^that Prussia had now torn 
 the^heart out of the Saxon land. , j,Only after some years, when 
 the ^^new double university flourished vigorously under the careful 
 guidance of Altenstein, did people begin to see that the king 
 had done what was necessary, and that the province had lost 
 nothing in the way of intellectual energy through the destruction 
 of two decrepit universities. It was only the town of Witten- 
 berg which refused to be concihated even by the seminary of 
 preachers which was^to serve to it as compensation; and as 
 much as a generation later, in the year 1848, it demanded from 
 the Berlin National Assembly the re-establishment of the ancient 
 academic glories. 
 
 In taking over the western provinces, the king had promised 
 them a university. Here parity of beliefs was to prevail, for 
 the new institution was to replace at once the completely 
 destroyed Protestant university of Duisburg and the abohshed 
 Catholic universities of Cologne, Bonn, and Treves, whilst 
 Miinster was to retain its Catholic academy as a theological 
 seminary. A violent quarrel now broke out regarding the seat 
 for the Rhenish university, a quarrel which for the first time 
 brought to hght the secret wishes of the clerical party in 
 the west. For centuries Cologne had boasted the greatest 
 university on the Rhine, and the city outshone all the other 
 towns in the country to so great an extent, alike through its 
 historic reputation and through the abundant artistic monuments 
 it could display, that even unprejudiced persons like Niebuhr, 
 Schenkendorff, and Wallraf, the Cologne collector, considered 
 that here alone could the intellectual life of the Rhineland find 
 its proper centre. Friedrich Schlegel, on the other hand, and 
 his ultramontane friends, exploited the romantic charms of the 
 venerable town as a welcome excuse for the achievement of 
 profounder designs. From ancient days the holy city of Cologne 
 had been a bulwark of the Roman Catholic party in the empire, 
 and its population, a full third of whom were still beggars, 
 had borne an evil reputation for dull-witted intolerance. Here 
 the obscuri viri of |the sixteenth century, and subsequently the 
 papal legates and the Jesuits, had worked after their kind; 
 here, in the shadow of the archiepiscopal chair, a Protestant 
 
 512 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 faculty would be as little able to thrive as would free secular 
 science ; here there was place only for a Rhenish provincial 
 university which would leave undisturbed the profound slumber 
 of the spirit characteristic of the ancient "priest's alley" of the 
 empire ; a university here would have done nothing to further 
 the reconciliation of the western march with the Protestant 
 north. As an intelligent Rhinelander wrote to Hardenberg: 
 " Those who so decisively favour Cologne, do not in intimate 
 conversation conceal their beUef that this university might 
 constitute the fulcrum of an opposition. And of what an oppo- 
 sition ! That of the CathoHc principle against the Protestant. 
 The more intimately the government becomes acquainted with 
 the regions of the Rhine, the less will it incline to establish 
 the Rhenish university in Cologne."^ Amdt, too, who had 
 speedily made himself at home by the side of his German 
 stream, and Siivem, who was now engaged in installing the new 
 educational institutions on the Rhine, warned the chancellor 
 against the sacerdotal spirit of the episcopal town, recommending 
 instead, as the site of the imiversity, the charming Bonn, with 
 its beautiful ruined castles. 
 
 There in the rich bend of the valley, just before the 
 entrance to the Rhenish wonderland, another Heidelberg might 
 perhaps come into being, a city of free research and cheerful 
 student hfe, a centre of attraction to the German youth from 
 all quarters. Even the prosy Schuckmann was influenced by 
 the aroma of youth when, on one occasion, from the top of the 
 Coblenz gate, looking across the green river and the luxuriant 
 plain, he contemplated the steep summits of the Siebenge- 
 birge. " This is the place for us ! " he exclaimed in delight. 
 In the little town, the university was mistress, and was sure 
 of undisturbed freedom. During the last days of the electoral 
 regime, there had for ten years existed an active university, 
 representing the freer spirit of the Josephan enUghtenment in 
 opposition to the clergy of Cologne. These considerations 
 proved decisive, and on May 26, 1818, on the same day as 
 that on which the new customs-law was signed, the king 
 appointed the town of Bonn as the site of the Rhenish university. 
 
 This was the fourth university which had been founded 
 
 1 Memorial regarding the Rhenish university transmitted to the chancellor by 
 Klewitz, February 20, 1817. Other documents concerning the foundation of the 
 university of Bonn will be found in Heinrich von Sybel's Kleine historische Schriften, 
 Vol II., p. 433. 
 
 SI5 2L 
 
History of Germany 
 
 or completely reconstituted during this reign, and of all the 
 benefits for which the Rhineland has had to thank the crown of 
 Prussia, it was perhaps the greatest. Here once more was 
 manifested the old truth that the culture of a nation is ulti- 
 mately determined by the condition of the highest educational 
 institutions. In Rehfues, the talented Swabian, Bonn secured 
 an active and experienced curator, one who was a good judge 
 of men. Hiillmann, Sack, Noggerath, Harless, and the two 
 Welckers, joined the university at the outset, and Amdt was 
 also summoned by a cordial letter from Hardenberg, " to supply 
 for the youth of the place the keynote of their outlook on 
 life." A few years later, when Niebuhr accepted a chair, the 
 new university was already in a flourishing condition. So 
 strange had been the revolutions of destiny in Germany ; the 
 Prussian state, whose origins, were rooted in the north-eastern 
 region of German colonisation, led back this ancient homeland 
 of German civilisation into the ways of modern culture. In 
 the university of Bonn, and in the other educational institutions 
 which became connected with the university. Protestantism and 
 Catholicism displayed renewed faculty for mutual toleration. 
 It was here that the majority of the Rhinelanders first became 
 acquainted with the works of our classical Uterature ; and so 
 quickly did the highly gifted population make itself at home 
 in this new world, that the neighbours who had been accustomed 
 to deride the ignorance of the lands of the crosier were speedily 
 silenced. 
 
 During the opening years, the Rhenish university involved 
 a higher expenditure than all the other universities combined. 
 Little money was left available for the secondary schools. But 
 the indefatigable Johannes Schulze, whom Altenstein had 
 summoned from the Rhine, always found some way out of the 
 difficulty. His eyes sparkled with delight whenever a thoroughly 
 efficient teacher was gained for Prussia, and anyone who 
 witnessed his zeal on behalf of knowledge was ready to forgive 
 the ardent man his bUnd preference for the new Hegelian 
 doctrine. Many new gymnasia (higher schools) were founded, 
 especially in Posen and on the Rhine. In the year 1825, 133 
 were already in existence, and while at first it was necessary to 
 summon pedagogues from elsewhere, Prussian teachers soon 
 gained high repute, and Prussia was able to supply her neigh- 
 bours from her own superfluity. Nor did Altenstein neglect 
 elementary education. Nimierous training-schools for teachers 
 
 514 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 were established, and these soon began to furnish ajasters whose 
 knowledge was enormously in advance of that possessed by the 
 retired non-commissioned officers of the Frederician age, but 
 who still at times displayed the mischievous conceit of half-culture. 
 Especially characterised by a crude rationaUsm were the teachers 
 of East Prussia, those who gathered round Dinter, the robust 
 and jovial Upper Saxon — a man with the rough manners of 
 the people. On the Lower Rhine, Diesterweg worked just as 
 vigorously as Dinter, but less one-sidedly. After a few years, 
 Altenstein was able to show that in Prussia a larger proportion 
 of children attended school than in any other great state, 
 although the elementary schools still lagged far behind his 
 desires. In the west, the lower grades of the clergy opposed 
 a stubborn passive resistance, which was almost as difficult to 
 overcome as was the stupidity of parents in the Polish regions 
 of the realm. In the German provinces of the east, the poverty 
 of the numerous Uttle rural communes made improvement 
 extremely difficult. 
 
 The abundant activities of the department of education 
 did not satisfy the soaring idealism of Siivem. Like the 
 majority of his contemporaries, the excellent man overestimated 
 the value of that general programme of political reform which 
 Hardenberg had initiated during the years of his chancellorship. 
 He considered it necessary that the leading principles of the 
 educational system should be explained to the nation, and in 
 August, 1817, he arranged for the drafting of an elementary 
 education law which was to serve as an example for the whole 
 of Germany. He undertook this task with intense enthusicism, 
 inspired with political ideals in which the influence of Platonist 
 thought was unmistakable. The state, he declared in his 
 memorial, is itself a great educational institution, whose children 
 receive a characteristic stamp in respect alike of intelligence 
 and of sentiment ; the motive power of the Prussian state is 
 derived, not from the dead forces of nature, but from the 
 living energies of the human spirit, energies capable of eternal 
 increase and development. Altenstein, too, as a methodic philo- 
 sopher, demanded above all " a grand general plan," in order 
 that Prussia might be enabled, " through a pecuHar combination 
 of earnestness and maturity, to compete for the leading place 
 with the most highly-cultured peoples of Europe." The king 
 did not fail to recognise that the educational problem, conceived 
 in this lofty spirit, touched the very foundations of the entire 
 
History of Germany 
 
 life of the State, and consequently the committee which was 
 appointed to draft the education law was composed of members 
 of all the ministries — not excepting the ministry of war, which 
 was represented by General Wolzogen. 
 
 After twenty months, on June 27, 1819, a carefully 
 considered scheme was brought forward — the first of the 
 numerous education laws at which the Prussian state has vainly 
 laboured down to the present day. When the minister demanded 
 opinions from the lord-lieutenants and the bishops, he was to 
 learn that, in the disputed borderland between state and church, 
 well-intentioned practice attains its goal more easily than does 
 irrefragable doctrine. The general principles of the proposal 
 aroused a storm of contradictory views. On the theoretical 
 plane, no understanding could be secured regarding the partici- 
 pation of the church in the work of education, for the bishops 
 regarded popular education as causa ecclesiastica, while the lord- 
 lieutenants complained of the unjust favouring of the church. 
 There was also the thorny question to be considered how the 
 little villages of the east could bear the heavy burden of 
 schooling. Consequently the proposal was shelved, and Alten- 
 stein declared to the monarch that, for the time being, he 
 would " effect some kind of provisional organisation of the 
 school regulations." This practical method was really, for the 
 most part, that which best corresponded to the actual needs 
 of the time. The minister dealt with the schools in accordance 
 with the prescriptions of the civil code (T. II, Tit. 12) as 
 institutions which concerned the state alone. He adhered 
 firmly to the three essential ideas of the Frederician educational 
 policy : universal compulsory schooling, parity of creeds, and 
 apportionment of the cost of schooling among all heads of families 
 in the school districts. Now, as before, religious instruction 
 remained the first duty of the elementary school, and it was to 
 be strictly accordant to the creed of the majority in the 
 commune in which the school was situated ; the local clergyman 
 belonged ex officio to the school committee, and was entitled 
 to censure defects, but final decisions were retained in the 
 hands of the state. The philosophical minister was not in 
 favour of undenominational schools ; he knew how often they 
 lead to disturbance of religious peace, how they impair the 
 clearness and unity of instruction, and he permitted them only 
 when a mixed commune was not in a position to establish a 
 separate school for those of each creed. The teachers of the 
 
 SID 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 higher schools, too, as a rule belonged to one single confession ; 
 but Altenstein did not tie his hands in this respect ; and in 
 the CathoUc g5minasia of Rhineland, he appointed numerous 
 Protestant teachers, so long as a dearth of Catholic teachers 
 continued. Jews were by law excluded from holding office 
 as teachers in Christian educational institutions. Thus the 
 sovereignty of the state was preserved without any interference 
 with the good rights of the church. Friction with the ecclesiastical 
 authorities was rare, for the consequences of the freedom 
 of domicile did not become apparent except by degrees, and 
 the number of mixed communes was still comparatively small. 
 
 In the case also of the internal Ufe of the German 
 Protestant church these years of peace were a period of 
 rejuvenescence and renovation, the change being principally due 
 to the initiative of the Prussian crown. Like his Russian friend, 
 the king recognised in the victories of recent years the hand 
 of the Uving God, to whose will he wished to submit ; but 
 whilst the fantastical sentiments of Czar Alexander had inspired 
 him, under the influence of the devout mood resulting from the 
 war, to conceive the pretentious and yet futUe design of the 
 Holy Alliance, the sober-minded Frederick WilMam undertook 
 an inconspicuous and yet far more fruitful work. He determined 
 to pluck the ripe fruit of two centuries of peaceful thought, 
 to realise the cherished idea of his pious ancestors, the union 
 of the Protestant churches of Germany. To the new generation, 
 the ancient and unfortunate antagonism betweeen the two sister 
 churches of Protestantism, which long before had so greatly 
 favoured the victories of the counter-reformation and the great 
 desolation of the Thirty Years' War, now seemed strange and 
 hardly conceivable. In bourgeois hfe, the contrast between 
 the two churches was hardly noticed any longer ; even in 
 pastors' famihes, mixed marriages between members of the 
 Lutheran church and of the Reformed church, which as late 
 as the days of Thomasius had aroused such storms of theo- 
 logical indignation, now seemed matters of trifling importance. 
 The rationaUsts considered that they had outgrown all disputes 
 about dogma ; the offshoots of pietism regarded eternal love as 
 the great central feature of the Christian faith, tiiking the view 
 formerly expressed by Goethe in his youth, in his touching 
 Letters of a Rural Pastor. Even in the circles of the strictly 
 orthodox Protestants, the question was often mooted whether 
 
 S17 
 
History of Germany 
 
 ProtestantisHL could not return to that unbroken unity which 
 had been its happiness and its pride in the early days of the 
 Reformation. Recently, since the year 1802, Schleiermacher 
 had become the scientific advocate of evangelical union. That 
 which had still remained half concealed from the freest intelli- 
 gences of the seventeenth century, from Calixt and Puffendorf, 
 from Spener and Leibnitz, was a matter of current belief to 
 the disciple of the new philosophy ; he knew that all knowledge 
 of the supersensual world is only an approximate cognition, 
 and that consequently different essays at approximation can 
 exist peacefully side by side as long as they do not abandon 
 the fundamental principle of Protestant freedom. The Reformed 
 church, the branch to which he himself belonged, sought the 
 essence of Christianity in the moral configuration of life, and 
 was therefore from the first more accessible to the idea of " the 
 unity of the evangelical name " than was the sentimentally 
 dogmatic profundity of Lutheranism. 
 
 In Prussia, the ecclesiastical policy of the reigning house 
 had long been cautiously preparing for this reunion. Even 
 after the conversion of John Sigismund, the Hohenzollerns 
 continued to regard themselves as attached to the Augsburg 
 confession, and did not abandon their position as rulers of the 
 Lutheran national church ; moreoyer, the Corpus Evangelicorum 
 of the Reichstag remained common to both Protestant churches. 
 By severe punishments, and by the example of their own 
 tolerance, they repressed the invectives of the Lutheran pulpit 
 orators ; they endeavoured to expel from the dogmatic system 
 of both churches everything which might be mutually offensive, 
 and since they never adopted in their national church the harsh 
 doctrine of predestination, they succeeded after a severe struggle 
 in inducing the Lutherans to abandon the practice of exorcism. 
 Frederick William I was already unwilhng to recognise any 
 longer a distinction between Lutherans and members of the 
 Reformed church, saying bluntly that this distinction was " all 
 humbug." By the civil law it was enjoined upon both churches 
 that in case of need they should admit one another's members 
 to the sacrament. In the reorganisation of the administration 
 during the year 1808, the Lutheran consistories and the direc- 
 torate of the Reformed church were alike abohshed, and the 
 ecclesiastical affairs of all three creeds were placed under the 
 supervision of a special section of the district governments. 
 Here economic considerations were decisive. But the king soon 
 
 518 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 recognised that the governance of the church required inde- 
 pendent organs, and consequently, by a cabinet order of April 
 30, 1815, he re-established the provincial consistories, but as 
 common authorities for both Protestant churches. The synods, 
 which were formed on January 2, 1817, also consisted of 
 clergy of both denominations. Thus, step by step, an approxi- 
 mation was made to the formation of a single great Protestant 
 national church. 
 
 Through the influence of his tutor Sack, Frederick William 
 had from youth upwards cherished the design of evangelical 
 union. Being inspired with very strong feelings regarding his 
 own relationship to his subjects, he regarded it as a profotmd 
 misfortune that, notwithstanding the Protestant behef he shared 
 with them, he did not belong to the church of the majority 
 of his people, that the church of Luther, whom he esteemed 
 most highly among £ill the reformers, was not his own. This 
 sentiment had become even more powerful since in Konigsberg 
 he had turned away from rationalism. The prophecy in the 
 Gospels, " that they may all be one ; as Thou, Father, art in 
 Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us," 1 moved 
 him to the depths of his soul. " In my humble opinion," he 
 frequently said in conversation with pastors, " the dispute about 
 the eucharist is no more than fruitless theological hair-splitting, 
 when compared with the straightforward biblical faith of primi- 
 tive Christianity." He regarded the union of the Protestant 
 churches as a return to the spirit of the Gospels, and was 
 delighted to learn that his favourite bishop Borowski, the 
 orthodox Lutheran, was just as favourable to this view as was 
 his own tutor Sack, a member of the Reformed church. The 
 pious old man, whose joyful exclamation, " events come to man 
 in accordance with his faith," had so frequently consoled the 
 prince in his hours of affliction, had been a friend of Kant, 
 and stood near enough to modem science to recognise that 
 the distinctions between the doctrines of the two Protestant 
 churches no longer possessed their ancient significance for the 
 Christian conscience of the present day. The king never doubted 
 that it was his vocation to found the evangelical union. He 
 took a high estimate of the duties imposed upon the sovereign 
 power in respect of church government ; he knew that the 
 Protestant church of Germany was largely indebted to its union 
 with the state authority for many of the virtues by which 
 
 * John xvii. 21. 
 
History of Germany 
 
 it was distinguished from the harsh sectarianism of the neigh- 
 bour lands, that to this it owed its broad spirit of tolerance 
 and its comparatively free attitude in secular matters ; he had 
 little knowledge of, and little hking for, the independent congre- 
 gational organisation of Calvinism. 
 
 Immediately after the first peace of Paris a theological 
 commission was appointed to draw up a common liturgy for 
 the Protestants of Prussia ; the pious prince desired to display 
 his gratitude for the miracles of this war by no lesser service 
 than the heaUng of the ancient fraternal schism. The tercen- 
 tenary of the Reformation was now approaching. Marheineke's 
 history of the Reformation, and numerous other works, recalled 
 to the Protestant world, now in a mood of joyful excitement, 
 the deeds of Martin Luther, which had been dear to both 
 churches in their early days ; in Nassau, where the great 
 traditions of the tolerant, heroic race of Orange still persisted, 
 the congregations of both faiths joined to form a single national 
 church. To the king of Prussia also, it now appeared that 
 the decisive hour had come. He wished to issue a personal 
 utterance to his people, to speak to them as the leading member 
 of the church (for he knew that burghers, countrjmien, and 
 the army, still attached some importance to their king's word), 
 and he contented himself with the simple, practical proposals 
 which five years earlier Bishop Sack had advanced in his work 
 on the reunion of the Protestant ecclesiastical parties. If in 
 both the evangelical churches the eucharist could be celebrated 
 in a similar way, in accordance with the ancient biblical ritual 
 of all Protestants, and if the pastors of both creeds could be 
 admitted without distinction to all pulpits, this outward union, 
 which would impose no constraint of conscience, might, as the 
 years passed, develop into a living community of spirits. 
 
 In the preliminary labours, the monarch was assisted by 
 his court bishop, Eylert, a man possessed of one of those pliable 
 prelate natures, which do not indeed hold up a light with the 
 courage of the confessor, but which are sometimes, as was 
 Thomas Cranmer, indispensable to the church in some work of 
 mediation. At his home in County Mark, where the two 
 confessions were intermingled in motley confusion, the clever 
 courtier had found the soil well prepared for evangelical union, 
 and the idea of a presbyterian organisation was more akin to 
 his mind than to that of the king ; in matters of dogma he 
 was never very far removed from the old rationalism. He now 
 
 520 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 drew up an address from the monarch to the consistories, 
 which was submitted for examination to the leading theologians 
 of Berlin, and was then published, on September 27, 1817. In 
 plain terms the king annoimced his resolve that at the centenary 
 festival of the Reformation he would receive the eucharist in 
 common with the Lutherans ; he considered that in this way 
 he would be acting in accordance with the spirit of Protest- 
 antism, and in conformity with the intentions of his ancestors 
 and of the reformers themselves. He was not contemplating a 
 personal change from one church to the other, but both churches 
 were to combine to constitute a reanimated evangeUcal Christian 
 church ; reconcihation must proceed from the freedom of indi- 
 vidual conviction, and must not result either from over-persuasion 
 or from indifference. His example, he hoped, would exercise 
 a beneficial influence upon all Protestant congregations through- 
 out the land, and would be generally imitated in spirit and 
 in fact. The impression produced by this heartfelt address was 
 profound and enduring. The Brandenburger synod, assembled 
 under the presidency of Schleiermacher, immediately declared 
 its agreement, and the venerable Sack, who died during these 
 agitated days, left the world with the happy presentiment that 
 the seed sown during his life was now springing up. 
 
 On October 31st, throughout the country, the Protestant 
 populace flocked to the churches, which had been decorated 
 for the festival. In BerHn, after the joint communion, Schleier- 
 macher grasped hands in front of the altar with Marheineke 
 the Lutheran. In the garrison church at Potsdam, the king 
 and his household, with a number of associates of both con- 
 fessions, received the sacrament ; on the next day, in Wittenberg, 
 he laid the foundation stone for the monument to the reformer. 
 What a contrast between the two first centenary festivals of 
 the Reformation ! Two hundred years earlier the storms of 
 the great war were threatening ; a hundred years before, the 
 church had been utterly lacking in intellectual energy ; now 
 there was once more displayed a creative act, an act of recon- 
 ciliation. The awakening of the historic sense had reacted for 
 blessing upon ecclesiastical life. To his nation, Luther no 
 longer appeared, as in the days of the old rationalism, merely 
 the antagonist of Rome; the new generation began gratefully 
 to recognise the constructive activities of the Reformation. 
 Most of the writings published in honour of the festival were 
 unmistakably characterised by a pious sentiment. The Catholic 
 
 521 
 
History of Germany 
 
 populace exhibited little ill-will towards the peaceful ceremonial, 
 although dissensions were not altogether lacking, and the polemic 
 writing of the Catholic priest Van Ess evoked a number of 
 angry rejoinders. The thought of union was so inevitable an 
 outcome of the history of German Protestantism, that Frederick 
 William's example was speedily followed by almost all the congre- 
 gations throughout Prussia and was soon voluntarily imitated 
 by other German states as well. In August, 1818, a formal 
 announcement was made in the collegiate church at Kaisers- 
 lautem that, by an agreement on the part of the congregations 
 in the Bavarian Palatinate, evangelical union had been established ; 
 but here, certainly, religious indifference played some part in 
 securing this success ; many of the enlightened Palatiners merely 
 asked themselves whether the union would increase the chtirch 
 taxes, and at once favoured the project when their minds had 
 been set at rest about this matter.^ Baden and some of the 
 Hessian provinces followed suit — ^in a word, all the German 
 territories in which both the Lutheran and the evangelical church 
 had a large following. 
 
 The subsequent progress of this great imdertaking did not 
 correspond to its auspicious beginnings. The king, in his 
 honourable good-feeling, had scorned to effect a specious adjust- 
 ment of the quarrel between the creeds, by an artificial formula 
 of unity ; the union was founded upon the hope that the 
 spirit of Christian love would look beyond the dogmas which 
 had kept the churches asunder, and would no longer regard 
 them as an obstacle to religious community. But in nearly 
 all places in which the Lutherans were still found almost 
 unmixed, where the name of die reformierten Sakermenter was 
 still used as a term of abuse, and where no practical need was 
 felt for the union, this expectation proved illusory ; in Saxony, 
 for instance, in Mecklenburg, and in Holstein. To the strict 
 Lutherans, the king's pious undertaking seemed a revolt of 
 reason against revelation ; for the religious sentiment, like the 
 artistic, demands always the most definite configuration of its 
 ideals, and is inclined to dread that the truth of salvation 
 will itself be lost if no more than a letter of the writ be 
 regarded as unessential. In the ninety-five new theses that 
 Claus Harms of Holstein despatched to the Reformation festival, 
 this view was put forward with passionate violence. The zealot's 
 
 1 My authority for this statement is afforded by the notes of the Bavarian ecclesi- 
 astical councillor von Schmitt. 
 
 522 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 mind was filled with the image of Luther when, at the Marburg 
 colloquy, he had written on the table in large letters the text, 
 " this is My body," and when to all objections he had answered 
 obstinately, " I cannot depart from the written word." Accord- 
 ing to Harms, " If at that time Christ's body and blood were 
 contained in the bread and wine, this is still so to-day." He 
 triumphantly recommended the new theses to the Saxon court 
 preacher Ammon, as a bitter medicine for the weak-in-faith 
 of the time. Ammon, the Dresden rationalist, who, guided by 
 the wisdom of this world, merely desired to promote the interests 
 of the great Lutheran national church, was indeed speedily 
 demohshed by a vigorous rejoinder from Schleiermacher ; but the 
 profound rehgious earnestness of Harms, the preacher of Kiel, 
 was not to be conquered by logical superiority. In Wittenberg, 
 too. Superintendent Heubner refused to join the evangelical 
 union, and soon, in this land of Luther, there became manifest a 
 tough passive resistance which, since it sprang from the mysterious 
 depths of the emotional life, ought to have been handled with 
 extreme discretion. Such gentle consideration was not to be 
 expected from the ecclesiastical government of Prussia. It is 
 true that the king would never exercise any pressure upon con- 
 science ; but the more firmly he was convinced of the upright- 
 ness of his own faith, the less was he able to understand the 
 honoiirable good-feeling of those on the other side. He appears 
 to have said to himself that it was his own personal interven- 
 tion which had alone rendered the union possible, and was now 
 painfully surprised to find that a counter-agitation began, even 
 in the reformed congregations of the Lower Rhine, in the ancient 
 home of the German synodal organisation. Here the union 
 was welcome, but the congregations would not recognise the 
 supreme episcopal authority of the king — to the horror of the 
 officials, who one and all still held firmly to the doctrines of 
 the territorial system. Even the well-meaning Solms-Laubach 
 wrote wamingly : " These synodists of Jiilich-Cleves-Berg are 
 just as dangerous as the ultramontanes. Both parties are 
 equally attacking the king's prerogative." * The unanticipated 
 strength of this twofold opposition was first plainly manifested 
 when the king undertook to provide his national church with 
 a common liturgy. The young union was still to experience 
 
 ^ Solms-Laubach, Report upon the state of affairs in Jiilich-Cleves-Berg, 
 August, iSig. 
 
 523 
 
History of Germany 
 
 difficult years, full of fierce struggles and deplorable aberrations, 
 before it could finally prove what its founder had desired it 
 to be, a work of peace. 
 
 § 3. THE PROVINCES, 
 
 Thus fruitful activity prevailed in almost all domains of 
 the national life. The far-sighted creative work of the official- 
 dom in Prussia and elsewhere in Germany was largely, perhaps 
 mainly, responsible for the notable increase in the general well- 
 being and for the great advances in culture during this long 
 period of peace, and nothing manifests more plainly the childish 
 political immaturity of the opposition in those days than the 
 reproach of barrenness which the liberal press was accustomed 
 to level against Hardenberg. While the council of state was 
 dealing with the question of fiscal reform, there began in the 
 provinces, always under the immediate supervision of the chan- 
 cellor, the work of the new administration, a work of reconstruc- 
 tion which was at once more difficult and more varied than 
 had been the tasks which King Frederick had had to undertake 
 after the Seven Years' War. 
 
 Nowhere had the dutiful sense of the officialdom to endure 
 such severe tests as in the province of Posen. As long as 
 hopes of gaining Warsaw were entertained, Hardenberg had 
 been willing to allow a certain amount of national independence 
 to the Polish provinces. But when Prussia acquired no more 
 than the narrow territorial area extending to the Prosna, a 
 region in which Germans already numbered nearly two-fifths 
 of the population, more cautious counsels prevailed. Since 
 the treaties of Vienna merely imposed upon the crown in general 
 terms the obligation to deal tenderly with Polish nationality,, 
 the territories severed from Warsaw were incorporated in the 
 Prussian state in exactly the same way as were the other 
 acquisitions, and had to render the same oath of allegiance. 
 This new region was not regarded as indivisible. The areas 
 round Thorn were reunited with their old home, the Ordensland ; 
 whilst out of the main constituents of the new territory there 
 was formed, with the addition of certain areas from West 
 Prussia, a new province, which received the name of the grand- 
 duchy of Posen — a name just as unmeaning from the outlook of 
 constitutional law as were the new titles of the grand-duchy of 
 the Lower Rhine and of the duchy of Saxony. Whilst still in 
 
 524 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 Vienna, the king issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of 
 Posen wherein it was declared : " You have retained a father- 
 land, and this affords proof of my regard for your devotion. 
 You are being incorporated in my monarchy without having 
 to renounce your nationaUty." But, as was expressly declared 
 by the chancellor in the preUminary considerations, these words 
 in no way impHed a recognition that the province occupied 
 a separate position. In order to do honour to the conquered 
 nation, the king assigned to the grand-duchy as sole distinction 
 from the other provinces, a separate coat of arms, the white 
 eagle of Poland on an inescutcheon charged upon the Prussian eagle, 
 and gave them a statthalter of the blood of the Jagellons, 
 Prince Anton Radziwill. But, just as in the other provinces, 
 the administration was vested exclusively in the lord-lieutenant. 
 The statthalter was merely entitled to demand information 
 regarding the course of affairs, to ascertain the wishes of the 
 inhabitants, and to keep them informed regarding the intentions 
 of the monarch. On August 3, 1815, on the occasion of taking 
 the oath of allegiance. Prince Radziwill expressly warned his 
 countrymen not to entertain dangerous illusions, promising them 
 a full share in the civic hberties which Prussia guaranteed to 
 all her subjects, including respect for their " peculiarities " in 
 language, manners, and customs ; but promising them no separate 
 rights whatever. 
 
 The new province comprised the nuclear region of the 
 ancient Great Poland. Here, in the celebrated town of Gnesen, 
 the town of the seven hills, the white eagle had once made 
 its eyrie; here were to be found some of the most sacred relics 
 of Pohsh history, the tomb of Adalbert in Gnesen, and the 
 pilgrimage church of Tremessen ; and the nobiUty of Great 
 Poland had always been celebrated for ardency of national pride. 
 Among all the vassals of France, the Poles had adhered longest 
 to the side of Napoleon, even down to the time of the battle 
 of Montmartre. During the hundred days, the Germans in the 
 province had flocked to the colours with shouts of joy, but 
 the Polish nobles immediately entered into secret communication 
 with the Tuileries, and the authorities found it necessary to 
 remind them that treason was legally punishable with death.* 
 After the Imperator's second fall, discontented spirits turned 
 their hopes towards the neighbouring kingdom of Poland and 
 its new constitution ; the secret envoys of the Warsaw patriots 
 
 * Zerboni's Report to the chancellor, June 21, 181 3. 
 
History of Germany 
 
 fanned the flames of national propaganda all the more zealously 
 because they recognised the superiority of the Prussian adminis- 
 tration, and seriously feared that the province might become 
 estranged from the motherland through a general increase in 
 prosperity. Again and again for years the rumour recurred 
 that the king was thinking of voluntarily restoring the province 
 to Poland ; again and again a propitious aureole shone round 
 the head of the Mother of Poland, the Blessed Virgin in the 
 Carmelite Church of Posen. After the great defection of 1806, 
 the loyalty of the Polish officials seemed ever3Avhere open to 
 suspicion, and Zerboni advised the chancellor in all seriousness 
 that he should demand from the officials a written undertaking 
 in virtue of which they should declare themselves to be traitors 
 to their nation in the event of their breaking their official oath. 
 Hardenberg, however, rejected the proposal, on the ground that 
 men without conscience would not be bound by the redoubled 
 pledge. 
 
 After a brief period, the statthalter felt extremely unhappy 
 in his brilliant position, which was, indeed, one carrying little 
 influence. A handsome man, talented, magnanimous, and 
 chivalrous, he combined with the easy social charm character- 
 istic of the Pohsh nobles, the solidity of German culture ; his 
 hospitable house was almost the only one belonging to the high 
 nobility in Berhn where the world of fashion assembled side by 
 side with artists and professors ; musicians admired his playing 
 and his romantic compositions. For the past two hundred 
 years the Radziwills had been frequently connected with the 
 HohenzoUerns by marriage ; Prince Anton had himself espoused 
 the amiable princess Lomse of Prussia, and was in close personal 
 association with the king. But he remained a Pole, and inno- 
 cently attributed to his compatriots the loyalty with which his 
 own mind was filled. " I am prepared to assure you," he 
 wrote to Hardenberg after taking the oath of allegiance, " that 
 this province will vie in affection with those which have for 
 centuries been subjected to his majesty's rule." In his sermon 
 on this occasion. Canon Kawiecki had spoken in moving 
 terms of the Jagellon blood in the veins of the Hohenzollern, 
 and had ardently assured the nobles : " Bitter experiences 
 have matured our views ! " The prince hoped to win over 
 the province for Prussia by " a system of nationality," by an 
 amiable compliance with all the desires of the Poles ; but he 
 soon began to waver in his designs when Gneisenau warned him, 
 
 526 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 and when he himself gradually came to recognise, that his own 
 countrymen were regarding him with extreme mistrust and 
 reserve.^ Nor did Lord-Heutenant Zerboni di Sposetti ever 
 attain to a consistent attitude towards the Poles. In youth a 
 brilhEint and excitable hot-head, he had, in common with Hans 
 von Held and Knesebeck, been an enthusiast for the ideals of 
 the Revolution ; he was still an enMghtened hberal, devoted 
 to the chancellor, and regarded it as his duty to atone by a 
 considerate mildness for that partition of Poland which by the 
 liberal world had been branded as an iniquity. Since he owned 
 estates in Russian Poland, he was also compelled for personal 
 reasons to be considerate in his actions. At times, indeed, like 
 the statthalter, he was uneasy as to the consequences of his 
 system, for years before, in the administration of Southern 
 Prussia, he had become intimately acquainted with the Polish 
 character. 
 
 Unprejudiced persons could have no doubt about the 
 arrieres pensees of the Pohsh nobihty. The leaders declared, 
 with tmexampled arrogance, in the very face of the govenmient, 
 that their country must form a state within the state until 
 its viltimate reunion with Warsaw could be effected. Even one 
 of the most moderate among them. General von Kosinski, who 
 now wore a Prussian uniform and was an intimate associate 
 of the statthalter, demanded from his princely friend the consti- 
 tution of a purely " national " army, of&cered exclusively by 
 Poles, because the Germans were, after all, regarded by the 
 Poles as nothing more than agents of the secret police. Another 
 moderate, Morawski, sent the chancellor a lengthy memorial 
 concerning the Pohsh nation. He opened with the assurance : 
 " One who compares the Poles of to-day with those of 1806 
 is an entire century out of his reckoning." To confirm this 
 claim, he went on to say that Pohsh civihsation was older than 
 German, although action had of late predominated over speech, 
 and the fertility of Pohsh hterature had somewhat diminished. 
 He also reproached the throne of Prussia for " its system 
 of Germanisation and denationalisation," complaining, in 
 especial, that Polish history was no longer taught in the schools 
 as a special subject. " Since this change was effected, the 
 mothers have begun to teach their infants the national 
 history." In conclusion, he demanded guarantees for the 
 maintenance of Pohsh nationahty, insisting, above aU, upon 
 
 1 Radziwill to Hardenberg, August 9, 1815 ; Royer to Gneisenau, May 10, 1817. 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the following four points: a statthalter of the royal house or 
 of Polish blood ; a provincial diet, which should defend the 
 rights of the Poles by a standing committee, and which 
 should appoint a committee to carry on public instruction ; 
 all offices, including those in the churches and in the schools, 
 should be filled exclusively by persons of Polish birth, 
 upon the recommendation of the provincial diet ; finally, two 
 Polish councillors, one a civil official and one a Catholic priest, 
 should advise the king, the council of state, and the chancellor 
 regarding Pohsh affairs. A third Pohsh nobleman handed to 
 Major von Royer, an intimate friend of the statthalter, a memo- 
 rial in which it was bluntly declared that this region would 
 not become a Prussian province until it had been formally 
 separated from Poland ; until then it must be dealt with as 
 Polish territory. Consequently no oath must be demanded from 
 the Poles, for " it would be a second crime to keep this 
 criminal oath " ; nor should any of them be decorated in any 
 way, for those who had received decorations had always 
 especially distinguished themselves in the struggle against the 
 foreign dominion.^ 
 
 Insolent words were soon followed by treasonable deeds. 
 In the year 1818, General Dombrowski conceived the design 
 of a secret Polish brotherhood, which came into existence a 
 year later, under the name of the National Freemasons. The 
 authorities looked on inertly at these illegal intrigues, and did 
 not take action until the conspirators, emerging from the 
 obscurity of their lodges, endeavoured to constitute troops of 
 volunteers from among the peasants, giving these bodies the 
 unambiguous name of Kosiniery (scythemen). 
 
 The design to destroy Germanism, openly manifested in 
 these memorials of the Pohsh nobiUty, certainly found no support 
 from the statthalter, but the administration failed to take direct 
 action on behalf of German civilisation. The government ful- 
 filled with meticulous conscientiousness all the promises that 
 had been made to the Poles. After the generous Prussian 
 manner, the ancient memorials and signs of sovereignty were 
 left undisturbed throughout the country ; even to-day in the 
 Ring in Posen, the great Polish coat-of-arms with the heart- 
 shaped escutcheon of the Poniatowskis is displayed immediately 
 above the sentry-box of the Prussian Guard. The Polish 
 
 1 Joz^f von Morawski, Memorial concerning the Polish nation, December 29, 
 1817. M6moire surles affaires polonaises, sent by Royer to Gneisenau, April 9, 1817. 
 
 528 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 officers were pensioned, or enrolled in the Prussian army ; a 
 great number even of the Warsaw officials were taken into 
 Prussian service, although many of them could not write, and 
 most of them had no German, while almost all of them were 
 untrustworthy. The circle government was placed in the hands 
 of chosen administrators, most of whom belonged to the Polish 
 nobUity ; but to the great joy of the peasants, the manorial 
 poUce was not, for the present, reconstituted. The official 
 language of the authorities was German, but in all negotiations 
 with and announcements to the pubHc the tongue was used 
 which was most comprehensible to those concerned ; consequently 
 in the elementary schools of the Polish districts education was 
 carried on exclusively in the PoHsh language. 
 
 Yet even under this administration, long-suffering to the 
 point of weakness, Germanisation advanced unceasingly. As 
 soon as civil order had been re-estabUshed, the sluices of the 
 stream of German immigration were spontaneously opened, that 
 immigration which already in the middle ages had fertilised this 
 neglected land. The superiority of German industry and 
 German capital were manifested everywhere, especially in agri- 
 culture. At the time of the occupation, the morgen of average 
 land was sold at one and a half thalers — ^about the price attained 
 for areas of primeval forest in the far west of North America. 
 What a change occurred in these barbaric conditions when the 
 government now put into application the agrarian law of the 
 year 1811. Vainly did the nobUity, on receipt of " the alarming 
 intelligence of this confiscation of property," send in an address 
 of complaint to the king, displajang in naive words the true 
 character of the renowned Sarmatian junker freedom. " In the 
 unbridled excesses of the sinister and rough countryfolk," so 
 ran the wording of this document, " there will develop the 
 germs of practical Jacobinism." ^ The alleviation of the burdens 
 on the peasantry, though effected very slowly, was really 
 advantageous even to the nobles, who were now forced to 
 abandon their rude natural economy in favour of a monetary 
 economy, and who thereby in the year 1817 secured valuable 
 assistance through the foundation of the new agricultural credit 
 institute. 
 
 In this province of the monarchy, richer in towns than any 
 other, there was hardly a trace of a vigorous bourgeoisie. Even 
 
 ' Address of the nobles of the grand-duchy of Posen to the king, handed to 
 Minister von Klewitz, September, 1817. 
 
 529 2 M 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the town of Posen was a desolate place of unplastered houses, a 
 confusion of low shingle-roofed cottages, such as to-day still adorn 
 the suburb of WalUschei, interspersed with ruined churches and 
 dirty palaces. But here also a change began as from year to 
 year the number of German citizens increased and as they 
 found support for their national spirit in the numerous recently 
 founded educational institutions. After a terrible conflagration, 
 the -Polish town of Gnesen was rebuilt, for the most part at 
 the cost of the state, and the royal restorer was honoured in a 
 commemorative medal ; still more rapidly did the German town 
 of Bromberg come into existence when trade upon the Netze 
 canal was once more freed. Whereas in relation to other 
 neighbour peoples the Germans were too apt to display a weakly 
 impressionabihty ; here, in the land of the Slavs, they all assumed 
 a proud position as rulers and teachers, as bearers of a superior 
 civilisation ; no German learned Polish unless forced to do so, 
 for what had this miserable literature to offer him ? Moreover, 
 the bUndly defiant spirit of the Poles proved a force making 
 for Germanisation. The statthalter had promised that the 
 native-born, when equally competent, should have the first 
 claim to offices in the province. Instead of availing themselves 
 of this rash concession, and instead of studying in Breslau, 
 the provincial university of the new province, in order to prepare 
 themselves for state service, the PoUsh youths wasted their 
 energies in the evil arts of secret societies. The consequence 
 was that the rising generation of ofl&cials consisted almost 
 exclusively of Germans, whilst the incapable Warsaw officials 
 were gradually superseded. 
 
 The mass of the people took little part in the intrigues 
 of the nobles. The Polish peasant was well aware that never 
 since there had been a Poland had his class fallen upon happier 
 days; he did not trust the noble, he had not forgotten the 
 cruel stewards of the old days and the leathern scourge with 
 its knots weighted with lead. The only thing that estranged 
 the good-hearted and guileless common people from the Prussian 
 officials was religious hatred. For from the first the clergy 
 encountered the heretical government with tacit hostihty ; the 
 Catholic priests could not forgive the authorities for subjecting 
 the monasteries to the strict prescriptions of the civil code, for 
 instituting everjnvhere elementary schools, which had hitherto 
 been almost unknown in Catholic villages, and for providing 
 for the education of young priests by new educational institu- 
 
 530 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 tions. It was owing to the suggestions of the priests that 
 the peasants felt no gratitude for the benefits of Prussian rule, 
 and soon in the minds of the common people the terms 
 " Catholic " and " Pohsh," " Protestant" and " German," seemed 
 equivalent. The fires of revolt continued to smoulder beneath 
 the ashes, but it was not until after repeated acts of treason 
 on the part of the Poles that the throne at length determined 
 to adopt the only pohcy which could secure this threatened 
 frontierland for the state, determined upon the undisguised 
 favouring of German civiUsation. 
 
 In Prussia the situation of affairs was simpler. It was 
 true that in West Prussia there also existed a nobles' party, 
 which looked across the border yearningly at the Restitutor 
 Polonies. In the regained domains of Michelau and Culmerland 
 the Polish nobles behaved in a manner so open to suspicion that, 
 shortly before the oath of allegiance was imposed in Thorn, 
 President Hippel was moved to write to the chancellor : 
 " Unfortunately I cannot regard any one of them as worthy 
 of trust, unless perchance a few strayed sheep may be won 
 over by special favours." ^ Danzig, too, terribly visited by 
 the calamities of the war, long remained disaffected towards 
 the state which had restored peace and well-being. To how 
 great an extent had this most beautiful of our ancient towns 
 lost touch, almost as much as Holland, with the community 
 of the nation to which it belonged. For Danzig, as for Holland, 
 the Thirty Years' War, which for us had been a period of 
 profoundest ruin, had been an epoch of blossoming. Nowhere 
 else on German soil had the spirit of the imperial towns flourished 
 so defiantly, in continuous conflict with the Polish nobility ; at 
 the Artushof, and in the high-gabled houses of the patricians, 
 there were flaunted everjrwhere the pictures of the republican 
 heroes, Maccabeus, Camillus, and Scipio. Although few of the 
 old warrior-patrician families of the northern Venice had survived 
 the storms of the Napoleonic wars, the alert commercial town 
 adapted itself with difficulty to the forms of the modem official 
 state, and even after a generation the Danzigers of the old 
 stock were unwilUng to regard themselves as Prussians. The 
 greater part of the population of the province, on the other 
 hand, had for forty years past belonged to the German state, 
 
 1 Hippel, Report to the chancellor, July 19, 1915. 
 
History of Germany 
 
 and in a difficult time had manifested exemplary loyalty— the 
 Polish country-people not excepted. Consequently in East 
 Prussia, Germans, Lithuanians, and Masurians all thought with equal 
 pride of the diet of Konigsberg and of their valiant Heurichs. 
 
 The two provinces had suffered unspeakable afflictions. The 
 king approved the provision of considerable financial help to 
 the landlords for the re-establishment of their properties ; East 
 Prussia alone received 3,700,000 thalers. The lord-lieutenants 
 were to treat with the provincial diets concerning the apportion- 
 ment of the money. But what did these sums amount to, 
 seeing that the entire loss of the two provinces since 1806, in 
 damages due to the war and in disbursements for military pur- 
 poses, was estimated by the diets at 152,000,000 thalers ? Many 
 mistakes were made in the allotment of the funds, especially 
 in West Prussia, where Schon, after his despotic manner, incon- 
 siderately followed his own fancies. The great landlords became 
 divided into two camps : some of them blamed the advanced 
 views of the lord-heutenant, considering that he was deliberately 
 destroying the old families from hatred of the nobility ; whilst 
 others hailed him no less passionately as the saviour of the 
 nobles, and gave unreserved support to " the great Old Prussian 
 statesman." Since the impoverished state was quite unable 
 to do equal justice to all provinces alike, it was a necessary 
 canon of self-preservation to furnish assistance chiefly to the 
 still insecure new domains, and to leave the old and loyal 
 regions to suffer privation. The result was that, in the case of the 
 disaffected Danzigers, a great portion of the war debt was taken 
 over by the state, whilst Konigsberg, which was almost over- 
 whelmed by the burden of its debt, vainly appealed for assistance. 
 In East Prussia, since the beginning of the century, von Auerswald 
 had been at the head of the administration ; this was a warm 
 friend of the peasants, who had abolished serfdom on his own 
 estates before the passing of the law of 1807. He frankly 
 expressed the opinion that the great landlords did not possess 
 the confidence of the nation, and that they were less cultured 
 than the middle classes. During the next few years a settle- 
 ment between the landlords and the peasants was effected under 
 his leadership. In West Prussia, on the other hand, Schon 
 devoted himself chiefly to furthering educational progress and to 
 the construction of roads, for he regarded these as the two 
 most effective means for promoting Germanisation. During 
 his administration, 400 elementary schools were founded by the 
 
 532 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 communes and by the landlords. He knew how to keep the 
 PoUsh nobles in order. In his relations with the clergy, he 
 appUed with rigidity, and at times with severity, the principles 
 of the civil code, and maintained public order with all the 
 more success because the prince-bishop of Hohenzollem, who 
 is remembered even to-day by the strictly religious inhabitants 
 of Ermeland under the name of the " good prince," was himself 
 ill-disposed towards the nationahst dreams of the PoUsh priests. 
 Despite the caution of the administration, here in the eastern 
 march the wounds left by the war cicatrised very slowly ; the 
 remote stretches of coast, separated from their hinterland, 
 recovered health with difficulty. In Lithuania, when the 
 German landlord looked down from the heights above the 
 Niemen upon the few miserable rafts of the Polish Szimken 
 floating upon the mighty river, he complained that by the 
 officials in Berlin this magnificent country was regarded as a 
 mere source of remounts for the cavalry regiments. The Old 
 Prussians were inspired with bitter feelings towards the privi- 
 leged westerly provinces, and asked whether they themselves 
 were to be once more, as they had been in the days of King 
 Frederick, the step-children of the Prussian crown. 
 
 In Pomerania, Sack, the new lord-Ueutenant, soon gained 
 the confidence of the population yet more completely than he 
 had done on the Rhine. Even the discontented New Hither 
 Pomeranians gradually became reconciled with the German 
 state. When the Prussians entered Greifswald, Kosegarten, 
 the local poet, sang plaintively, " aforetime, under the three 
 crowns, we could hve at our ease " ; and unquestionably the 
 strict justice of monarchical rule had hitherto been quite 
 unknown in this granary of the unhappy Swedish realm, 
 this region which was able to pay no more than 60,296 gold 
 thalers in direct taxes. Whilst in Prussian Pomerania the 
 peasants had been protected by the strong hand of the monarchy, 
 here, the crown, the nobiHty, the university, and the 
 patriciate of the rich towns, had bought up almost all the 
 lands of the peasants, and had instituted, as in the neighbouring 
 Mecklenburg, a comfortable oUgarchical regime. When, in the 
 peace of Westphalia, the mouths of the Weser, the Elbe, and 
 the Oder, were handed over to the throne of Sweden, the 
 Swedish government made Pomerania the principal seat of 
 government for all the German provinces of Sweden. Now, a 
 
 S33 
 
History of Germany 
 
 century and a half later, the fat sinecures of this regime, 
 established for a million subjects as a welcome means of provid- 
 ing for the sons of the aristocracy, persisted unchanged when 
 no more than 100,000 Germans between the Peene and the 
 Baltic were under Swedish rule. The nobles looked down 
 contemptuously upon those of Prussia, for the arms of the 
 Swedish nobles hung in the Ritterhaus in Stockholm, side by 
 side with the escutcheons of the Torstensons and the Oxen- 
 stiernas. The university of Greifswald lived cosily upon the 
 revenues of its wide possessions, disturbed only every twenty 
 years or so by a royal visitation ; of all the academical institu- 
 tions of the wealthiest German university, one only was widely 
 celebrated, the manege. The proud Stralsund had faithfully 
 preserved the ancient Hanseatic Uberties, in conjunction with 
 the glories of its churches, council-houses, and beguinages, and 
 exercised unrestricted rule over a domain comprising more 
 than one hundred townships. The Prussian authorities 
 approached this vigorously distinctive local Ufe with caution. 
 Notwithstanding the protests of the nobiUty, most of the old 
 offices were abolished, only the high court of Greifswald remain- 
 ing as a modest court of appeal ; Stralsund and the other 
 great towns retained their ancient constitutions, but were com- 
 pelled, after repeated protests, to enter the Prussian circle- 
 organisation. After two years' delay, the authorities at length 
 ventured to introduce the new customs-law. The amalgamation 
 was effected steadily and securely. The majority of the tenant 
 farmers and serfs, especially those on Riigen, had from the 
 first been free from the mistrust felt by the privileged classes, 
 and rejoiced to find in the new authorities a certain amount 
 of protection against the arbitrary exactions of the landlords. ^ 
 Prussian Pomerania had suffered far more severely from the 
 war than had Swedish Pomerania. The ruins of the harbours 
 of Leba, Stolpmiinde, Riigenwalde, and Colberg, still recalled 
 the prosperous days of the peace of Basle. Stettin, which at 
 that time rivalled Hamburg, had now to reconquer its place 
 in the world-market ; but many of the rich old firms were no 
 longer in existence, the harbour of Swinemiinde had but recently 
 been reconstructed, and moreover the Sound-dues paralysed the 
 
 1 Memorial concerning the reorganisation of New Hither Pomerania, by Carl 
 Schneider of Bergen, December 3, 1815. Petition of the farmer Arndt and the 
 burgomaster Liiders, representatives of the estate of peasants, to the king, July 20, 
 1816. Petition from the burgomaster and council of Stralsund to the chancellor, 
 September 12, 1816. 
 
 534 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 growth of the Pomeranian seaports. In the country districts 
 the immaturity of civilisation and the patriarchal conditions of life 
 aroused the astonishment of the lord-Heutenant. In the circle 
 of Neu-Stettin, there were only 710 inhabitants to the square 
 mile [German], whereas the population in the governmental 
 district of Diisseldorf was 8,537 to the square mile ; and never- 
 theless the " good Pomeranian still continues to seek his wealth 
 in the ownership of land." Sack importuned the chancellor 
 to grant permission for the settlement of vigorous peasant 
 immigrants, who could set the good Pomeranians an example 
 in the practice of intensive culture, and could make them 
 understand the blessings of the new economic freedom. ^ But 
 where were the resources for colonisation on the Frederician 
 scale ? The province recovered from the sorrows of the years 
 of war with almost as much difficulty as did the other Baltic 
 lands, the only difference being that the quiet Pomeranians bore 
 the troubles of this hard and joyless time with more equanimity 
 than did the passionate Prussians. 
 
 Merckel, the lord-Ueutenant of Silesia, had already, during 
 the war, become dear to his fellow-countrymen as civil governor. 
 They did not forget that formerly, on a momentous occasion, 
 by his firm confidence in their wilUngness to make sacrifices, 
 he had prevented the continuation of the retreat ; that subse- 
 quently when, during the period of the truce, the monarchs 
 had counselled the evacuation of the exhausted territory, he 
 had pledged his word that Silesia would support the allied 
 armies for an entire year. How happily, after this, had 
 Gneisenau's work, the formation and training of the Silesian 
 Landwehr, been assisted by the powerful aid of the civil 
 governor. The son of a respected merchant of Breslau, at 
 home from childhood upwards in all strata of complex Silesian 
 society, to the people of his native province Merckel seemed 
 the natural leader. The active, serious, and precise manner 
 in which he conducted business, inspired confidence in all; and 
 anyone who came to see him on pressing affairs, even at a 
 late hour in the night, would find the vigorous Uttle man, 
 who seemed to get on without sleep, seated at his writing- 
 table. From the first he was one of the most zealous supporters 
 of Hardenberg's reforms, was a disciple of the Kantian philosophy, 
 
 ' Sack, brief Report on the administration of Pomerania, Schlawe, July 28, 1818. 
 
 535 
 
History of Germany 
 
 richly cultured, almost learned, and profoundly convinced of 
 the blessings of free investigation. As a strict rationalist, he 
 was not free from bureaucratic mistrust of the religious life, and 
 was ever watchful to maintain the sovereignty of the state. 
 At court he was regarded as, next to Schon, the most revolu- 
 tionary-minded of the lord-lieutenants,^ although he despised 
 the waspish criticism of the East Prussians, and, in truth, 
 never advanced far beyond the ideas of enlightened absolutism. 
 
 At a momentous time, the Silesians had manifested a tena- 
 cious loyalty; even the neglected Poles of Upper Silesia dis- 
 played a deep devotion to the crown, although they were but 
 little influenced by the general enthusiasm for the War of Libera- 
 tion, and they remained completely unaffected by the PoUsh 
 nationalist propaganda. Here King Frederick had been truly 
 loved; few looked back with regret to the " pre-Prussian days " ; 
 even the nobiUty had ceased to think of their ancient feudal 
 suzerainty. None the less there still existed in this region 
 a stubborn particularism, which was zealously fostered in Breslau 
 by the " Silesian Society for Patriotic Culture." The province 
 delighted to speak of itself as the jewel in Prussia's crown ; 
 down to the year 1808 it was always governed by its own 
 provincial minister, independent of the old general directory, 
 and was greatly mortified that it was now to be placed on 
 the same footing with all the other provinces. The ancient 
 capital, whose fortifications had been dismantled, began 
 to surround the picturesque confusion of its gloomy alleys 
 with a circle of charming avenues, and constituted the vigorous 
 centre of a rich and distinctively local life. Breslau was the 
 head and heart of the province, far more characteristically than 
 were any of the other provincial capitals, Konigsberg not excepted. 
 Here was the flourishing university, and here the palace of 
 the one prince-bishop of the monarchy ; here was to be seen 
 the filth of the Jewish quarter side by side with the palaces 
 of the jovial nobiUty ; here German and Polish nationality, 
 Protestant and Catholic culture, the officialdom and the bour- 
 geoisie, manufacturing industry and agriculture, jostled one 
 another indifferently. Rarely as yet did the Silesian look 
 beyond this motley activity ; seldom did he leave his beloved 
 homeland, where they were all so snugly interconnected by 
 blood and by marriage. In the army, as in official circles, 
 the proud Catholic nobility, which as late as the year 1811 
 
 ' Hardenberg's Memoranda, Christmas, 1819. 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 had continued to establish its younger sons in the benefices of 
 the wealthy cathedral city, was but Httle represented ; the 
 Silesian nobles held aloof from the soldier races of the Pome- 
 ranian and Brandenburg knighthoods, and found their associates 
 rather in Vienna than in Berlin. In Silesia, the towns' ordinance, 
 industrial freedom, and the new agrarian laws, had hitherto 
 encountered vigorous resistance, and Merckel had need of all 
 his sagacity and knowledge of the country to carry through 
 the introduction of these reforms step by step, with careful 
 regard for the pecuHar circumstances. 
 
 How lamentable, now, was the economic condition of the 
 coimtry, which had formerly, after the entry of the Prussians, 
 exhibited so marvellous a progress. What had become of the 
 good fortune of those days when John Quincy Adams had 
 travelled through Silesia to study the marvels of the Frederician 
 administration, when princes and counts led a luxurious hfe 
 in summer-time in the spas of Warmbrunn and Salzbrunn, 
 when a rich manufacturer dwelt in almost every country-house 
 in the Waldenburger Tal, and when, on the rough Landeshut 
 ridge, among " the Americans," the rich merchants trading 
 with America and Spain, the wine of Hungary flowed in streams ? 
 The export trade in hnen did not regain its former prosperity ; 
 in the weavers' villages of the mountains there prevailed a condi- 
 tion of poverty which at length seemed unbearable even to 
 the cheerful content of this easy-going people ; moreover, trade 
 with Poland, upon which Breslau so largely depended for its 
 subsistence, had been greatly damaged by the new Russian 
 customs-barriers. Nevertheless, the manufacture of cotton was 
 increasing, and the wool-market had grown in importance since 
 Thaer had introduced his pedigree sheep into Panten. In the 
 year 1814, the Fiirstentums-Landschaften which had been founded 
 by Frederick II resumed the payment of interest, and saved the 
 credit of the great landlords, so far as this was possible in 
 view of the depreciation of their properties. The Konigshiitte 
 smelting works in Silesia soon afterwards resumed operations on a 
 large scale, and gradually in this region, notwithstanding the 
 threatening vicinity of the customs boundaries of Austria and 
 Russia, there came into existence a noble array of new mines 
 and smelting works. But all this was effected with extreme 
 slowness. The Silesian people did not possess the bold and 
 enterprising spirit of aspiring times ; here hfe was passed in 
 deliberate work and quiet renunciation. 
 
 537 
 
History of Germany 
 
 It was due, above all, to the personal activities of the 
 lord-lieutenants that the new forms of provincial administration 
 struck root so speedily. Hardenberg had been fortunate in 
 Ms choice, appointing, almost without exception, to these 
 difficult posts, men of established reputation, and yet men who 
 were still comparatively young. The least adequate, perhaps, 
 of the lord-lieutenants was Heydebreck in Brandenburg. He 
 had gained his experience as an able official of the old school 
 in the collegial deliberations of the war-chambers and domain- 
 chambers, and at first was unwilling to accept " the so-called 
 office of lord-lieutenant," until the chancellor had made him 
 recognise how important and honourable was this office.^ But 
 he had as subordinate one of the most capable of officials, von 
 Bassewitz, governor of the Potsdam district, a man of marvel- 
 lous practical knowledge, who carried in his head a map of 
 every parish in Electoral Mark, who knew all about every 
 thaler of the war contributions, and who trained an entire school 
 of efficient administrative officials, so that the Potsdam govern- 
 ment maintained the brilhant repute which it had formerly 
 acquired under Sack's regime. Bassewitz held with imperturb- 
 able firmness to the principles of the new legislation, and yet 
 understood how to deal with everyone in so circumspect and 
 friendly a spirit that even the feudal nobles were not seriously 
 hostile to the reformer. 
 
 In the country-side of this part of the world, the nobility 
 was still as powerful as in Pomerania, although the noble land- 
 owners of Electoral Mark possessed property valued at no 
 more than 27,000,000 thalers, and were burdened with mortgages 
 amounting to 21,000,000, whereas the peasantry already possessed 
 land valued at 31,000,000 thalers, which was burdened with debt 
 to the amount of no more than 6,500,000. The prestige of the 
 Landrat was still formidable, especially when he administered 
 his office as efficiently as did the son of old Zieten, the 
 celebrated and exemplary Landrat of County Riippin. 
 PatriarchaUy simple were the customs of the countryfolk, even 
 just outside the gates of Berlin, and the primitive triennial 
 rotation of crops was still in vogue. But the activities of 
 Albrecht Thaer now began gradually to bear fruit on all hands. 
 His school at MogHn in Oderbruch, which had just been elevated 
 to the status of a royal agricultural college, attracted a continu- 
 ally increasing number of older and younger agriculturists, who 
 
 1 Hardenberg to Heydebreck, June 29, 1815. 
 
 538 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 here, beneath the old alder trees beside the pond, received the 
 friendly counsels of the learned and yet thoroughly practical 
 man, whilst out in the fields they were taught how, by a 
 more intelUgently regulated rotation of crops, it was possible 
 to dispense with fallows. Since the white fleeces of the 
 Moghn wool-king had driven all other wool out of the field, 
 the prestige of a more careful sheep-breeding had become firmly 
 estabHshed, the great landlords gradually began to transform 
 their activities in accordance with the principles of the new 
 " rational agriculture," and Goethe exclaimed encouragingly 
 to the reformer of German agriculture : 
 
 " No clod of earth shall fallow lie. 
 And least of all shall man ! " 
 
 The rapidly developed capital lay like an island amid this 
 agricultural province, completely separated from the interests 
 of the open country. Although Berlin now numbered 188,000 
 inhabitants, the characters of the life of the city were still 
 principally determined by the court, the garrison, the official 
 classes, and the university. Nowhere in Germany could more 
 refined judgments concerning music and the drama, philosophy 
 and history, be heard than in the simple tea-drinking society 
 of literary circles in Berhn. How many men of talent in after 
 years looked back with fond memories to the hospitable house 
 of the Mendelssohns in the Leipziger Strasse. Here in the 
 quiet park, close to the Potsdam Gate, where for the people 
 of Berhn the world came to an end, were to be found in J05rful 
 assembly artists, critics, and men of learning. But society 
 was still stratified in accordance with professional occupation. 
 Even Gneisenau, the new governor, associated almost exclusively 
 with his military colleagues, and all the world wondered at 
 the unprecedented innovation when, in the year 1817, the king 
 allowed subscription balls, open to everyone, to be held in the 
 concert-hall of the opera-house, and when he himself, with the 
 court, made a progress through the motley assembly — though 
 no doubt the price of entry, i tlr. 16 gr., was prohibitive to the 
 majority. Outside the circles of the students and the gymnasts, 
 there was httle talk of politics. The few pohtical writings 
 which appeared in Berlin after the silencing of the Schmalzian 
 feud, showed only too clearly that neither the enthusiasm for 
 the war, nor the creative activity of the new university, had 
 
 539 
 
History of Germany 
 
 been able altogether to expel the spirit of Nicolai from the 
 sphere of it origin. Buchholz continued with his customary 
 self-complacency to busy himself with the commonplaces of 
 Hberal enlightenment, and J. von Voss aroused the justified 
 indignation of the new provinces by his A Brandenburger's 
 Letter to the Rhinelanders. Herein was voiced once again the 
 conceited and presumptuous Berhnism of 1806. Superciliously, 
 " the native of the heart of the country," issued his advice to 
 the Rhinelanders, and announced to them that cultured BerUn 
 would soon dispose of their " extraordinary superstition " — 
 until Rehfues in Bonn took up that pen which he had employed 
 so effectively in the struggle against Bonapartism, and, amid 
 the delighted approval of the Rhinelanders, provided a rough 
 welcome for the wisdom of Berlin. 
 
 From the time when, in the year 181 8, GiovanoU had opened 
 his refreshment rooms, and other men from the Engadine had 
 followed the example, the cultured world had become accustomed 
 to read the newspapers. There in the dark reading-rooms, 
 political debates sometimes took place, and certainly the Mvely 
 foreign journals still seemed far more attractive than the gentle 
 tedium of those of Prussia. The bustle of the great town was 
 displayed almost exclusively in the narrow streets of the central 
 regions ; the green-clad gendarmes had ample leisure to arrest 
 without pity every evil-doer who smoked in the street, and 
 when the hot noonday sun blazed down upon the quiet, even 
 lines of houses, it was said that one could hear them snoring 
 — ^this was the current joke in other parts of the realm, where 
 everyone was willing to make fun of Berlin. After the second 
 peace, a bold speculator placed two-and-thirty genuine Warsaw 
 droschkes on the streets, and the professors von Voss and 
 Spener engaged in a lively dispute upon the question whence 
 were to come all the people who should make use of this 
 park of carriages ; a similar undertaking, a short while before, 
 had ended in a failure, but this venture proved successful. 
 The exchange of letters in the town was effected through the 
 agency of " the worshipful mercantile guild of grocers " ; the 
 town letters were collected in their retail shops, and their 
 messengers took them through the streets, vigorously ringing 
 a hand-bell the while. The mass of the bourgeoisie played little 
 part in the lively intellectual life of high society ; they regarded 
 the legislative innovations with mistrust, and obstinately adhered 
 to their simple petty-town customs. With extreme slowness, 
 
 540 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 and not until after the war, was the difference gradually 
 extinguished between the rough North Germans and the 
 more refinedly cultivated families of the French colony. 
 
 In the height of summer, old and young streamed out to 
 the Stralau fish-fair, to regale themselves on the national dishes 
 of eels and pickled gherkins, washed down with the pale ale of 
 BerMn. The matches of the shooting clubs were still greatly 
 patronised, and in the new by-laws of 1813 it was thought 
 necessary to draw express attention to the fact that the 
 champion shot, and his two sub-champions, being well-disposed 
 citizens, would not put in a claim to immunity from taxation. 
 The shop-keepers were subdivided into two sharply distinguished 
 guilds, of grocers and of drapers and mercers. Twice a week 
 the brokers published a hst of market quotations, in which 
 there was httle mention of foreign paper ; but the petty bour- 
 geois continued to reckon only in pfennige. AH heavy goods 
 were sent by water, for there was not as yet an uninterrupted 
 high-road even between BerMn and Hamburg. In winter, 
 business was at a stand-still ; in spring and autumn, boats were 
 numerous on the Spree, but even then one single crane, in the 
 Royal Dock, sufficed to handle the freight of all the carts and 
 shipping. Yet amid these restricted conditions there were already 
 manifest the beginnings of more abundant trade. Near the 
 great warehouses were inns where the wagoners put up and 
 waited for their loads, and the innkeepers began to act as 
 middlemen in the transport service. It was from these carriers' 
 inns that, from 1816 onwards, there sprang the great carrier 
 companies which, favoured by the fortunate situation of the 
 town, soon got control of the best part of the trade of 
 north-eastern Germany. What a sensation was created when, 
 in the first year of the peace, Cockerill built a factory 
 in the new Friedrichsstrasse, to supply all the tools and 
 machinery requisite for woollen manufacture ; here there was 
 at work a steam-engine of nearly 30 horse-power, and it was 
 not long before the workshops were actually lighted with coal- 
 gas. A year later the first Jacquard loom was introduced 
 into the siUc-weaving works of BerUn. It is true that the 
 weaving industry, which in the year 1803 had occupied 
 1,465 looms, had now work for no more than 420 ; the cotton 
 spinners, too, could hardly make a living even after the 
 abolition of the continental system, for the Enghsh were well 
 able to keep the secret of their spinning machinery. But 
 
 541 
 
History of Germany 
 
 cotton-weaving and cotton-printing, fulling, and numerous other 
 industries, made vigorous progress. In this way, by the hard 
 work of a frugal and harassed generation, the foundation was 
 gradually laid for the greatness of the first German manu- 
 facturing town. 
 
 In all these new provinces it was merely necessary to unite 
 small portions of newly acquired territory with solid nuclei 
 of Old Prussian land, but complete reconstruction was essential 
 in the extraordinary confusion of two-and-thirty large and innu- 
 merable small domains which now passed by the name of the 
 province of Saxony. Middle and low German areas, Teutonic 
 and Wendish territories, jostled one another here ; the old 
 boundary between the dioceses of Mainz and Magdeburg, which 
 had long constituted the line of demarcation between western 
 and eastern Germany, ran across the centre of the new province. 
 There existed also the sharpest contrasts in economic and 
 religious Ufe. In one part were the fertile lowlands of the 
 Golden Aue and of the Magdeburg region ; in another part, 
 in the rough plateaus and in the damp valleys of Eichsfeld, 
 were the poor villages of the weavers which had been utterly 
 neglected under the lax rule of the crosier, surrounded by 
 innumerable Uttle fields. In the new governmental district 
 of Merseburg, there was only one Catholic church ; the native 
 district of Luther, Paul Gerhardt, and Rinckart, the homeland 
 of the Reformation, was devoted to its Protestant memories. 
 In Eichsfeld, the Jesuits of the elector of Mainz had been 
 completely successful in the work of the counter-reformation, 
 a few villages alone excepted, and it was not until the year 
 1804 that the Prussians reintroduced Protestant services into 
 HeiUgenstadt. Nor was all this complexity compensated by a 
 compact domain. Only for a small portion of the province 
 did the Elbe constitute a common artery of commuttication, and 
 it did this far less effectively than elsewhere the Rhine or the 
 Oder. The new capital, Magdeburg, had fallen upon evil days 
 as had its half-ruined cathedral ; together with its suburbs, 
 the town contained no more than 31,000 inhabitants, and, 
 living entirely by commerce, it could never become the centre 
 of the cultured life of the province, for the days had long 
 passed away in which the free press of the Protestants had 
 found its last refuge in the city. 
 
 The loyal inhabitants of Magdeburg and Altmark hardly 
 
 542 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 troubled to conceal how uncongenial to them was their political 
 association with the Rhenish Confederates of Electoral Saxony, 
 who on their side took the oath of allegiance with heavy hearts, 
 although many zealous police officials reported to the chancellor 
 that the populace was filled with rejoicing. In every castle 
 and every church of the electoral region, the escutcheon with 
 the lozenge-crown recalled the ancient history of a state which 
 had once been the leading power of German Protestantism. 
 Here, from the ease of older civilisation and greater prosperity, 
 people had been accustomed to look down upon the upstarts 
 of Brandenburg ; now it had been necessary to submit to a 
 partition of the kingdom and to the detachment of Lusatia ; 
 the university and the highest governmental authority of the 
 province had been transferred to the Magdeburg region, although 
 the Merseburgers had urgently recommended their own town 
 to the king as the only suitable place for the capital ; ' more- 
 over, the new royal Prussian religion threatened to oust the old 
 Lutheranism. At first, discontent found such vigorous expres- 
 sion that even in the schools the sons of the Prussian ofiicials 
 had to engage continually in fights with the native-bom Saxons. 
 Most incensed of all were the nobles, for although the new 
 regime carefuUy protected their interests, and left at their dis- 
 posal the patronage of the wealthy chapters of Naumburg and 
 Merseburg, they felt that in Saxony they had been rulers, and 
 must now descend into the subject class. So great was their 
 hostility to the monarchical regime that, in the council of state, 
 the lord-lieutenant von Biilow urgently recommended that the 
 new tax laws should not be imposed without the approval of 
 the Saxon estates. " In default of this, we shall risk the loss 
 of the Httle confidence the inhabitants now possess in our rule." 
 The officials, too, complained bitterly of the strictness of the 
 Prussian service, especially the judges, who hitherto in all 
 difficult cases had availed themselves of the convenient back 
 door of the Aktenversendung, and who were now forced to give 
 decisions ; many of them, inspired with a sense of wrong, returned 
 to their easy-going old homeland.'' Even the more intelligent 
 among the Saxons showed on all hands that comfortable 
 preference for the traditional order which, notwithstanding all 
 the noise made by Hberal writers, still represented the genuine 
 
 ^ Petition of the town of Merseburg to the king, October 3, 1815. 
 * Bulow's Opinion regarding the tax proposals, Council of State, May 23, 1817. 
 Biilow to Hardenberg, March 9, 1816. Kircheisen to Hardenberg, June 2, 1816. 
 
 543 
 
History of Germany 
 
 sentiments of the Germans. How many fights had Johannes 
 Schulze with the excellent Ilgen, head master at Schulpforta, 
 before he could finally secure the adoption of the Prussian 
 examination regulations at the old princely school, and prevent 
 the town scholarships being allotted any longer according to 
 the favour or caprice of the town councillors. 
 
 Friedrich von Billow had been specially selected as lord- 
 lieutenant for this land of aristocratic sovereignty because in 
 his term of service in Hanover he had already become acquainted 
 with similar conditions, and because years before, in an incisive 
 Uterary controversy with his compatriot Rehberg, he had shown 
 how rightly he esteemed the superior advantages of monarchical 
 as compared with feudal administration. In his new home 
 he had so thoroughly assimilated the views of Frederician 
 officialdom that at the outset of the movement towards evan- 
 gelical union he had thought it necessary to take up his pen 
 once again and to warn the throne regarding the dangers of 
 an independent S5aiodal church. But in action he always 
 remained kindly disposed and cautious, and got on tolerably 
 well even with the Saxon nobiUty. Schonberg, the governor in 
 Merseburg, acted with less discretion ; this was a Saxon noble- 
 man who for years had contemplated with profound dissatisfaction 
 the misdeeds of the nepotist regime, and who was now deUghted 
 to introduce into this chaos the essentials of modem legal 
 equality. Since he was a man of amiable disposition, brimming 
 over with good humour and jovial spirits, he was a great 
 favourite among the common people ; but the members of his 
 own order detested him as a representative of the " democratic 
 official spirit." Among the organisers of the new province, 
 however, by far the most efficient was Vice-president Motz, 
 who administered the governmental district of Erfurt with 
 very Httle interference on the part of his chief Count Keller, 
 an ex-diplomat. To this district belonged those portions of 
 Thuringia which had at one time been directly governed by 
 Napoleon, and, as an insecure possession, had been bled white 
 and grossly misused. Hence, in this region, all defects were 
 ruthlessly eradicated, for which the routinism of the Saxon 
 authorities and the arbitrariness of the French regime had been 
 responsible ; by Hahn, the educational councillor, the work 
 of the higher and of the elementary schools was reorganised ; 
 the activity of various societies of general utiHty, including the 
 athletic grounds, was carefully fostered ; and the impoverished 
 
 S44 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 population of Eichsfeld was so effectively assisted that the 
 famine years of 1816 and 1817 did not cause extreme distress 
 and Councillor Kunth on his official tour was hardly able to 
 recognise the once so neglected plains of this region. 
 
 Everywhere, however, the inchoate condition of Old Prussian 
 legislation proved a hindrance. Since the urgently necessary 
 revision of Stein's town's ordinance had not yet been effected, 
 the authorities got on as best they could with provisional 
 measmes, conducting the election of town councillors after the 
 Prussian manner, and introducing a careful audit of municipal 
 accounts. The town of Naumburg was at length induced to 
 arrange for a common poUce administration for the city and 
 the four suburbs, and as soon as the petty frictions over these 
 laborious negotiations had been successfully overcome, the 
 inhabitants gradually began to feel that better times were in 
 prospect. In a single step, the province effected an advance 
 which had been procrastinated for two centuries during the 
 Electoral Saxon regime. At first the burghers and the 
 peasantry, and at length the nobiUty as well, became accustomed 
 to the changed conditions, and transferred to their new prince 
 the patriarchal veneration which they had hitherto cherished 
 for Kong Frederick Augustus. How much simpler, too, and 
 more accessible appeared the new ruler who, at the very outset 
 encountered the discontented Merseburgers with the exhortation : 
 " Do not forget that we are all Germans." The mistrust which 
 the old subjects of Electoral Saxony at first felt towards their 
 fellow citizens of Altmark and Magdeburg, gradually disappeared ; 
 but since the Germans could not live happily without hating 
 some of their neighbours, the Saxons of the kingdom of Saxony 
 now began to accuse the contented inhabitants of Torgau and 
 Eilenburg of treason, and to execrate the Prussian Saxons as 
 scimi of the " Prussian stock." Within a few years of the 
 greatly deplored partition there might already be seen in 
 numerous frontier villages a Saxon farm and a Prussian farm 
 defiantly flaunting the colours of their respective countries. As 
 well-informed persons had prophesied at the congress of Vienna 
 nowhere did the powerful attractive force of the Prussian state 
 display itself more effectively than in relation to the plastic 
 Upper Saxons. 
 
 Just as manifold and yet simpler were the conditions 
 encountered by the new administration in the province of 
 
 545 2N 
 
History o( Germany 
 
 Westphalia. Notwithstanding the differences in their poUtical 
 destiny, the homelands of the white Saxon steed had always 
 retained a vigorous common tribal pride. The ancient tribal boun- 
 dary on the heights above Barmen, which had in former days 
 separated the Saxons from the Franks, remained subsequently 
 for many centuries the frontier between County Mark and 
 the duchy of Berg ; the serious-minded and resolute Low Saxon 
 regarded^^ with dislike (which was cordially reciprocated) the 
 easy-going and garrulous Rhinelanders, and spoke with mockery 
 of the " Berg wihdbags." The Westphalian students always held 
 together beneath the green, white, and black banner of their 
 province, were famed as insatiable topers and brawlers, and, at 
 the close of their university career, never failed to make their way 
 home again to Westphalia. The powerful scions of the Drostes, 
 Spiegels, Galens, and Fiirstenbergs held aloof from the foreign 
 mihtary adventures at one time characteristic of the German 
 nobility, and remained for the most_^ part firmly settled at home ; 
 only the collateral branches of the old families, the Kettelers 
 and the Plettenbergs, who had gone with the Teutonic knights 
 to the Dvina, acquired power and fame outside their native 
 country. Now that the whole region of the red earth passed 
 under the sway of the Prussian crown, even in the lands of 
 the crosier, which mistrusted the Protestant monarchy, the 
 reunion of the possessions of Wittekind was hailed with joy, 
 the only complaint being that Osnabriick, the birthplace of 
 Justus Moser, historian of that city, should, with certain portions 
 of Miinster, remain in Hanover and Oldenburg. 
 
 No one felt this joy more keenly than Lord-lieutenant 
 Ludwig von Vincke, who during the war had been 
 chief of the provisional government, and who was universally 
 regarded as the only possible head of the province. 
 Possessed of an admirable talent for administration, thoroughly 
 well-informed by travel and study concerning political and 
 economic conditions in foreign countries, he had nevertheless 
 remained above all a WestphaHan nobleman, blunt, unpolished, 
 and downright, as firmly rooted in his native soil as had 
 been the old painter of Soest who could not conceive even 
 of the Lord's Supper having been eaten without platefuls of 
 juicy Westphahan ham. Wherever the service of the state 
 had led him, in Aurich no less than in Potsdam, he had kept 
 before his eyes the aim which from earhest youth had seemed 
 to him the highest in life: "My fatherland of Westphalia 
 
 546 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 shall henceforward set the example in the matter of perfect 
 institutions." 
 
 How great^^was^ now his delight when^ he was entrusted 
 with the administration of the reunited land ; his only trouble, 
 the only thing which his independent spirit foimd it hard to 
 endure, was " the intolerable of&cial correspondence," and the 
 dependence this involved on the ministers in Berlin. Since 
 ecirly youth he had been on terms of intimate friendship with 
 all the exceptional men who adorned this classic epoch of 
 Prussian officialdom, and had always maintained an intermediate 
 position between the two parties of reform. Since, like Stein, 
 he sought poUtical freedom chiefly in the self-government of a 
 vigorous and independent bourgeoisie and peasantry, he was 
 at one with Stein in resisting the unrestricted divisibiUty of 
 landed property and the radical abolition of the guilds. But 
 his rigidly monarchical sentiments as an official never failed to 
 exercise a check upon his aristocratic leanings, and he would 
 not hear a word of feudal rights which might endanger the 
 unity of the national will. He rejected patrimonial jurisdiction 
 as " a great nuisance " ; the harassed subjects of the mediatised 
 always secured his loyal support, and that also of his subordi- 
 nate Kessler, an enUghtened hberal ; and although in Berlin he 
 often advised considerate treatment of the CathoUcs, he neverthe- 
 less encountered aU encroachments on the part of the hierarchy 
 with relentless severity. The king, when conversing with 
 budding officials, was accustomed to commend to their attention 
 the lord-heutenant of WestphaHa as the model of faithfulness 
 to duty — for Vincke was the most diligent of all the indefatigable 
 members of the officialdom. How often at midday did the 
 people of Miinster see him hurrying home to bolt his simple 
 meal, and hastening back to the office to immerse himself in 
 his beloved documents. Yet this dreaded devourer of figures 
 cordially detested the wisdom of the study. All his knowledge 
 had been acquired by travel and experience ; he was at home 
 throughout the country, in the wooded hills and low-lying 
 meadows of the region round Siegen, in the iron-works of County 
 Mark, and in the isolated farms of the Miinster heathlands. 
 In blue overall, pipe in mouth, gnarled stick in hand, the 
 impetuous little man with the wise young face would often 
 walk enormous distances across the country to attend to the 
 interests of his beloved peasants. In his early days as lord- 
 lieutenant in Westphalia it happened to him once that a peasant 
 
 547 
 
History of Germany 
 
 woman whom he found making butter told " the youngster " 
 to turn the chum for her for a time while she went to attend 
 to a job outside ; but in later years every child throughout 
 the country knew the father of Westphalia. 
 
 With the one exception of Rhineland, no other German 
 territory was so completely transformed by the industrial revo- 
 lution of the new century as was Westphaha, which during 
 the first years of the peace was still in evil repute as a desolate 
 and inhospitable land, of great memories and an impoverished 
 present. In mighty Soest, which in former times had despatched 
 its masterfid aldermen even as far as Gothland, and whose town 
 laws {Jus Susatense) had been adopted by most of the towns 
 of Low Germany, there now Uved among the ruins of the 
 magnificent ancient buildings a poor population of town-dwelling 
 farmers. Stadtberge, the venerable Saxon fortress of Eresburg, 
 had almost completely disappeared ; no more than the Roland's 
 column, the whipping-post and two ruined churches, still looked 
 down over the Diemel valley, from the summit of the tall conical 
 hill. In front of the gate of the proud Hansa town of Dort- 
 mund, the Freistuhl of the Vehmgericht was so utterly abandoned 
 and so sohtary beneath the ancient lime-trees that the Freigraf 
 (vehmic judge) could now have laid the naked sword and the 
 willow-noose in open day upon the stone table. It was 
 only in the Old Prussian regions of the province, in the 
 predominantly Protestant counties Ravensberg and Mark, that 
 trade and industry had already experienced a vigorous revival. 
 In Bielefeld the anciently celebrated linen-weaving industry 
 had not been completely destroyed by the continental system, 
 and immediately after the peace it conquered the American 
 market with its sailcloth. When Stein had made the Ruhr 
 navigable, an important outlet was opened for the produce of 
 the coal-mines and iron-works of Sauerland, and 125,000 tons 
 of coal were already being sent yearly down the valley. In 
 Vincke's view, all this was merely the promising prelude to 
 a new development ; he knew how great were the stores of 
 wealth in the mineral treasuries of his homeland and in the 
 tenacious energy of its inhabitants, and it was a recurring 
 pleasure to him to repeat to his fellow-countr3mien the praise 
 of Erasmus, who said that no people in the world had such 
 power of enduring labour as the Westphalians. He regarded 
 himself as Stein's heir, and desired to complete for the whole 
 of Westphalia what Stein had begun in County Mark. When 
 
 S48 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 the lower part of the Ruhr valley was united with the neigh- 
 bouring Rhenish province, he begged the king to allow him' to 
 retain supervision over the whole length of the river, and did 
 not rest until he had secured means for the construction of 
 the riverine harbour of Ruhrort, the gate of exit from the 
 Westphalian mines. Simultaneously he began the works 
 necessary to open the Lippe for navigation as far as Lippstadt. 
 More difficult tasks awaited the indefatigable man in the 
 new domains. For centuries the duchy of Westphalia had 
 slumbered vmder the indolent sway of the archbishops of Cologne ; 
 and subsequently, as a province of Darmstadt, it had been 
 subjected to the arbitrary rule of five co-ordinate supreme 
 authorities and innumerable minor officials. Here there was 
 " an Augean stable to be cleansed." Unaffected by the com- 
 plaints of Covmty Mark, Vincke arranged that the capital of 
 the western governmental district should be placed, not in 
 the busy town of Hamm, but in the rugged hill country of 
 the upper Ruhr, upon the remote barrier ridge of Amsberg, 
 " for you. Markers," he said, " can help yourselves, but here in 
 the duchy it is we who must give the initial impetus to the 
 new life." ^ In order to connect the new capital with the 
 rest of the world, the construction of the network of roads 
 which Stein had begun in County Mark was pushed vigorously 
 forward, and as early as 1817 Vincke was able to report to 
 Berlin that the governmental district of Amsberg possessed 
 fifty miles [German] of high roads and coal tramways, whilst 
 the entire state of Prussia could now boast of no more 
 than 523 miles of high roads, and the province of Pomerania 
 did not as yet possess a single metalled road. The roads 
 of this period took a course which was far from direct ; 
 though running along the convenient valleys, they commonly 
 climbed up and down the hillsides in wide undulations, 
 so that the villages on the heights could also play a 
 part in providing postillions and post-horses. Since the 
 lord-lieutenant was well acquainted with the needy state 
 of the national finances, he endeavoured to induce the locahty 
 to provide the funds necessary for road-building, and in one 
 of the provincial newspapers he informed the Westphalians that 
 the English, when it seemed to them that a new road, bridge, 
 or canal, was requisite, invited all those interested in the matter 
 
 "^ Vincke, General Account of the State of Affairs in the Duchy of Westphalia, 
 May 9, 1817, Vincke to Hardenberg, July 17, 1815, July 15, and August 14, 1816. 
 
 549 
 
History of Germany 
 
 to attend a public meeting, where a committee was elected 
 and money subscribed. But the daring appeal was premature. 
 This harassed generation of impecunious petty bourgeois was 
 not yet to be won over for such bold ventures ; it was regarded 
 as a striking success when a bridge on the road from Amsberg 
 to Altena was constructed by share capital. 
 
 The last bishops of Paderbom had neglected their domain 
 even more atrociously than the electors of Cologne. It was 
 with repugnance that Vincke became acquainted with this 
 Westphalian Ireland, a land in which agriculture was starved 
 and in which the peasants lived in dilapidated hovels, contrast- 
 ing strangely with the stately farms of the Hellweg region ; 
 the inhahitants, good-humoured but drunken 'and savage, 
 perpetually at war with the law, so that great bands would 
 often enter the forest with a long train of carts to carry off 
 the trees from a whole area in a single night ; and, to crown 
 all, " the curse of the country," Jewish usurers in every vUlage.i 
 Here also, after a period of quiet struggle, the lord-lieutenant 
 gained general confidence, when he had restored civil order with 
 a firm hand, had founded new schools, had provided better 
 salaries for the teachers (who had often received no more than 
 thirty thalers), had imposed obstacles in the way of the settle- 
 ment of Jews, and had opened new outlets for the produce 
 of home industry. From 1817 onwards, when the great lunatic 
 asylum at Nieder-Marsberg had been acqmred for the province, 
 there was constructed the long series of magnificent institu- 
 tions for the poor, the sick, the deaf and dumb, and the blind, 
 which were the envy of neighbouring countries. 
 
 But the nobles of Miinster could not forget the proud 
 history of their immediate cathedral chapter, and they retained 
 their ancient grudge against the Prussian dominion. It was 
 admitted that Westphalia was not taxed so heavily as the east ; 
 and that the only oppressive burden, the land tax, which had 
 been very unjustly apportioned by the Napoleonic officials, could 
 not be equitably adjusted until a tedious cadastral survey had 
 been effected ; moreover, there was no longer any reason to 
 complain of the Protestant arrogance of the officers and civil 
 officials, which in the evil days before 1806 had sometimes 
 been offensively displayed. Nevertheless parity of behefs was 
 as repulsive to the clerical nobihty of Miinster as it was to 
 the Polish nobles. Among the inhabitants of the Rhenish 
 
 ^ Vincke, Survey of the Administration of Westphalia, August,-i8i7. 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 and South German regions, lively, fond of sight-seeing, and 
 lovers of beauty. Catholic culture has always preserved the 
 agreeable characteristic of a frank and innocent cheerfulness ; 
 among the ponderous and pensive northerners this culture often 
 displayed itself in harsh, morose, and fanatical forms. This 
 was especially the case in Miinster, where the iron cages contain- 
 ing the bones of the Anabaptists still hung on the tower of 
 the Lamberti church, to give the converted populace a daily 
 reminder of the horrible sins of heresy. It was resentfully 
 noted that among the ministers of state there was not a single 
 CathoUc ; among the lord-lieutenants, but one, Zerboni ; among 
 the generals, two or three at most — ^where then was the 
 boasted parity ? The disproportion had an obvious explana- 
 tion, for of the high officials found by the conqueror in the 
 new provinces very few had been wilUng to enter Prussian 
 service. But subsequently the number of Catholics in the civil 
 service, and still more their number in the officers' corps, 
 remained comparatively small, for the Poles held aloof from 
 official hfe, and in the manufacturing provinces of the west 
 the members of the cultured bourgeoisie brought up their 
 children for business careers far more commonly than did the 
 members of the same class in the east, while the Catholic 
 nobles of the west seldom entered the service of the state. Most 
 rarely of all did this happen in the case of the old families 
 of Miinster, by whom military service under the Austrian crown 
 was still preferred to home service. The nobles lived sulkily 
 at home, associating only with one another and with the clergy ; 
 and even when during the winter they visited the city of 
 Miinster, the provincial capital, their palaces remained almost 
 inaccessible to the officers and civil officials. 
 
 Great difficulties were also imposed by the pretensions of 
 the numerous mediatised princes, who in the governmental 
 district of Miinster owned a full half of the land. Many of 
 them, such as the Arnbergs, the Loozes, and the Croys, were 
 Belgians, and exhibited a studied mistrust for the German 
 state ; but even those of German blood were frequently hard 
 masters. For years the Amsberg, govenmient was in dispute 
 with the princes of the House of Sayn, endeavouring to secure 
 for the unfortunate inhabitants of Wittgenstein some alleviation 
 of the burdens imposed by their twofold state of subjection; 
 for the governments were delighted to act as protectors of the 
 common people, priding themselves, as Kessler once declared 
 
History of Germany 
 
 to Beyme, that free collegial deliberation gave them " a sort 
 of popular character.^ It was thanks to the officials also that 
 certain useful innovations which had been introduced during 
 the period of foreign dominion were partially preserved for the 
 region, although they were not in harmony with the Prussian 
 civil code. The territorial pohce was reintroduced only in the 
 domains of the mediatised and in those of the immediate 
 nobility, and the landlords did not deplore their loss. Thus 
 completely, in the west, had the feudal order of society already 
 passed away. 
 
 Among all the works of the Prussian administration there 
 was none so fruitful for the nation as the quiet laborious 
 activity which the two Rhenish provinces regained for German 
 life. How confidently, at the Vienna congress, had all the 
 enemies of Prussia continued to express the hope that the 
 North German state would dash its head to pieces against 
 the obstacle imposed by this German-French pecuhar tj^e of 
 life. The dangerous situation of the remote western march was 
 not concealed from the king, and when he entered into posses- 
 sion of the new provinces he openly declared : "It is by 
 a higher consideration for the German fatherland as a whole 
 that my resolution has been determined ; it is for this reason 
 that these primitively German lands must remain united with 
 Germany, they are the bulwarks of the freedom and inde- 
 pendence of Germany." For a generation Rhineland was the 
 spoiled darling of the Prussian crown, as had been Silesia 
 in the days of Frederick II. Even the majority of the Old 
 Prussian officials who were sent to the west undertook their 
 duties with profound anxiety, and it was only gradually that 
 they recognised with astonishment how thin was the Gallic 
 varnish which had been superimposed upon these essentially 
 German stocks. 
 
 It was in the lower Rhenish territories below Cologne that 
 German characteristics had been most firmly maintained. On 
 the right bank, in the free land of Berg, the Prussians were 
 not regarded as foreigners. For more than a hundred years the 
 Protestant church of Berg had been under the protection of 
 the Prussian crown, and its diet had lived on friendly terms 
 with the diet of its neighbour Mark. The patriotic spirit which 
 
 ^ Kessler, Memorial concerning the Introduction of a representative Constitution, 
 Munster, April I2, 1818. 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 in 1814 was displayed by the men of the Berg Landsturm did 
 not date from yesterday. People still related with pride how 
 Stiicker, " the hero of Berg," and his brave peasants had once, 
 on the occasion of the first attack by the sansculottes, carried 
 on a petty war on their own account, in opposition to the 
 will of their Bavarian overlord ; every child in the country was 
 still familiar with the parody of the Lord's Prayer which had 
 come into existence as long ago as the days of Frederick's 
 wars, in reprobation of the French plunderers. The vigorous 
 industry of the people, who had in this region long been 
 accustomed to intercourse with foreign parts, and the rich 
 multiformity of religious contrasts, here gave rise to certain 
 characteristics of free urbanity. The manufacturers of the 
 Wuppertal had already christened their double town of Elber- 
 feld-Barmen by the name of " the German Manchester " ; the 
 men of Solingen referred with self-esteem to the world-wide 
 renown of their cutlery ; all were proud to derive their pros- 
 perity solely from their own exertions and all gladly entered 
 into the great relationships of the Prussian state, which opened 
 a wider field of labour for their vigorous energies. No other 
 territory of the north possessed so many popular men engaged 
 in independent work on behalf of the common weal, on behalf 
 of the awakening of the German spirit. There was, for instance, 
 the widely known " hermit of Gauting," Baron von Hallberg, 
 a fierce enemy of the French, who during the war had been 
 commander of the Landsturm on the Seig, and who always 
 took a prominent part when resistance to the French party 
 was in question ; there was Deycks, councillor at Opladen, 
 general legal adviser for the Wupper region, promoter of horti- 
 culture and of schools of agriculture ; there was Zuccalmaglio, 
 doctor at Schlebusch, who even during the epoch of foreign 
 dominion had founded the first philharmonic societies, inspired 
 always by the secret hope that they would one day play the 
 French out of the country ; there was pastor Loh of Burscheid, 
 held in equal respect by men of every religious party, who 
 preached tolerance and peace to all ; there was Ascheberg, 
 the preacher, editor of the Zeitschrift Hermann, which was 
 widely circulated in Westphalia as well as Berg, and If which 
 received the cordial support of Vincke. The activities of the 
 contentious polyhistor Benzenberg extended far beyond the 
 boundaries of Berg. In his industrious homeland this excellent 
 patriot had acquired an economic education which other German 
 
 553 
 
History of Germany 
 
 publicists still lacked, and subsequently had learned in associa- 
 tion with Hardenberg and Gneisenau the aspect of political 
 affairs when seen from above ; he voluntarily devoted his 
 independent pen to the chancellor's service, and indefatigably, 
 with the cheerful frankness characteristic of the men of Berg, 
 he combated the prejudices of the Rhinelanders against the 
 Prussian state. 
 
 The Old Prussian territories of Cleves, Mors, and Guelder- 
 land, accepted the new order even more gladly than did Berg. 
 This was true, not only of Wesel and Duisberg, ancient strong- 
 holds of militant Calvinism, but also of the rigid Catholic 
 inhabitants of the left bank, who put their trust in the gracious 
 Mother of God of Kevelaer. The inhabitants remembered with 
 pride the long series of brilliant men for whom the state of 
 the Hohenzollerns was indebted to this remote corner of the 
 world ; quite recently the little town of Cleves had provided 
 the Prussian officialdom with four of its best men, namely, 
 Maassen, Beuth, Sack, and Sethe. In loyal Crefeld, Prussian 
 sentiment was so defiantly displayed that the French prisoners 
 returning homeward found their lives in danger on their way 
 through the town. The silk manufacture of the vigorous place 
 at first suffered severely through the separation from France, 
 but such great firms as that of Leyen, and such active 
 merchants as de Greiff, recognised from the first that they would 
 soon be able to make good the inevitable losses of the years 
 of transition. 
 
 Higher up the left! bank the old opposition between the 
 temporal and the spiritual territories speedily became percep- 
 tible to the Prussian officials. The inhabita.nts of the coal- 
 field of Saarbriicken still preserved their affection for the 
 House of Nassau, which had so long ruled in this region, and 
 whose members had found their last resting-place in the ancient 
 church of St. Amual ; the Palatiners in Hunsruck and in the 
 Nahe valley had not forgotten the brilliant'' days when the 
 httle town of Simmem had been the tribal ' seat of the most 
 powerful of the princely races of the' Rhine ; all. Catholic and 
 Protestant ahke, were famihar with the benefits of German 
 princely rule, and greeted the Prussian dominion with joy 
 since a return to the old dynasties was out of the question. 
 But in the former lands of the crosier, and also in Aix and 
 JiiHch, mistrust everywhere prevailed and an intractable spirit 
 of dissatisfaction. Here were completely lacking the monarchical 
 
 554 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 traditions wherein was rooted the German sense of the state ; 
 for even Jiilich, which the court of Diisseldorf had always 
 treated as a mere apanage, had hardly any sense of dynastic 
 fidelity. These men without a state, already profoundly dis- 
 affected by the prolonged period of provisional administra- 
 tion abounding in opportunities for confusion, had now to 
 accept the dominion of an utterly strange ruling house 
 which in these regions had during the regime of the crosier 
 been regarded as the great disturber of the peace of the empire, 
 and whose reputation had of late been further impaired by the 
 mockery of the French. Within a few years so many political 
 storms had blown across the Rhine ; why should not this 
 Prussianism, which had so suddenly descended on the country 
 like a snow-storm, vanish in its turn ? The people did not 
 yet beUeve in the permanence of the new regime ; they listened 
 greedily to the oft-repeated rumour that the province was to 
 be exchanged for the kingdom of Saxony ; and they regarded 
 as a sign of weakness the considerate behaviour of the Prussian 
 government, whose methods differed so strikingly from the 
 dictatorial practices of the Napoleonic prefects. 
 
 In so far as any national memories still persisted in this 
 part of the world, these related to the Hapsburgs and to the 
 Holy Empire. What a poor thing to the burghers of Aix 
 seemed the festival of allegiance of the two Rhenish provinces 
 after all the imperial coronations which the proud town had 
 witnessed in former days. In the region of Cologne it] was 
 thought that the Prussians could be effectively wounded by the 
 repetition of the old saying, " Hold fast to the empire, peasant 
 of Cologne, hold fast whatever befall " ; what a long time was 
 still to elapse before it was understood that Prussia was the 
 heir of the old empire ! Although during the unspiritual Bona- 
 partist regime even religious Ufe had become superficial, and 
 although the clergy of Rhineland at the opening of the 
 years of peace were greatly inferior in culture to those of West- 
 phaha or of | Bavaria, the church continued to maintain its old 
 prestige.f After all, it was not ! simply the | sensual comfort of 
 the rule of the crosier, nor the rich adornments of its court 
 and church festivals, which bound the population of Electoral 
 Cologne and |Electoralj Treves to the old church. The Catholic 
 faith was firmly rooted in their minds, being here regarded, as 
 it was among the Latin races, to be the only possible form of 
 Christianity ; in all the problems of hfe the priest had been 
 
 555 
 
History of Germany 
 
 and remained the honoured counsellor of the people. This fact 
 had been impressed upon the Jacobins when, amid the threaten- 
 ing murmurs of the Rhinelanders, they had placed the goddess 
 of Reason upon the altar and had endeavoured to remove the 
 image of the Virgin from the castle of Bonn. Now, when the 
 new Protestant teachers and officials entered the country, 
 when a university in which parity of beliefs prevailed was 
 inaugurated, when in the holy town of Treves, for the first 
 time since the days of the arch-heretic Olevianus, Protestant 
 sermons were preached once again (on the occasion of the 
 tercentenary of the Reformation), the Catholic populace began 
 to complain, not strictly speaking from intolerance, but because 
 the new customs conflicted with traditional usage. The spirit 
 of provincialism indued an ecclesiastical garment. " We are 
 Rhinelanders," said the people, " and that is why we are good 
 Catholics." 
 
 The fires of Rhenish particularism were adroitly fanned 
 by the small but quietly growing ultramontane party, whose 
 members had not yet abandoned the hope of once more wrest- 
 ing from the temporal authority these nuclear lands of priestly 
 dominion. When the bishop of Treves made a pastoral journey 
 through his diocese to confirm the junior members of his flock, 
 he was now preceded by mounted peasant lads carr5ring the 
 colours of Electoral Treves — a practice the bishops had never 
 ventured on under French rule. The Rhinelanders in the 
 episcopal territories complained as loudly as did the Poles of 
 the way in which their homeland was invaded by a swarm of 
 foreign immigrants. The grievance was iterated with so much 
 obstinacy as to find support at length even in the pro-Prussian 
 lower Rhenish territories, and Benzenberg pathetically declared 
 that " indigenacy " was the natural right of every people, that 
 the Great Elector had long before promised the estates of Cleves 
 that the native-born alone should receive appointments in this 
 territory. A thorough purging of Rhenish officialdom had in 
 fact been effected. The prefects, who were all French, had left 
 the country ; so had the sub-prefects, with the exception of 
 three or four of German birth ; communal administration had 
 been utterly neglected because the mayors for the most part 
 understood no French and left the conduct of affairs in the 
 hands of ignorant clerks. Nevertheless the king proceeded very 
 cautiously with the inevitable transformation, declaring it to 
 be his " inalterable determination " that no one on the Rhine 
 
 556 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 was to be deprived of his position except for proved incapacity. 
 For many of the imperial officials their posts were held open 
 for years until they had secured in Bonn the degree of scientific 
 culture which the law demanded from Prussian state servants. 
 In the year 1816, in the six Rhenish governmental areas, there 
 were among the ofl&cials 207 Rhinelanders, 23 non-Prussians, 
 and 150 Prussians from other provinces, the latter for the 
 most part in those subordinate positions reserved for soldiers 
 who had served their time. This was certainly a reasonable 
 proportion, especially in view of the fact that the great 
 majority of the Rhenish jurists had devoted themselves to the 
 judicial side of their profession, and the courts in any case 
 were constituted almost exclusively out of the native-bom.* 
 
 Once awakened, however, the hostihty towards " cold and 
 rigid Prussianism " took no account of figures. The Rhine- 
 landers, rejoicing in their chosen land, in their civilisation a 
 thousand years older than that of the rest of Germany, stiU 
 utterly ignorant of the German world (for to them Germany 
 ended at Frankfort), regarded themselves as superior in all 
 things to the Old Prussians. " You are Lithuanians," Gorres 
 once exclaimed to his Old Prussian friends ; and this represented 
 the view of all the inhabitants of Coblenz. To this thoroughly 
 bourgeois people it seemed especially repulsive that among the 
 Old Prussian officials there were still to be found a certain 
 number of nobles. In a memorial, J. Weitzel, the Uberal 
 pubUcist, assured the chancellor with frank self-satisfaction that 
 justice demanded that every man should be judged by his 
 peers. On the Rhine, he said, this truth is already generally 
 recognised, " because we have here an enhghtened public 
 opinion " ; consequently in Rhineland there must be none 
 but bourgeois officials. None the less, cases of resistance to 
 authority were incomparably rarer than they had been under 
 the French regime, although by the latter disobedience ^was 
 punished far more severely than it was by the Prussian Jaw. 
 Over their beer, people might continue to complain of the stiff 
 Prussians, to whom the amiable Rhenish art of " live and let 
 live " was still so utterly imknown ; but for all that, nature 
 demanded her rights, and in secret these Germans were in truth 
 heartily pleased that they could once more converse with their 
 officials in the mother tongue. Under the crosier as under the 
 
 1 Cabinet Order of November 8, 1816. Survey of the personnel of the Rhenish 
 governmental areas, February 20, 1817. 
 
 557 
 
History of Germany 
 
 prefects it had been universally believed that every law could 
 be evaded by cunning or by favour. It was not agreeable to 
 the Rhinelanders to be forced to abandon this belief, and to 
 bend before the majesty of law ; but the immaculate justice 
 of the officials, and their perspicacity (indisputable in general, 
 isolated exceptions notwithstanding), ultimately compelled the 
 respect of the people. Already in tete-a-tete one could some- 
 times hear the half -unwilling admission, " The Prussian is 
 severe, but he is just." But public praise of the Prussians was 
 as yet out of the question. 
 
 Discontent is regarded as the natural privilege of the 
 genuine Rhinelander, and discontent was continuously nourished 
 by complaints concerning the unprecedented pressure of taxa- 
 tion. This people, firm in the faith, had willingly furnished 
 the church-tithes, since^^ everyone believed that in making 
 these payments he was coming to terms with heaven ; the 
 French taxes were regarded as war taxes, and were paid silently 
 upon compulsion. Everything paid to the Protestant king was, 
 however, rendered grudgingly, and to most people it still seemed 
 preposterous that in time of peace the secular arm should levy 
 taxes at all. When vague rumours now reached the Rhine 
 regarding the freedom from land taxation of the Old Prussian 
 landed proprietors, discontent became yet more rife, and for 
 an entire generation almost all the Rhinelanders were firmly 
 convinced that their country was being plundered for the benefit 
 of the east. In reality, Hardenberg was guided by the principle 
 of endeavouring to win over the difficult province by mildness. 
 The king expressly commanded the authorities that in the 
 collection of arrears of taxation great consideration should be 
 displayed, lest for a certain gain in money " the trustful depen- 
 dence " of the people should be shaken.^ During the first years, 
 the Rhinelanders were plainly favoured in matters of taxation, 
 for even if the land-tax was here somewhat higher than in the 
 east, in compensation, when the droits reunis had been abohshed, 
 indirect taxation was practically in abeyance. Even when the 
 new customs and tax laws were promulgated, the west was 
 treated so gently that Benzenberg came to the conclusion that 
 except Posen and Westphalia no other province of the monarchy 
 was taxed more lightly. Although the statistics compiled by this 
 eloquent publicist always offered a number of weak points to 
 criticism, it was incontestable that since the days of the Napo- 
 1 Cabinet Order to Sack, September 14, 1815. 
 
 558 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 Iconic regime there had occurred a notable diminution in the 
 burden of taxation. In the governmental district of Aix, the 
 taxation imposed in the year 1813 amounted to 5 thalers 2 sgr. 
 8 pf. per head ; nine years later the figure was no more than 
 4 thalers 8 sgr. 6 pf., of which 14 sgr. represented local rates. 
 The new government had played its part also in bringing about 
 the low level of local taxation, for it gave assistance to the 
 Rhenish towns in the reorganisation of their compUcated debts, 
 and remitted the arrears of taxation down to the year 1815, 
 with the result that the majority of the communes on the 
 Rhine found themselves in a far more favourable financial situa- 
 tion than the towns of the east with their heavy burden of 
 war taxes. These considerations notwithstanding, complaints 
 regarding excessive taxation never ceased ; people spoke as if 
 it had been Prussia's duty to give the Rhinelanders a special 
 reward for freeing them from the foreign yoke. 
 
 In the ancient lands of the crosier, the alhes at their first 
 entry were by no means received with such unalloyed pleasure 
 as in Berg ; at this time the delegates from the left bank of 
 the Rhine remained one and all in Paris as members of the 
 legislative assembly — in order, as they subsequently maintained, 
 to assist in ensuring the tyrant's overthrow. Now, when every- 
 one was grumbling against the Prussians, the terrible oppression 
 of the Napoleonic regime was speedily forgotten ; its benefits 
 alone were remembered ; enthusiasm was once again displayed 
 for the glorious ideas of '89, French or Belgian newspapers 
 were preferred (for the native press was still in its infancy, 
 and even the Kolnische Zeitung was quite a small paper with 
 a circulation of barely two thousand), and everyone swore by 
 the new doctrine that the sun rose over Europe in the west. 
 Yet the reawakening Gallicism of the Rhinelanders served 
 merely to show how essentially German was this people : 
 Rhenish hberalism originated in the same conservative and par- 
 ticularist disposition which in aU the other Prussian provinces 
 resisted every change in traditional usage. That which existed 
 was loved simply because it existed, and the government did 
 all that was possible to meet people's wishes in these respects. 
 The economic legislation of the Revolution, which har- 
 monised in essentials with the ideas embodied in the laws of 
 Stein and Hardenberg, was left unchanged ; so also temporarily 
 with the French communal administration. The prefects and 
 sub-prefects were, however, replaced by governmental committees 
 
 559 
 
History of Germany 
 
 and local councils, and even this valuable innovation was received 
 with nothing but criticism. " We can see," it was bitterly declared, 
 " that the only aim of Prussia is to increase the army of 
 officials unendingly ; the entire new governmental college of 
 Coblenz will never do as much good as did the one man Lezay- 
 Mamesia, the never-to-be-forgotten prefect of the department 
 of Rhine and Moselle." Again and again, stories were related 
 of sinister Prussian designs against Rhenish freedom, and one 
 whose only source of information was the loose talk of the 
 tavern frequenters, might readily despair of the country. When 
 Schwerz, the agriculturist, commissioned by the government 
 for the purpose, was visiting the Rhenish estates, in his native 
 town of Coblenz he had to listen to so many angry remon- 
 strances that he assurred the chancellor : " There is not a man 
 here but would give thanks to God on his knees were the 
 country once more to pass under French rule " Other well- 
 disposed observers compared the province to a volcano which 
 might at any moment break out in eruption.^ 
 
 Alarmed by these gloomy reports, Hardenberg for a time 
 seriously believed that a revolt was possible. Yet in actual 
 fact it was only a small minority on the Rhine which whole- 
 heartedly desired reunion with France. The Rhinelanders were 
 well aware of their vigorous return to prosperity, and the bond 
 of economic interests proved stronger than their French 
 sympathies. In any case, there was here no need to dread secret 
 conspiracies ; the best virtue of the Rhenish-Franconians, their 
 candour and good sense, gave a guarantee of this. Yet 
 during the next few years the censure and criticism of " the 
 revolution," as the new change of regime was termed, con- 
 tinually increased. The older generation had had actual 
 experience of the plunderings practised by the undisciplined 
 soldiery of the Republic : but the young men who were now 
 growing up had in their schools listened on the Day of Napo- 
 leon and the Day of Austerlitz to ceremonial speeches on the 
 glory of the world-ruling tricolor ; during the years which for 
 most men determine life they had seen the great emperor in 
 person, reviewing his magnificent cuirassiers in the Poppelsdorfer 
 Allee. Since liberalism was now again ever5rwhere beginning 
 to express its admiration of French freedom, this generation, 
 
 1 Governmental^Councillor Schwerz to Hardenberg, Coblenz, August, 1816. 
 Report to Klewitz from a landlord of Cologne, January, 1817. Lieutenant-Colonel 
 von Romberg to the Chancellor, August 24, 1817. 
 
 560 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 which in the twenties and the thirties dominated opinion on 
 the Rhine, was now glad to boast of its French culture ; the 
 French word of command Dutzwitt {tout de suite) sounded more 
 agreeable to its ears than the German Rasch (quick !). The 
 Rhenish students' clubs in the western German universities 
 all sported French colours, and the current stories regarding 
 the atrocities of the sansculottes were now transferred to the 
 credit of the Cossacks. 
 
 The mistrust felt by the province towards the government 
 was unccEisingly fostered by the separatist activities of the 
 Rhenish nobility. Nowhere else in the empire had the nobles 
 suffered severer losses. A generation earlier they had still ruled 
 the cotmtry through its cathedral chapter, and almost two-thirds 
 of the land had belonged to the nobles and the church. Now 
 landed proprietorship on the large scale had been so utterly 
 destroyed that an estate of about fifty acres was considered 
 one of considerable size. In the governmental district of Treves 
 there were only one hundred and two land owners with estates 
 larger than three hundred acres ; in Aix, no more than eighty ; 
 in Diisseldorf, but one. Of the old families competent for 
 representation in the diet there were in Berg no more than 
 twenty-four still extant ; and in Cleves but five, of which two 
 only still possessed landed property. There no longer existed 
 a sharp distinction between town and country, between land- 
 lords and burghers and peasants, and this radical destruction 
 of the ancient feudal classification was an irrevocable fact, for 
 here, in Germany's liveliest route of commerce, even in the 
 middle ages urban life had invaded the rural districts, and the 
 Revolution merely completed with a coup de main that for 
 which the way had long been prepared by the intensive economy 
 of the dense population. The few famihes of knightly birth 
 which had survived the destruction of the Rhenish nobility, 
 the WyUchs, Mirbachs, Spees, and Nesselrodes, were unable 
 to adapt themselves to the changed order ; they expected from 
 the liberators the return of the good old time, and at once 
 demanded in the name of German law and German honour the 
 restoration of tithes, htmting rights, and entail. The officials, 
 on the other hand, whether native-bom or immigrant, warned 
 the chancellor against any such step. They knew that the idea 
 of social equality was to the Rhinelanders the dearest of all 
 poUtical principles. Whilst Vincke, on the ground of his 
 Westphalian experiences, defended entail, the Rhenish presidents 
 
 561 2 o 
 
History of Germany 
 
 and councillors declared with one voice that the economic 
 prosperity of Rhineland depended on the free divisibility 
 of the soil.i Consequently the demand of the nobles was 
 politely rejected, and from the time of this disappointment they 
 became disaffected towards the Prussian state ; it was only 
 the princely houses of Wied and Solms, which from ancient 
 days had been distinguished by culture and a free spirit, that 
 maintained a worthy relationship towards the crown. Yet 
 the populace could not be persuaded out of its belief that the 
 Prussians were in league with the nobility. Four years after 
 the ceremony of allegiance, Solms-Laubach described the senti- 
 ments of the province in the following terms : "A completely 
 satisfactory mood would be attainable only through the instru- 
 mentality of the impossible, the nobles must be paid their tithes 
 once more, but the peasantry must retain their exemption from 
 these exactions." ' 
 
 Notwithstanding all such difficulties, this region of varie- 
 gated and peculiar life, strangely compounded of ancient clerical 
 and neo-French elements, became imperceptibly and securely 
 connected with the new state. Of two lord-Ueutenants, one, 
 von Ingersleben in Coblenz, had during the war been at the 
 head of the Pomeranian administration, and had ably super- 
 vised the levying and equipment of the Landwehr ; the old 
 man was well received by the Rhinelanders on account of his 
 benevolence and his hospitable geniality. The other. Count Solms- 
 Laubach in Cologne, friend of Stein, and participator in the 
 German central administration, accepted his office from a sense 
 of patriotism, diligently made himself at home in all his 
 administrative duties, and in his work as a monarchical official 
 so completely forgot the mediatised noble that the greedy 
 knighthood of his lord-lieutenancy soon came to regard him as 
 a renegade ; he knew his Rhenish fellow-countrymen, and for- 
 bade his subordinates to display the domineering manners of 
 Old Prussia which were intolerable to the self-complacency of 
 the Rhenish Franconians. Neither of these men possessed 
 Vincke's independence of mind, but they were ably supported 
 by the generality of officials, who were almost all men of ability, 
 and who, from Delius, the talented governor of Treves, down to 
 
 1 Baron von Wylich to Hardenberg, February i6, to Schuckmann, May 15, 
 1816. Reports from Governor von Schmitz-Grollenburg, Coblenz, October 9, 
 Governor von Erdmannsdorff, Cleves, October 31, 1817, Councillors Bitter, 
 Hartung, etc. 
 
 2 Solms-Laubach, Report to Prince William, August 18, 1817. 
 
 562 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 the last gendarme, stood firmly shoulder to shoulder amid the 
 suspicious populace. 
 
 No one who looked about him with open eyes could fail 
 to see in every market-place and every street how with the 
 enfranchisement from the foreign yoke there had resulted a 
 return of civic freedom and of the ancient customs of the 
 country. The smugglers and deserters, the curse of the 
 Napoleonic epoch, immediately disappeared, and with them 
 disappeared also the horrible system of poUce espionage. The 
 towns were once more adorned with their proud escutcheons, 
 which had hitherto been discountenanced as symbols of 
 federalism. Even the old kermises and shooting festivals were 
 revived, although among the flags which adorned the scene 
 there was rarely displayed the eagle banner to which the people 
 really owed the reawakening of Rhenish merry-making. Under 
 the rule of Napoleon, the Cologne carnival had shyly withdrawn 
 itself into the houses : now the cheerful cry Alaaf Koln ! und 
 Geek loss Geek elans ! was once more heard in the streets ; 
 the Funken of Cologne once more held their mad parade ; and 
 in order that thanks to the Prussians should not be wholly 
 lacking, on one occasion a great stock-fish tied on the top of 
 a long pole and adorned with a laurel crown was suddenly 
 upUfted above the crowd and greeted with a loud Heil dir im 
 Siegerkranz ! — ^for the taciturn king was utterly displeasing to 
 the Rhinelanders, who found the unrestrained liveliness of the 
 facetious crown prince far more to their taste. In the year 
 1822, an association was formed to undertake the organisation 
 of the beautiful popular festival, which year by year in its 
 brilliant processions of masks displayed more and more plainly 
 the wealth and ease of the once again flourishing Rhenish 
 capital. In order to manifest its good feeling for Rhineland 
 the government also allowed the free passage through the 
 streets of religious processions, which had been prohibited by 
 the Napoleonic law ; in Cologne, from 1818 onward, the festival 
 of Corpus Christi was once more celebrated in the open with 
 its ancient pomp. It was remarkable to note how the romantic 
 ideas which had hitherto prevailed only in the narrow circle 
 of the Boisserees, now all at once permeated the populace, how 
 the Rhinelanders began to remember their great history. When 
 the French had removed the works of art from Cologne and 
 Aix, no one had paid any attention ; but now, when the 
 Prussians brought back the stolen goods, both towns instituted 
 
 563 
 
History of Germany 
 
 festivals of rejoicing. Three years later, by a generous bene- 
 faction, Canon Wallraf laid the foundation of the Cologne art 
 collections. The government zealously undertook the protection 
 of the ancient architectural glories of the region ; when the 
 king and the crown prince visited Treves for the first time 
 they entered through the Porta Nigra, the fortress gate of the 
 Caesars, which had recently been disinterred. Their example 
 exercised a wholesome influence, and the time at length arrived 
 in which the Rhenish clergy, whose reputation had hitherto 
 been so evil, became especially distinguished in Germany for 
 artistic sense and historical culture. 
 
 In the Rhine valley, extensive works for navigation were 
 immediately begun. Under the French regime the towing path had 
 been almost completely destroyed and the channel had been 
 grossly neglected ; it was not until sixteen years later that at 
 Bingerbriick the mariners of the Rhine erected a monument 
 to the king, because he had effected a tenfold widening of the 
 channel through the Bingerloch or narrows at Bingen. The 
 prefects had paid somewhat more attention to the construction 
 of roads ; but even the most important high-road of the province, 
 that from Cologne to Coblenz, was first completed by Prussia. 
 Year by year a more vigorous activity was displayed upon the 
 Baienturm jetty in Cologne, where recently the grass had been 
 growing. Impoverished Cologne seemed already likely to out- 
 soar wealthy Strasburg ; in Coblenz, once so dirty, the mariners 
 on the Rhine could now see a long row of stately houses show- 
 ing above the new walls ; all the Prussian towns in Rhineland 
 increased more rapidly in prosperity than those under French 
 rule or under the petty princes. On the lower Rhine, the 
 recovery of industry was so rapid that in Wuppertal as 
 early as the year 1821 the Rhenish West India Company was 
 founded, whilst the exploitation of the coal-field of Saar- 
 briicken helped to increase the industrial prosperity of this 
 region. In the year 1815, the state mines of Saarbriicken, 
 employing five hundred men, supplied fifty thousand tons of 
 coal, but within a brief period the yield was doubled — to the 
 great satisfaction of Bleibtreu, the surveyor of mines, who had 
 been the first to assure the chancellor that this district rich in 
 possibilities would prove indispensable to Prussia. Union with 
 the vine-growing land of France had been unfavourable to the 
 progress of German viticulture ; but now the North German 
 market was opened, and as soon as the two great vintage years 
 of 1818 and 1819, following bad vintage years, had restored 
 
 564 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 courage to the vine-growers and provided them with fresh 
 means, throughout the vine-growing region, and especially on 
 the Moselle, new vineyards were planted, so that in many 
 communes the vine-growing area was doubled and Trevir metro- 
 polis could now with better right than formerly enjoy the title 
 Baccho gratissima, which had been given to it by its spiritual rulers. 
 
 An almost hopeless task was imposed upon the new govern- 
 ment in consequence of the horrible devastation of the forests 
 which, among all the sins of the French, the forest-loving 
 Germans found it hardest to forgive. The peasant of Berg 
 clenched his fists when any allusion was made to the ancient 
 glories of the country, the King's Forest and the Franconian 
 Forest. Of the immemorial oaks and beeches, not a single 
 one was left standing. All that the deforestation of the rude 
 hill-tops of Hunsruck and Eifel signified for the climate and for 
 agriculture people were now to learn with horror when, after 
 a storm, the freshets from the mountains poured down into 
 the Moselle valley, washing away in a few seconds the humus 
 which during months of hard work the unfortunate vine-growers 
 had carried up the steep rocky terraces. What quantities of 
 beasts of prey, too, had been allowed to grow up through the 
 French neglect of the chase. In the Kotten Forest, just 
 behind Borm, wolves were still shot ; and as late as 1817 one 
 hundred and fifty-nine of these animals were destroyed in the 
 governmental district of Treves. Hartig, the leading German 
 forester of those days, was sent to Rhineland from Berlin; 
 long before, in the days of the great sales of the domains, 
 he had performed an enduring service for the old provinces 
 when he secured that the forests should not also be ahenated. 
 Here, in the west, he endeavoured to save aU that it was still 
 possible to save ; in many places afforestation was begun, and 
 a strict forest poUce was instituted, which aroused much 
 discontent among the peasants ; but who could guard 
 against the fierce winds which blew across the bare downs of 
 Eifel ? The terrible desolation could never be completely repeiired. 
 
 The reorganisation of the system of education proved 
 more fruitful. When the Prussians took over the coimtry, 
 Johannes Schulze found the schools " in a condition of hopeless 
 neglect."* Since the French state had never given any support 
 
 ' J. Schulze, Memorial concerning Church and Education on the Rhine, 
 December 31, 1816. 
 
 56s 
 
History of Germany 
 
 to the elementary schools, in more than a third of the com- 
 munes there were no schools at all. In many hamlets the 
 peasants considered they did all that was necessary when for 
 four months in winter they found room in a barn for a 
 vagrant teacher. Three-fifths of the children grew up without 
 any instruction at all. Even the lower educational institutions 
 of the towns were rarely any better than those notorious schools 
 of the old episcopal days which bore the distinctive name of 
 Silentium. Here and there only had some vigorous pedagogue 
 like Weinmann, the schoolmaster of Kreuznach, in arduous 
 conflict with the French authorities, managed to maintain the 
 German spirit among his pupils. What labours had to be effected 
 in this region before the Prussian principle of universal compul- 
 sory education could become effective. The change was above 
 all to the advantage of the CathoUcs, whose schools had been 
 especially neglected, but the new teachers from the semimary 
 at Treves often found their work extremely difficult, for many 
 of the priests of the Rhenish region had at one time been monks, 
 and had not outgrown the views of the cloister. 
 
 The current of German culture flowed irresistibly across the 
 liberated frontier land. Till quite recently the entire Rhineland, 
 the right bank not excepted, had been utterly sterile ground for 
 the German book trade ; at the beginning of the century even 
 the rich Wuppertal had not been able to boast a single bookseller's 
 shop ; but now in Bonn there came into existence a new- 
 centre of literary intercourse, and the energetic Perthes imme- 
 diately cemented his business relationships. The old patricians 
 of Cologne, like those of Strasburg to-day, spoke French on 
 great social occasions, and patois in familiar converse ; but 
 now the younger generation had to learn an intelligible High 
 German. Many years of serious struggle and of unfortunate 
 mutual misunderstanding were still to elapse before the new 
 province became proud of its union with Prussia. But 
 Amdt. who was intimately acquainted with the talented, 
 impressionable, and plastic Rhenish Franconians, ever readily 
 accessible to all extraneous influences, already felt well 
 assured that contact with the incisive Old Prussian system 
 could not fail to redound to the advantage of this people. 
 It was only the deplorable sloth of the local political system, 
 only the unnatural conditions of the theocracy and of the 
 foreign dominion, which had debased the highly gifted stock : 
 a strong state could alone raise it from this debasement, and 
 
 S66 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 coxild refertilise the most beautiful and the oldest of all 
 German lands with the vigorous energy of the new national 
 life. 
 
 § 4. BEGINNINGS OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE. 
 
 Thus it came to pass that half or, for practical purposes, 
 the whole of Prussia was in process of transformation. For 
 some years the state required a monarchical dictatorship. 
 Unquestionably the work of administrative reform could be 
 brought to a successful conclusion only in a centralised con- 
 stitution, whose necessity the king himself had recognised in 
 so many cabinet orders ; unquestionably the innumerable 
 conflicting elements in the nation could be aroused to a living 
 sense of cohesion in no other way than by the continuous com- 
 munity of political work and party Ufe ; but the essentials 
 of organisation must first be established, before the govern- 
 ment was encumbered with parliamentary forms. These 
 millions of Swedish, Polish, Saxon, and French hearts required 
 time in which to weep out their sorrows, in which to accom- 
 modate themselves to the new conditions. Who could venture 
 upon the responsibility of allowing particularist prejudices, 
 the thousand injured local interests of a nation which in 
 pohtical matters was still entirely untrained, to jostle one 
 another forthwith in parliamentary struggles ? Who could 
 venture to expose at this early date to the attacks of an 
 opposition, universal military service, the tax laws, the sub- 
 division of the provinces — to an opposition which had abso- 
 lutely no understanding of the vital conditions of a great state, 
 and which to some extent manifestly cherished treasonable 
 designs ? 
 
 To Prussia's misfortune, the king was no longer in a 
 position to exercise free choice of time for the foundation 
 of the constitution. He had deprived himself of freedom 
 in this respect when he subscribed the unhappy ordinance 
 of May 22, 1815, which promised a representative system 
 based upon delegations from the provincial diets. The 
 charters issued when taking over Swedish Pomerania spoke 
 in the same sense, and the promises made to the Saxons 
 were essentially identical, having been to the following effect : 
 
 567 
 
History of Germany 
 
 " You shall retain your representative constitution when it 
 has been adapted to the general constitution which it is our 
 purpose to provide for our entire state." Provincial diets 
 and participation in the national assembly were promised 
 to the other new provinces as well. The royal word had been 
 pledged, and the patriotic press, whose thoughts were directed 
 solely towards the ideal of constitutional government, stormily 
 demanded that this pledge should be fulfilled. To impatient" 
 spirits it seemed all the more necessary that speedy action 
 should be taken because the interim territorial representation, 
 which during recent years had served the old provinces as a 
 common representative organ, had finally been abolished in 
 the summer of 1815. This assembly itself, on April 7th, 
 shortly before its close, had determined, upon the motion of 
 the Upper Silesian deputy Eisner von Gronow, to petition 
 the king for the speedy introduction of a definitive repre- 
 sentative system and for the revival of the provincial 
 diets. 1 
 
 When Hardenberg, in Vienna, had induced the king to make 
 this momentous concession, it was believed that the fulfil- 
 ment of the intention would be quite easy ; the first proposal 
 went so far as to suggest that as early as June ist a com- 
 mittee should assemble, consisting of of&cials and residents 
 from the provinces under the presidency of the chancellor, 
 and that by September ist it should bring the Prussian con- 
 stitution into existence. Since war was imminent, this extremity 
 of frivolousness was happily averted, and the ordinance deferred 
 the summoning of the constitutional committee until Sep- 
 tember 1st. But it was impossible to arrange matters even 
 at this date, because the king and his counsellors were unable 
 to leave the congress of Paris. When at length they returned, 
 not only was it necessary once again to postpone the con- 
 stitutional work, on account of the inevitable labours of 
 administrative organisation ; it also speedily became evident 
 that the ordinance which the liberals had so greatly esteemed 
 was nothing less than an irresponsible piece of levity on the 
 part of Hardenberg, the gravest of all his pohtical errors. 
 In the year 1808, indeed, upon Stein's instigation, Vincke, 
 Schon, and Rhediger had drawn up certain resolutions and 
 proposals for the future constitution ; but of all these, Httle 
 was now of practical utility, since the state domain had been 
 
 * Minutes of the Interim Territorial Representation , April 7, 1815. 
 
 568 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 doubled. Nor did the new ordinance itself offer any firm 
 standing ground ; and indeed, on close examination, it 
 was manifestly a series of riddles and contradictions. 
 According to this document, the provincial diets were to be 
 re-established, and from them a common Landtag was to be 
 elected. But did there then actually still exist estates which 
 could be considered as providing a representation of the 
 recently constituted provinces ? Did they still possess incon- 
 testable rights ? How were the representative constitutions 
 of the new provinces to be retained, and how were these 
 various constitutions to be assimilated to the common consti- 
 tution ? Did not this mean that the provinces were to be 
 recognised as independent states, and were simultaneously 
 to be incorporated in a new state ? And if their consti- 
 tutions were retained, could they not demand that the common 
 constitution should be created only with the assent of their 
 separate estates ? A complex of intricate and insoluble 
 legal questions was here involved ; the state itself was favour- 
 ing the particularism of its territories ; the thoughtless promise 
 of the crown gave the signal for a constitutional struggle 
 which threatened the foundations of the national unity 
 estabUshed with so much difficulty. 
 
 Extremely unfortunate was the form of the ordinance 
 of May 22nd, and extremely comprehensive was the design 
 which underlay that ordinance. Hardenberg revived the far- 
 reaching ideas of reform characteristic of Stein's best days ; 
 it was his intention to create a new circle and communal 
 organisation for the entire state ; from the circle diets were 
 to proceed the provincial diets, and from these latter was 
 to proceed the central diet. Nothing was further from his 
 mind than a spiritless imitation of the French Charte of 1814. 
 Rather it was his endeavour to transform the Old German 
 diets in order to fit them for the purposes of a modem repre- 
 sentative system. The royal ordinance made use of the words 
 " representation of the people " and " estates " indifferently, 
 as equivalent expressions ; the intention was to constitute a 
 Reichstag divided into three estates ; this body was to be 
 based entirely upon the foundation of the constitutional law, 
 and was to represent, not the well-established rights of iso- 
 lated privileged classes, but the interests of the people as a 
 whole. This plan harmonised with the views of the time ; for 
 although the subdivision of the nation into nobles, burghers, and 
 
 569 
 
History of Germany 
 
 peasants, had long ceased to correspond to the conditions of 
 modern society (above all in the west), public opinion was 
 still familiar with this classification. Moreover, the new South 
 German constitutions started from similar principles ; every- 
 where the upper house was a feudal corporation, in essentials 
 a representation of the nobles, whilst the lower house was, 
 as a rule, a representation of several groups of estates. In 
 Prussia the new circle assemblies, like the national represen- 
 tation of 1811, were constituted by the representation of the three 
 estates ; and although the chancellor had no love for social 
 distinctions, he recognised the necessity of adapting innova- 
 tions to the customary and the traditional. 
 
 But even such a constitution as this, intermediating between 
 the old and the new, encountered in Prussia a resistance 
 which had not to be overcome in the states of South 
 Germany. The opposition in Prussia arose from the great 
 and manifold relationships of this state, and from that prudent 
 consideration which, in the long struggle against feudal licence, 
 the Hohenzollems had ever displayed. In the states of the 
 Confederation of the Rhine, the old diets had long before 
 been abolished by the rough hand of despotic officialdom, and 
 the structure of the new constitution could here be erected 
 upon cleared ground ; it was only in Wiirtemberg that the 
 abolished estates endeavoured to reacquire their rights. But 
 in Prussia certain remnants of the ancient territorial diets 
 had almost everywhere been preserved. Thus in these 
 powerless bodies the king's ambiguous promise suddenly 
 reawakened ancient and long-forgotten claims ; the rubbish 
 of the centuries filled the air with dust. The struggle of 
 national unity against particularism, which in the adminis- 
 trative domain had been almost completely fought out, was 
 renewed in the constitutional question. While the mass of 
 the nation remained in a condition of complete inertia, it 
 was only the claims of the old feudal orders which found 
 vigorous defenders; and since nations receive as gifts only 
 what they themselves deserve, the old diets seemed more 
 powerful than they really were, and ultimately gained partial 
 success. 
 
 What a difference when the observer turned from the 
 monarchical administration of Prussia to consider its pro- 
 vincial diets ! On the one side all was order, unity, and 
 clarity ; on the other, hopeless confusion, in which almost 
 
 570 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 every right was contested. The feudal territorial divisions 
 were hardly ever coincident with the administrative areas 
 of the state ; their constitution was wholly dependent upon 
 the private law characteristic of the patrimonial state, and 
 was separated by a wide abyss from the legal ideas of the 
 modem state ; nowhere did there exist a representation of 
 all classes. The authority of the estates was for the most 
 part hmited to the administration of the knightly credit 
 institutes and fire insurance societies, to the assessment of 
 certain taxes, and similar matters. The old order of estates 
 had maintained itself in East Prussia far more vigorously 
 than elsewhere, because here a portion of the peasants, the 
 Kollmers, were represented in the Landtag. Even in the 
 spring of 1813, the Landtag of Konigsberg had displayed its 
 efficiency, and the estates of the Mohrung circle cordially 
 assured the chancellor that this ancient constitution, handed 
 down from our forefathers, was the only one well adapted 
 to the German national spirit.^ In West Prussia, on the 
 other hand, all the powers of the estates were open to dispute. 
 After Frederick the Great had abohshed the old Polish estates, 
 his successor, in his year of grace, had issued an ordinance 
 regarding the rights of the estates. It had not been carried 
 into effect. During the years of the war, the government 
 on several occasions summoned assemblies of the estates, 
 whose composition was prescribed from above. No one was 
 able to say what legal rights really existed in this respect, 
 and still less whether Danzig and the Warsaw territories, which 
 had now been added to the province, had any right to claim 
 a share of representation. 
 
 In Pomerania there still nominally existed the Further 
 Pomeranian and the Hither Pomeranian Landstuben, a repre- 
 sentation of the prelates, the nobility, and the immediate 
 towns, without any participation on the part of the peasantry 
 and the lesser towns. But the once all-powerful Landtag 
 had ceased to assemble after the year 1810 ; since the 
 estate of peasants had zealously sent its delegates to the 
 new circle assembhes, the old oligarchy had passed into such 
 obHvion that the government of Stargard made enquiry in 
 Berlin whether the Landstuben were still in existence. The 
 reply was to the effect that this would be decided when the 
 question of the re-establishment of the provincial diets was 
 
 '■ Memorial from the Mohrung circle diet, September 4, 1816. 
 
 S7I 
 
History of Germany 
 
 settled.! In Silesia, Frederick the Great had abolished the 
 last vestiges of the diets of princes of the imperial days. 
 
 All the more loudly vociferated Hardenberg's ancient oppo- 
 nents, the estates of the Electoral Mark. This Landtag was 
 a peculiar one, representing, as in Pomerania, only the pre- 
 lates, the nobles, and the immediate towns, an ancient and 
 extremely complicated administration of debts, known as the 
 Landschaft of the Electoral Mark. In the sixteenth century 
 the estates had taken over extensive territorial debts, and 
 since then, in order to pay the interest on these debts, they 
 administered the yield of certain taxes, which were paid, 
 however, not by themselves, but by the greatly commiserated 
 " taxable estate." This was the protoytpe of feudal admin- 
 istration, universally distinguished, hke the feudal military 
 system, by its incomparable costliness. An annual income 
 of 300,000 thalers was raised at a cost of 50,000 thalers 
 in emoluments and salaries.^ During the first years of 
 Hardenberg's administration, the throne had aboUshed the 
 Marsch- und Molestienkasse together with other feudal rubbish, and 
 now a further step was absolutely necessary. Since the state 
 was organising its own debts, it was necessary that it should 
 again take this debt of the Mark upon its shoulders ; the 
 days ,]of the Landschaft of Electoral Mark were numbered. 
 Thus the most vigorous prop of the old feudal power began 
 to crumble, and, greatly concerned, deputies of the nobility 
 petitioned the king to restore the ancient constitution and 
 to hear the views of the estates concerning certain necessary 
 changes. Neumark also possessed its " upper and lower 
 estate " ; Altmark and Kottbus demanded that they should 
 be allowed to rejoin the estates of Brandenburg. The unfor- 
 tunate ordinance of May 22nd provided new energy for all 
 these efforts and endowed them with a semblance of right. 
 Moreover, so potent was the charm exercised upon this in- 
 experienced generation by the word " constitution," that Buchholz, 
 the Bonapartist representative of the prudent foUc of Berlin, 
 became a zealous advocate of the feudal nobility ; he was 
 the Hterary spokesman of the feudal party, and in his Journal 
 fur Deutschland praised the ancient constitution of Electoral 
 Mark, describing it as a genuine example of a constitution. 
 
 1 Memorial from the government of Stargard, April 29, 1814. 
 " Report of the Potsdam Government, December 6, 1809. 
 
 2 Petition of the knightly deputies of Electoral Mark, August 13, 1814. 
 
 572 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 The system of estates in the old provinces, however, 
 seemed well ordered when compared with the chaotic condi- 
 tions that prevailed in the newly acquired territories. How 
 proud was Swedish Pomerania of its ancient constitution ; 
 the only trouble was that no one had the least idea what this 
 term signified. The old Landschaft of the " circles and 
 towns " of Hither Pomerania had been aboUshed by King 
 Gustavus Adolphus IV in the year 1806, and in its place 
 there had been introduced the Swedish constitution with its 
 four estates, this change being effected amid the jubilation 
 of the peasants, who now at length secured representation. 
 Four years later, by a further coup de main on the part of 
 the crown of Sweden, a new constitution was promulgated, 
 but this never came into actual existence. Consequently the 
 Hither Pomeranian patriot could display his enthusiasm as 
 he pleased for any one of three different constitutions. In 
 actual fact, the " circles and towns " continued to behave 
 as if nothing had happened during these nine years ; they 
 regarded themselves as the genuine legal representatives of 
 the country, and besieged the king with grievances. The 
 peasants and tenant fanners, on the other hand, led by the two 
 indefatigables, Ludwig Amdt and Christian Liiders, advocated 
 other views ; they had espoused the constitution of 1806, 
 and considered that this was the only one with any legal 
 title to existence.^ 
 
 In Posen there still existed a council of deputies, that 
 is to say, a general council after the Napoleonic style. Since 
 this assembly was nominated by the Warsaw government, 
 since, moreover, it formed only one constituent of the Polish 
 prefectoral system, and since it could not be regarded as a 
 genuine diet, it was with perfect justice abolished by Prussia 
 on August 26, 1818. 
 
 An incredible condition of feudal anarchy existed in 
 Saxony — a condition which it is plain Hardenberg had no 
 suspicion of when he promulgated the ordinance of May 22nd. 
 Each one of the seven parts of the duchy of Saxony 
 possessed its own assembly of the estates, and since the 
 quiet Ufe of junkerdom had here never been disturbed by the 
 severe hand of a strong monarchy, the feudal oligarchy dis- 
 tinguished itself from the mob by laborious proofs of noble 
 descent ; not long before. King Frederick Augustus had warned 
 
 1 Petition of July 20, 1816. 
 573 
 
History of Germany 
 
 off a count of the younger nobility from the sacred threshold 
 of the Lusatian estates. In these circles it was regarded as 
 a matter of course that the portion of the Saxon hereditary 
 dominions which had passed to Prussia would continue to 
 retain all the rights which the Landtag of the kingdom of 
 Saxony had possessed, and the demand was even voiced that 
 a separate system of national debt should be retained. When 
 in Lower Lusatia, which now constituted a mere fragment of 
 the new province of Brandenburg, the chancellor would not 
 immediately summon the old Landtag, the estates of the 
 territory declared : " The contents of this ordinance, which 
 with a few momentous words deprives us of all that has 
 hitherto been dearest to us — our well-grounded privileges, our 
 constitutional efficiency, our just hopes, and the beliefs of 
 our childhood — ^has profoundly disturbed us." They went on 
 to demand, " as representatives of the people, as participators 
 heretofore in administration and legislation," that they should 
 be taken into consultation concerning the new constitution. 
 The estates of the princedom of Querfurt endeavoured on two 
 occasions, on their own initiative, to constitute themselves into 
 a circle diet, although this was forbidden. When the Prus- 
 sian stamp-laws were introduced into Saxony, the estates of 
 the Thuringian circle issued a passionate statement of 
 grievances to the king, wherein they menacingly declared that 
 this step " had awakened ancient memories." The burghers 
 and peasants, on the other hand, uttered here, as in Hither 
 Pomerania, loud remonstrances concerning the behaviour of 
 the high-born " representatives of the people." Bourgeois 
 landowners of the Gorlitz region demanded, while thankfully 
 recognising the just sentiments of the new government, that 
 the provincial diet should be completely transformed, for 
 " the existing condition of affairs is supported solely by the 
 weak foundation of antiquity." The like request was sent in 
 by the town councillors of Naumburg for, they said, " the old 
 estates represented their own interests alone, and the feudal 
 constitution concealed the gravest defects under the semblance 
 of legality." This writing was transmitted to Berlin by 
 President von Schonberg, with the assurance that it voiced the 
 judgment of the cultured people of the province. ' 
 
 1 Petition of the estates of I-ower Lusatia, December 4, 1816. Reports of 
 the Merseburg government, August 8, 1817, October 24, 1819. Petition from 
 bourgeois landowners of Upper Lusatia, March i, 1818. Petition of the Naum- 
 burg town councillors, December 31, i8i6. 
 
 574 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 Since the ordinance of May 22nd decreed the re-estab- 
 lishment of the provincial diets " where they still exist 
 in greater or less efficiency," the former estates of the 
 provinces westward of the Elbe also thought they could 
 derive advantage from the ambiguous royal words. AU of 
 them, those of Westphalia, Berg, and Darmstadt, had been 
 abolished by France. Yet some shattered fragments of the 
 ancient feudal institutions had still been preserved almost 
 everywhere ; in addition, appeal was made to article 24 of 
 the peace of Tilsit, in virtue of which the new lord paramount 
 had to fulfil all the duties which had hitherto devolved upon 
 the king of Prussia, and the conclusion drawn from these 
 words was, that the representative rights aboUshed by the 
 governments of the Confederation of the Rhine would now be 
 restored without further parley. The first to move in the 
 matter were the nobles of County Mark, who even during 
 the war had petitioned for the restoration of " the good old 
 constitution." When the oath of allegiance was taken, the 
 estates renewed their demand, saying : " We are Markers 
 and as such are deeply attached to our pecuUar father- 
 land." 
 
 Since that time, the same demand had been repeated in count- 
 less petitions by the spokesman of the estates. Baron von 
 Bodelschwingh-Plettenberg. " Our constitution exercised its 
 benevolent influence before the Prussian state had a consti- 
 tution at all. The fact that the scheme for the Prussian 
 constitution is not yet completed can be no obstacle to the 
 leaving of our own constitution at work within its own boun- 
 daries." After repeated attempts at conciliation, Hardenberg 
 finally forbade the indefatigable petitioner to use the title 
 of " estates," and subsequently (on May 10, 1820) laid it 
 down as a general principle that where the former estates had 
 been abolished by the foreign authorities recognised by Prussia 
 in the peace of Tilsit, these remained abolished until the 
 introduction of the new provincial diets. ^ The principle was 
 legally incontestable, for the Prussian government was not 
 responsible for the cou-p de mains of the foreign regime, and 
 in the very moment when it was proposed to transform the 
 ancient institutions, it was a matter of political necessity 
 
 1 Representation to minister von Reck, from the deputies sent by County 
 Mark to the swearing-in ceremony, dated October 20, 1815. Petition of the estates 
 to the chancellor, March 20, June 2, 1817, etc. Hardenberg's Replies, May 18 
 1817, May 10, 1820. 
 
 575 
 
History of Germany 
 
 to avoid the re-establishment of these same institutions 
 unchanged. 
 
 The endeavours of the estates of the Mark constituted no 
 more than one Hnk in the chain of a widely ramified move- 
 ment of the nobihty throughout the entire region of Lower 
 Rhenish Westphalia, which aimed at the re-estabhshment 
 of the ancient union of the estates of Jiilich, Cleves, Berg, 
 and Mark. Unfortunately Stein espoused the cause of these 
 nobles. The great statesman recognised, indeed, that the 
 new constitution could not possibly be harmonised with the 
 former estates ; he desired a free hand for the king " with 
 the advice of those whom he chose to summon in counsel," 
 and he warned his fellow-countrymen against the excessive 
 demands of the arrogant nobility of Electoral Mark. But 
 he was filled with passionate hatred against Hardenberg, and 
 was embittered by the hesitating procedure of the government, 
 and he therefore favoured the artificial and illegal attempts 
 to reconstitute the Rhenish Westphalian estates ; he regarded 
 this movement as a wholesome stimulus for the govenunent, 
 whereas in reality it was an obstacle to every comprehensive 
 reform. His aristocratic sentiments became harsher and 
 more stubborn with age ; his parliament of property-holders 
 was now understood by him to be nothing more than a 
 representation of landed property ; and it was not the great 
 landed proprietors as such, but the nobles alone, who were 
 to constitute the first estate. With what strange associates, 
 too, did the baron now enter into relationship. In the 
 Jiilich region was Mirbach, who desired proof of noble descent 
 as a title to sit in the diet ; in Miinster was Baron Merveldt, 
 who demanded a separate assembly of the estates for each 
 one of the ancient territories of Westphalia, and who desired 
 that these bodies should elect the representatives to the 
 provincial diet. " This monarchy," he said, " consists of 
 territories and states possessed of constitutions which, thanks 
 be to God, have not been dissolved by any revolution." Now 
 the estates of the princedom of Paderbom also approached 
 the king, begging for their re-establishment. The Landrats 
 von der Horst and von Borries, as representatives of the 
 estates of Minden, went further still, demanding the re-estab- 
 lishment of the ancient constitution at least to this extent, 
 that the nation of Minden should vote its own taxes, and 
 that the military organisation of the region should be con- 
 
 576 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 ducted by its own estates.* The feudal movement extended 
 more widely day by day. Even in the duchy of Magde- 
 burg, whose estates had ceased to be of any account long 
 before the days of King Jerome, and even in the county of 
 Hohenstein and in Eichsfeld, demands for the reconstitution 
 of the ancient Landtags found expression. 
 
 In face of such claims, the unity of the state could be 
 preserved in no other way than by the work of establishing the 
 constitution being left entirely in the hands of the monarchy. 
 The news from Wiirtemberg, where the king had just before 
 been vainly endeavouring to come to an understanding with 
 a feudal assembly about a new constitution, had produced a 
 profound impression in Berlin. In view of these experiences, 
 who could even dream of harmonising the Prussian consti- 
 tution with twenty or more feudal Landtags? An entire 
 reconstruction was essential. The new provincial diets must 
 be attached to the modem provinces, not to the old terri- 
 tories ; and (in addition to the nobles) the towns, and the 
 small landowners must receive a reasonable degree of repre- 
 sentation. At the same time, the reawakening of feudal 
 particularism showed how strong were still the centrifugal 
 forces ; for this reason it seemed indispensable that the crea- 
 tion of a Reichstag should speedily follow the establishment 
 of the provincial diets. 
 
 All this was clearly recognised by Hardenberg, but among 
 the ministers an utter confusion of views prevailed. They 
 had to face an entirely new problem, and regarded the 
 stubborn resistance of the new provinces and the clamours 
 of the former estates with profound anxiety. Whilst AncUlon, 
 in confidential intercourse, was already espousing the wishes 
 of the feudal party, Klewitz was the first to display open 
 antagonism to these wishes. A straightforward opponent of 
 the feudalists, this excellent man had nevertheless always 
 overestimated the justification for the particularist tendencies 
 of the state, and consequently, in the very memorial in which 
 he recommended the re-estabUshment of the provincial minis- 
 tries, he had proposed to the chancellor that, for the present, 
 provincial diets only should be constituted, since the nation 
 would then quietly await the centralised constitution. Six 
 
 1 Count Merveldt, Petition to Altenstein, August 20, 1817. Petition of the 
 estates of Paderborn to the king, August 31, 1816. Petition of the estates of the 
 princedojD of Minden to Hardenberg, April 10, 1815. 
 
 577 3P 
 
History of Germany 
 
 months later, in the spring of .1817, he took an addi-_ 
 tional step in the direction of the feudalists. He wrote 
 a new memorial : " What do the Prussian provinces expect 
 from their king, and what can the king agree to give 
 them? " He answered his owii question by saying that these 
 provinces, old as well as new, expected nothing more than what 
 they had customarily enjoyed, what they had always possessed, 
 in so far as this expectation was compatible with present needs.' 
 He went on to advocate the establishment of provincial diets 
 and a notable enlargement of their rights, " not so much 
 because the Zeitgeist demands it, as because the king desires 
 that the welfare of his state shall advance, and that after 
 its example the welfare of Germany and of Europe shall also 
 advance. By this enlargement of rights, an adjustment or 
 common constitution for the different territories or provinces 
 could be brought into being." Thus the independence of the 
 lord paramount might be secured, whereas this independence 
 might very readily be endangered by a common Landtag. 
 Thus for the first time in an ofiicial document did the view 
 find expression that a constitution for the state as a whole 
 was superfluous and even dangerous ; the reactionary party 
 at court and the feudalists in general did not hesitate to turn 
 the timid minister's utterances to their own advantage. 
 Hardenberg, however, offered lively opposition, and the king 
 had not yet been won over. 
 
 Klewitz further suggested : " First of all that which 
 has existed from immemorial times must ever3^where be ascer- 
 tained in detail." Delegates from the council of state were to 
 perambulate the individual provinces in order to study feudal 
 conditions, and to ascertain from personal intercourse with the 
 inhabitants the desire of the provinces regarding a constitution; 
 but the summoning of notables to form constitutional com- 
 mittees, as proposed in the ordinance of May 22nd, seemed an 
 extremely dubious policy in view of experiences in Wiirtem- 
 berg. The counsel was well-intentioned, for unquestionably, 
 in view of the extreme uncertainty of public opinion, an 
 assembly of notables in Berlin might readily be made the arena 
 of social passions and particularist longings But, since the 
 ministry itself had^ not as yet arrived at any common under- 
 standing regarding the principles of the constitution, the pro- 
 posed visitation of the provinces involved another danger 
 
 * Klewitz, Memorial of April 28, 1817, handed to the Chancellor on June ist. 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 hardly less great. The debates of an assembly of notables 
 must at least lead to the emergence of some sort of average 
 opinion, whereas if some hundred notables were individually 
 to be asked their views in their own homes, it was evident 
 that nothing would result but the ascertaining of a medley of 
 fundamentally subjective opinions which would be likely to 
 confuse and to paralyse the vacillating determination of the 
 crown. This danger was not recognised, and the fear of the 
 confusions likely to result in a constituent assembly prevailed. 
 The king approved the visitation of the provinces. 
 
 In such circumstances, on July 7, 1817, the constitutional 
 committee met for the first and only time. As a matter of 
 course it formed a subdivision of the council of state, and 
 consisted of twenty-two members of this body. Hardenberg 
 informed the committee that the king held it to be simpler 
 and safer to send three commissaries into the provinces instead 
 of summoning the notables to Berlin. Altenstein was appointed 
 for the western provinces ; Beyme for Pomerania and Prussia ; 
 Klewitz for Brandenburg, Saxony, Silesia, and Posen ; the 
 committee was not to give its opinion until the reports of 
 the three commissaries had been received. At the same time, 
 in a lengthy address, the chancellor declared that the ancient 
 diets had been unmistakable obstacles to the working of the 
 state machine ; the state owed its improvement and its flourish- 
 ing condition to the genius of its rulers ; but since the present 
 condition of affairs could not continue without great 
 disadvantage, since the nation was ripe and worthy to receive 
 a permanent constitution and a representative system, since 
 by the valiant defence of the fatherland and by the struggle 
 for its independence the state had given a rare example of 
 civic virtue and loyalty to the king, the latter had voluntarily 
 determined to bestow a representative constitution. There was 
 appended a definite statement of the limits which the monarch 
 imposed upon his concession : " His majesty will gladly consult 
 the future representative assembly regarding the laws that are 
 to be passed, but it is his definite intention to allow only a 
 consultative voice, and all interference in the administration is 
 expressly excluded." 
 
 In the late summer and in the autumn, the three ministers 
 completed their circuit. They were commissioned to acquire 
 precise information regarding all the representative institutions 
 
 579 
 
History of Germany 
 
 which had ever existed in the territories, and as far as the 
 future was concerned they were to propound two questions in 
 especial : whether a representation of the estate of peasants 
 was possible and useful in addition to a representation of the 
 nobles and the towns ; and whether a national assembly was 
 desired, or no more than provincial diets. In all, about three 
 hundred persons were asked their opinions (in Silesia fifty-seven 
 notables). More than half of these belonged to the landed 
 gentry, this being a necessary outcome of the nature of previous 
 conditions ; but merchants, manufacturers, burgomasters, and 
 the clergy, also gave their opinions in a great many instances, 
 and in the coast provinces Beyme applied for information by 
 preference to the bourgeois classes. Very few opinions, how- 
 ever, were given by the estate of peasants, most of these 
 opinions being from Silesia and Magdeburg, but not one from 
 the regions that had formerly belonged to the kingdom of 
 Saxony, where the peasant was only just beginning to gain 
 relief from the oppressions of the feudal regime. 
 
 If an attempt be made to draw a general conclusion from 
 the confusion of opinions, given for the most part in good faith 
 and with German frankness, it becomes apparent that there did 
 not as yet exist a definite and coherent public opinion, or 
 even a passionate popular will, which might have exercised 
 pressure upon the throne ; the feudal movement had not yet 
 found its counterpoise among the people ; but there was dis- 
 played strong support for the naive particularism of the pro- 
 vinces. Almost ever3^where a desire was expressed for 
 provincial diets ; President von Motz, who for the sake of 
 national unity demanded nothing but a Reichstag, stood quite 
 alone. But many voices declared in favour of provincial diets 
 without any national assembly, some on account of particularism, 
 others animated by a dread of shaking the throne. Most 
 of those who expressed their views recognised that the provincial 
 diets must be attached to the newly formed provinces ; yet 
 several advocated Landtags for the governmental districts, and 
 still more numerous were the demands for diets for the terri- 
 tories of ancient delimitation. As regards the form of the 
 national assembly, opinions were also fundamentally diverse. 
 Many thought of a parliament, others of a small corporation 
 containing forty members which should attend the sittings of 
 the council of state. The question whether there should be a 
 unicameral or a bicameral system was rarely propounded. Nor 
 
 580 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 was there any harmony regarding the representation of 
 the estate of peasants. The majority were in favour of this, 
 but many of the nobles and of the burghers expressed doubts 
 whether a sufficient number of "fit subjects " (this was the 
 usual expression) were to be found in the young estate. The 
 gentry were chiefly influenced by the fear of persons who, not 
 being themselves peasants, might advocate the cause of the 
 peasantry, and they invariably demanded that this estate 
 should be represented by peasants alone. A far from incon- 
 siderable minority, consisting of men of all classes, roundly 
 declared that the people was not yet ripe for representative 
 institutions, and that a well-ordered administration was 
 sufficient. Very frequently, with childlike naivety, the sole 
 grotmd for a constitution was alleged to be that the king had 
 pledged his word and must therefore fulfil it — ^for the rest, 
 everything could be left to his grace. In this chaos of imma- 
 ture views, the most satisfactory point was the instinctive 
 understanding displayed for the connection between constitution 
 and administration, by which the Prussians were distinguished 
 from the South Germans of those days. Thanks to the old 
 traditions of the state, and above all thanks to the reforms 
 of Stein and Hardenberg, almost everyone here understood the 
 importance of administrative questions. The constitution was 
 regarded, not as the begiiming of a new national life, but as 
 the enlargement, the completion, of the reforms which had 
 been begim in commtmal and circle administration. The 
 influence of French theories of equaUty was hardly seen at all ; 
 a subdivision of classes was taken as a matter of course. 
 
 The notables of Posen had alone attained the altitude of 
 neo-French culture. As if it had been the outcome of a tacit 
 conspiracy, the Polish nobles questioned by Klewitz almost 
 unanimously agreed in demanding an independent pro- 
 vincial diet, which was to supervise education, to appoint the 
 officials, and to administer a separate budget under the 
 control of a provincial treasury. The inevitable general von 
 Kosinski handed in a proposal for a Prussian "federative 
 constitution " based upon a balance of powers : c'est la Prusse 
 qui doit faire I'e-poque dans U siecle constitutionnel. Prussia 
 had hitherto said to her subject peoples, " You are helots, 
 held together by soldiers and by a dominant official caste " ; 
 the state must now recognise its duty " to be a tender 
 mother, must recognise it all the more clearly because it 
 
 581 
 
History of Germany 
 
 must admit the injustice of Europe towards the nations united 
 under its eagle." In fine, Prussia was to be transformed into 
 a federation of independent provinces, with provincial diets 
 and provincial military forces ! Bojanowski demanded " a 
 Declaration of the Rights of Man " ; Morawski found that 
 human dignity was fully preserved only where " a superman " 
 ruled, controlled by a senat conservateur and a chamber of 
 deputies. Some of the Germans also showed theniselves to 
 have been infected by the French culture dominating this part 
 of the world. Governmental-director von Leipziger brought 
 forward a complete " constitutional proposal," cut on the well- 
 known Parisian pattern. (§ i. The House of HohenzoUern 
 rules in unbroken line of descent in accordance with the exist- 
 ing local laws. § i6. The Christian religion is the national 
 religion. And so on.) Manifestly such views of the Polish 
 nobles, with their hardly concealed arritres pensees, were 
 imlikely to win over the throne for the imitation of French 
 institutions ; but they served to teach all the more impressively 
 how dangerous it was to rest content with provincial diets alone. 
 Lord-lieutenant Zerboni laid great stress on this point, asking 
 wonderingly : " Is it our desire to introduce a cantonal consti- 
 tution like that of Switzerland ? " He wrote : "As yet we 
 are not a nation. We exist only in abstracto, and become 
 extinct when the idea ceases. Great events lie in the womb 
 of the future. These events will become associated with 
 Prussia. We have no rival, for we seize the role which is 
 allotted to us." Consequently there must be a representative 
 assembly for the state as a whole, with legislative and not 
 merely advisory powers.* 
 
 In Rhineland extremely divergent views prevailed. On the 
 one hand was the feudal agitation of the Lower Rhenish nobles ; 
 these were now joined by Baron von Nagel, who published an 
 unauthorised and detailed work upon the Jiilich-Cleves-Berg 
 diet ; and also by Homraer, the former syndic of Electoral 
 Treves, who desired the re-establishment of the Landtag of 
 Treves with its spiritual curia. Opposed to these were the 
 democratic views of a thoroughly modern bourgeois society ; 
 and in addition, especially among the native-bom officials, cer- 
 tain constitutional ideas which suggested the proximity of France. 
 It is true that the town councils of Cologne and Treves, when, during 
 
 * Klewitz, Report conceriiing the circuit in Posen. Zerboni, Opinioo of 
 November 28, 1817. 
 
 582 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 that summer, the king visited the provinces, merely referred in 
 general terms to the promised constitution ; while Benzenberg, who, 
 with the landowners of the Crefield circle, [had audience of the 
 monarch, begged merely for an advisory assembly. President 
 Sethe, on the other hand, submitted a memorial in which it 
 was proposed that the Reichstag should be appointed solely 
 by election, all independent burghers receiving the suffrage, 
 the mediatised alone being excluded because they paid no 
 taxes. Regarding the feudal constitution, he said bluntly : " It 
 is only a shadow and an illusion of representation." In like 
 sense a judge of Diisseldorf suggested representation of the 
 interests of the various social classes with the exception of 
 nobles. Another Rhenish memorial demanded an upper chamber 
 of members appointed for Ufe from among the landowners, the 
 large capitalists, and the men of marked intelligence; and a 
 lower chamber which was to be appointed, by indirect election, 
 by all independent burghers, and which was to represent the 
 entire people. This, he said, was the necessary complement to 
 the obligation of universal military service. Here were already 
 manifested the ideas which were to ripen in the year 
 1848. As yet they had Uttle power, for the mass of the 
 RMnelanders lived solely for industry and commerce, and 
 neither the constitutional movement nor the Teutonising enthu- 
 siasm of the younger generation found here any strong support. 
 In Westphalia, Altenstein seems to have conversed chiefly with 
 the nobles. He had an interview with Stein which was equally 
 satisfactory to both parties.^ 
 
 In the eastern provinces the principal dispute concerned 
 the question whether the estate of peasants, which had so 
 recently been enfranchised, was already capable of benefiting 
 by representative institutions. Beyme found the nobles of 
 Hither Pomerania still completely imder the influence of feudal 
 views ; very few of them desired reforms, the most notable 
 exception being Prince Putbus, " a true friend of the peasants." 
 Schildener, professor at Greifswald, endeavoured with small 
 success to prove in a pamphlet to the privileged classes that 
 no other estate represented the Pomeranian spirit so faithfully 
 as did that of the despised peasantry. Among the notables of 
 Further Pomerania, the desire for the restoration of the ancient 
 constitution was equally predominant ; but the admission of 
 the peasants, to representation was here regarded as unavoidable. 
 
 1 Minutes relating to the circuit in the western provinces. 
 583 
 
History of Germany 
 
 The minister received an extremely favourable impression regard- 
 ing " the excellent and vigorous spirit " which the year 1813 
 had awakened in East Prussia. In this region representation of 
 the estate of peasants was everywhere regarded as essential. In 
 West Prussia, Beyme was astonished by the general political 
 indifference. The towns uttered vigorous complaints regarding 
 the unaccustomed burdens of the town's ordinance, whilst the 
 nobles were especially concerned to advise against the admission 
 to representation of bourgeois landowners. ' 
 
 The majority of the Silesian notables favoured the repre- 
 sentation of all three estates in Lower Silesia ; but almost all 
 expressed doubts whether the Upper Silesian peasants were ripe 
 for political activity. So strong had been the impression pro- 
 duced by the royal promise that even the ultra-conservative 
 Field-marshal York declared : " The monarchical constitution 
 and administration such as existed under Frederick the Great, 
 are to me the dearest and best. But a constitution and a 
 representative system have been promised the country, and 
 the pledge must be fulfilled. Moreover, this must be done as 
 speedily as possible, because the continuance of heavy burdens 
 fosters dissatisfaction, and with arms in their hands the people 
 may even become dangerous." ' 
 
 In the Marks there were many complaints because " the 
 ancient constitution has been trodden vmder foot " ; and there 
 was much anxiety regarding the threatening excessive powers 
 of the burghers and the peasants. The nobles of Altmark 
 were exceptionally broad-minded, for under the Westphalian 
 regime they had learned to lay aside many ancient prejudices, 
 and most of them favoured the representation of the estate 
 of peasants. In Electoral Mark, the peasants, proud of 
 their new circle assemblies, had no doubt that they would 
 send representatives to the provincial diet as well. Minister 
 von Voss-Buch, the leader of the feudalists, still remained 
 cautiously in the background ; in view of the spirit of 
 the age a constitution seemed almost unavoidable, but it 
 might be better to begin at first with a representation of the 
 estates, that is to say, to institute a provincial diet after 
 consulting the estates. 
 
 Nowhere did the ancient class hatreds flame so fiercely as 
 in Saxony. Here the "ripeness" of the peasants for repre- 
 
 * Beyme, Report concerning circuit in Pomerania and Pmssia. 
 ' Opinion of York, Klein-Oels, September 12, 1817. 
 
 584 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 sentation was doubted by the majority, while all demanded that 
 the province should have the right of voting its own taxes. 
 People referred sorrowfully to the extravagance of the PoUsh 
 Augustus. Von Berlepsch, an excellent man, declared that this 
 anxiety about money was the only political idea in Saxony. 
 The opinion of Count Wintzingerode-Bodenstein showed how 
 dif&cult this work of constitution-buUding seemed even to men 
 of experience. He had at one time collaborated when Frederick 
 of Wiirtemberg compacted the Swabian territories to form 
 a " realm " ; but in a great state such a procedure was not 
 applicable ; here the old diets must be established, and for 
 Eichsfeld the diet system of Electoral Mainz must be reconsti- 
 tuted with certain improvements. 
 
 One only of the three ministers, Beyme, appended to his 
 report a representation of his own views. These resembled 
 those of Hardenberg, for he condemned the old system as "an 
 offspring of mediaeval darkness which could not bear the 
 light of modem days." He saw in America " the ideal of a con- 
 stitution " ; demanded for Prussia a representation of the three 
 estates, temporarily in a single chamber, until a vigorous nobility 
 should have been constituted ; he proclaimed the peasantry 
 as the youngest and healthiest of the estates, Rhineland as the 
 most enlightened province. He demanded complete publicity 
 for the proceedings of the Reichstag, the provincial diets, and 
 the circle assemblies. He demanded constitutional rights almost 
 identical with those which exist to-day, and trial by jury for 
 press offences. 
 
 All three of the delegates conscientiously endeavoured to 
 fulfil the instruction to enquire into what had existed 
 from immemorial times. Altenstein did not shrink from the 
 labour involved in seeking out the syndics and other office 
 bearers of the old Landtags in the numerous territories of 
 which the new western provinces were composed. Most of these 
 were venerable men, well on in the seventies, " with excellent 
 memories " as the minister assures us ; but, after all, they had 
 not been able to retain in their minds every complicated detail 
 of the ancient Franconian furniture of vanished days. Thus 
 with honourable labour was gathered together a long series of 
 historical retrospects. Here were carefully described the liberum 
 veto of the Poles and the frecarice annuce of the estates of 
 Electoral Treves, the Silesian diet of princes, and the Unter- 
 herrentag of JiiUch, the advocatus Patrice of the duchy of 
 
 S85 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Westphalia, and the tax chamber of Bleicherode in County 
 Hohenstein, the Vest Recklingshausen and the diet of the prince- 
 dom of Corvey, with its five heads and three estates — and, 
 to sum all up, from the whole medley there was one thing 
 only to learn, and this was that there Wcis nothing to learn 
 for the Uving present. 
 
 This perambulation of the provinces gave an extremely scanty 
 result. It provided a fruitless jumble of ancient memories 
 and uncertain wishes. Even the few publicists who concerned 
 themselves with the constitutional question had no advice to 
 give. Graven, the liberal, in his writing Does Prussia need a 
 Constitution ? propounded the innocent demand that the entire 
 legislation since 1806 should be submitted to the national 
 assembly for examination, for he did not even consider how 
 easily this enlightened wish might lead to the destruction of 
 the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg. Benzenberg's book Upon 
 the Constitution, to which Frederick William gave friendly recep- 
 tion, unquestionably one of the most mature political works of 
 the epoch, informs us : " At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from 
 the sun, there moves in its orbit around that luminary, a small 
 sphere, whose diameter is 8,000 miles " ; thus beginning at the 
 very beginning, the disquisition proceeds on its way, until, on 
 page 504, the exhausted reader arrives at Germany without 
 learning anything to speak of about Prussia ! 
 
 The serious question whether this proud, absolute throne, 
 which had so recently manifested its unbroken vital energy in 
 the reconstitution of the army, the administration, and the 
 fiscal system, could without danger share its supreme authority 
 with a representative assembly — ^this great ridcUe seemed even 
 more obscure than it had been before the opinions of the people 
 had been taken. Sharply critical Uberal writers elsewhere in 
 Germany, who, in view of the one thing which Hardenberg 
 had not done, forgot the great things which he had done, 
 never realised what troubles were besieging the chancellor. For 
 more tragical than all the other proofs of childUke political 
 immaturity which the visitation had brought to hght, was the 
 realisation that at least one-half of the Prussian people was 
 still quite unable to look beyond the boundaries of the native 
 province. Count Edmund Kesselstadt, one of the most far- 
 sighted patriots on the Rhine, accurately described the mood 
 of the new provinces in the following terms : " From the great 
 majority of Prussian subjects, the idea of belonging to a great 
 
 S86 
 
Reconstruction of the Prussian State 
 
 state is altogether remote, for the idea of being German has 
 to them alwa5rs seemed somewhat strange." ' If a represen- 
 tative S3retem could be bestowed upon a generation at such a 
 level of culture, it might indeed be hoped that the sense of 
 duty of the conscientious and reasonable population would 
 induce them to accommodate themselves to the new form of 
 the state. But a constitution given at this time would not 
 have been the work of the nation, but, as had formerly been 
 the town's ordinance, would have been a free gift of the royal 
 will, moving on in advance of the nation. 
 
 The king, however, disquieted by the news from the south, 
 now b^an to become estranged from the constitutional plans 
 of his chancellor. 
 
 * Kesselstadt's Opinion, recorded in the minutes of Altenstein's visitation. 
 
 S87 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 SOUTH GERMAN CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLES. 
 
 § I. THE GOOD OLD LAW IN SWABIA. 
 
 The South German middle-sized states were for the most part 
 spared the laborious work of reconstruction which in Prussia 
 for many years occupied all the energies of her statesmen. 
 During the wars of the last decade, these thrones had in every 
 case adopted the side of the conqueror at a suitable moment, 
 and consequently in the great days of settlement had main- 
 tained their possessions with trifling alterations. Their terri- 
 tories had been far less severely visited by the afflictions of 
 the campaigns than had been the north, and there was here 
 no obstacle to the immediate undertaking of the work of 
 constitution-building. Moreover, with the fall of the Pro- 
 tector, there came to an end also the strict dictatorship which 
 for ten years had forcibly maintained the unity of these young 
 state structures. The courts themselves felt that the artificial 
 bonds required renewal. They hoped by the granting of 
 certain harmless representative rights to reconcile discontented 
 subjects with their native land, and to alienate the senti- 
 ments of the people from the alarming idea of German unity ; 
 at the same time they hoped by the speedy fulfilment of 
 article 13 of the federal act to safeguard their sovereignty 
 against any attack on the part of the Bundestag 
 
 Thus it happened that the nuclear lands of the Confedera- 
 tion of the Rhine experienced the first difficult years of 
 constitutional life a generation earher than did Prussia ; and 
 however scanty the political outcome of this time of apprentice- 
 ship, none the less the period served to awaken the slumbering 
 forces of the south, and to display to the world for the first 
 time after a long interval what a treasure Germany possessed 
 in the ancient civilisation, in the homely bourgeois culture, 
 and in the warm-hearted public spirit of the highlands. These 
 
 588 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 High German stocks, which had taken hardly more than a 
 passive part in the poUtical struggles of the eighteenth century, 
 suddenly appeared in the foreground of German history, and 
 anyone who judges German affairs only from information 
 derived from the newspapers, or by the catchwords of party, 
 might readily fall into the error of imagining that the 
 leadership of the nation had now passed from the state of 
 Frederick to Bavaria, Swabia, and Franconia. 
 
 Just as formerly the age of our classical poetry had 
 erected its stage outside of Prussia, so now the new political 
 ideals which the spokesmen of public opinion esteemed as 
 the true content of the epoch, could find no root in Prussia ; 
 and the state whose good sword had first, and so recently, 
 opened for the Germans the gates of a new age, seemed, to 
 the liberal world, to be no more than an inert mass, a 
 ponderous load, which hindered the movements of the free 
 limbs of our race. Entangled in the beUef that all that 
 is good for the nations is derived from constitutional forms, 
 people had no longer any vision for Prussia's military system 
 and commercial policy, for the quiet work which in Prussia was 
 preparing for the reconstruction of the German state ; and whilst 
 all the proceedings of the Swabian chambers were reported in 
 the press with passionate enthusiasm, in non-Prussian Germany 
 the conditions in Prussia remained so utterly unknown that any 
 ridiculous fable could count upon credulous hearers. In actual 
 fact, the South German constitutions were, as the courts of 
 Munich and Stuttgart had from the first hoped, pillars of 
 particularism. The orators of the petty Landtags had, 
 indeed, the words of German unity on their lips, but the 
 serious side of their political labours remained restricted 
 within the frontiers of their homeland ; and since at the Bun- 
 destag the policy of absolutism maintained the upper hand, 
 they soon began to esteem their native provinces as consti- 
 tutionally exemplary states, each an acropolis of German free- 
 dom and enlightenment ; and they ultimately attained to the 
 naive view that their local constitutions stood above the 
 federal laws. 
 
 What a misfortune it was for our political culture that in 
 this nation which was so slowly emerging from a condition of 
 dispersed energies, the first constitutional experiences should 
 be effected amid the pseudo-life of powerless and non-independent 
 states. In these narrows, German parliamentarism acquired from 
 
 589 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the first characteristics of provincial restriction. The momentous 
 problem of continental constitutional life, the problem how par- 
 liamentary forms were to be harmonised with the power of an 
 army ever ready for war and with the continuous progress of a 
 great European poUcy, could not even be mooted, in such 
 dependent communities. Every political dispute here became 
 a matter of personalities ; and since the continuance of king- 
 ship by Napoleon's grace inspired neither veneration nor for- 
 bearance, there resulted from the curse of particularism a morbid 
 ferocity of party struggle which corresponded ill with the good- 
 natured character and the tolerably healthy social conditions 
 of our people. In the end, the behaviour of the petty courts 
 was determined by the will of Austria and Prussia ; so long as 
 these two leading powers refused to adopt the constitution^ 
 system, the opposition parties of the new representative assemblies 
 were devoid of all prospect of ever attaining to the guidance of 
 the ship of state. In such a position, without any genuine 
 responsibility, they became accustomed to practise all the sins 
 of political dilettantism ; they considered that their statesman- 
 like duties were adequately fulfilled if they continued obstinately, 
 staunchly, and with passion, to reiterate the essential principles 
 of the constitutional doctrine, and they endeavoured to atone 
 for then: lack of power by a boastful self-overvaluation. An 
 almost superstitious honour was paid to the names "constitu- 
 tion," " popular representation," " man chosen of the people " ; 
 anyone who took the side of the monarchy was suspected of being 
 a vile place-hunter. The evil arts of poUce persecution served 
 to increase at once the bitterness and the arrogance of the opposi- 
 tion, and continued to gain over new adherents for that doctrine 
 of Rotteck which regarded the misfortunes of the blameless 
 populace as solely dependent upon the wickedness of govern- 
 ments. In the bad school of federal anarchy and constitutional 
 petty fife, the Germans gradually became the most discontented 
 and also the most docile of all the European peoples. 
 
 y The very first Landtag of these years of peace, that of Wiir- 
 temberg, exercised a confusing and embittering influence upon 
 public opinion. Here the long-suppressed and justified discon- 
 tent with the Rhenish Confederate despotism manifested itself 
 with an impetuous violence which filled all the courts with 
 anxiety ; the democratic ideas of the new century entered into 
 alliance with the defiant spirit of feudal licence ; and on both sides 
 
 S90 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 justice and injustice were indistinguishably mingled. Here, 
 also, the struggle for the construction of the new constitutional 
 forms took the form of a legal dispute on behalf of well-grounded 
 liberties estabUshed by convention ; the questions of power in this 
 matter of constitutional life were judged in accordance with the 
 rules of civil procedure, and the formaUst view of the state charac- 
 teristic of jurists trained in the field of civil law acquired, even 
 during these first constitutional struggles of new Germany, a 
 prestige which became injurious to the free development of German 
 parliamentarism. 
 
 Among all the temporal territories of the empire, Wiirtem- 
 berg and Mecklenburg had longest and most faithfully preserved 
 the feudal ordering of the state ; even in the middle of the 
 eighteenth century, in the blossoming time of absolutism, in both 
 these countries the feudal constitution was formally confirmed 
 by a legal settlement. Whilst everywhere else the masses 
 detested the polyarchy of the feudal lords, and revered the 
 growing power of the princes as the protector of the weak, in 
 Wiirtemberg the good old law was regarded as sacred by 
 the entire populace. Everyone in Old Wiirtemberg repeated 
 with complacency the saying of Fox : " There are in Europe 
 only two constitutions worthy of the name, that of England 
 and that of Wiirtemberg." In the defence of the ancient 
 and traditional law, all the political energies of this people were 
 for three centuries monopoUsed ; here was trained that defiant 
 Swabian legal sentiment which found expression in the saying 
 farta tueri. When upon the intercession of Frederick the 
 Great the old J. J. Moser was restored to freedom from 
 Hohentwiel, men, women, and children flocked to meet this 
 mart3nr of the good old law. Even in the poUtically well- 
 endowed intelligence of Spittler, the ideas of the constitutional 
 law of his native land were so firmly implanted, that he involun- 
 tarily judged all the constitutions of history by the measure 
 of Swabian freedom. The rigidly bourgeois character of 
 Old Wiirtemberg society was mainly dependent upon this 
 popular affection. 
 
 Here, in the land] of the town-leagues and of the peasants' 
 wars, upon the most luxuriant soil of the German separatist 
 spirit, the nobles also had from the first been accustomed to 
 go their own way. In the year 1514, when the land of Wiirtem- 
 berg, by agreement with Duke Ulrich, secured its" funda- 
 mental representative law, the convention of Tiibingen, the 
 
History of Germany 
 
 nobles acquired their liberties as immediates of the empire 
 and scorned to participate ; it was only in the court and state 
 service of the house of Wiirtemberg that the Swabian 
 imperial knight frequently appeared as a privileged guest. 
 The Landtag of the duchy was constituted solely out of the 
 prelates of the Lutheran state church with representa- 
 tives elected by the town councils. Thus there existed a 
 bourgeois oligarchy which on a small scale was just as 
 powerful as were the States-General of the Dutch Republic, 
 and which, like this body, was in continuous conflict with 
 an inchoate monarchical authority. The duke ruled as absolute 
 master over his great private possessions, whose rich yield 
 was in times of peace entirely adequate to supply the expenses 
 of the court and of the government. But if through extrava- 
 gance, or through the needs of war, he ran into debt, he 
 then asked the Landtag to vote taxes, and could secure what 
 he desired only when the representative liberties had been 
 once more confirmed and enlarged in a resolution of the Landtag 
 which had the force of a convention. In most of the other feudal 
 territories, the rising monarchical authority utiUsed the com- 
 mittees of the provincial diets to destroy the power of the 
 Landtag from within outwards. During the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, the Wiirtemberg Landtag was seldom summoned ; yet 
 its powers did not pass to the duke, but to the two com- 
 mittees of the estates. The small committee in Stuttgart 
 was the real ruler of the country. It sat continuously, 
 appointed its own new members, levied and made use of 
 the income derived from the provincial taxes at its own 
 discretion, and provided for the children and the relatives 
 of the boiu-geois " gentry," the Stockmaiers, Pfaffs, and Com- 
 merells, in the official positions at their disposal. If the 
 privy-councillors, who were pledged both to the duke and 
 to the province, should put in an appearance to audit the 
 revenue accounts, the red wine of Eilfing was not spared ; 
 in case of need, the hand could be plunged into the renowned 
 secret treasure-chest of the committee. This chest served for 
 all the arts of corruption, those arts with which an oligarchy 
 cannot possibly dispense, for " the friendly removal of a 
 troublesome official, one who censured all malpractices," or 
 for the struggle against the territorial prince. The chartered 
 liberties of the country were firmly maintained by the com- 
 mittee against every encroachment. Help was sought, now 
 
 592 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 from the aulic council of the empire, now from the house 
 of Austria, which would not abandon its hereditary claims 
 upon Wiirtemberg ; until at length England, Prussia, and 
 Denmark gave formal guarantees for the last great charter 
 of the country, the legal settlement of 1770. 
 
 The chiu^ch also still possessed its church funds, which 
 disposed of the income from numerous estates and forests ; 
 it alone among the Lutheran state churches of Germany had 
 preserved undiminished the entire possessions of the ancient 
 church. It was not for this reason alone that among the 
 Lutheran theologians Wiirtemberg was spoken of as the apple 
 of God's eye. The Uttle country was the Uving centre of 
 Protestantism in High Germany. With all the profundity 
 of their temperament, the inhabitants had once voluntarily 
 gone over to the Protestant faith, and had then steadfastly 
 maintained that faith amid severe trials, when the armies 
 of the Hapsburgs on three occasions swept across the country 
 and threatened to armihilate its independence. The church, 
 thus preserved amid struggle and suffering, determined the 
 entire culture of the people. It early gave the country an 
 admirably ordered elementary school system, and maintained 
 among adults a puritan moral discipline by means of the 
 dreaded exhortations " from the pulpit." The three cele- 
 brated schools in the quiet forest valleys of Bebenhausen, 
 Blaubeuren, and Maulbronn, where the sons of the gentry 
 received their education, continued to retain all the charac- 
 teristics of ecclesiastical educational institutions. Even at 
 the university of Tiibingen, the theological foundation set 
 the tone : all offices, it was understood, were to be filled 
 from those on the foundation. The clerical famihes of the 
 Andreas, Osianders, and Bidenbachs, shared with the burgo- 
 master families the control of the Landtag. 
 
 The great days of this bourgeois theocratic oligarchy 
 coincided with the quiet epoch following the peace of Augsburg, 
 when the whole of German life was dominated by theology. 
 At that time, tmder th« good duke Christopher and the pious 
 Louis, who divided his time so peacefully between the beer 
 tankard and his s5anboHc books, Wiirtemberg was regarded 
 as the prototype of a Lutheran territory. But as soon as 
 the development of standing armies imposed new tasks upon 
 modem policy, here, cis everywhere else, the barrenness of 
 the feudal state became manifest. The artificial structure 
 
 593 3Q 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of this well-secured caste rule was designed for the eternal 
 arrest of human affairs, the power of the sovereign ruler of 
 the country was so unnaturally restricted that Old Wiirtem- 
 berg learned only the sins of monarchy, and never its creative 
 energy. To the people, the duke seemed merely the embodi- 
 ment of oppression and extortion, since he was continually 
 demanding new taxes and new recruits from the grumbling 
 committee. The excessive sentiment of princely self-esteem, 
 which in the eighteenth century seized this dynasty also, 
 could not here find expression for its activities in the founda- 
 tion of institutions of general utility, in the care for well- 
 being and culture, but only in courtly extravagance and the 
 occasional exercise of arbitrary force. The grandiose castles 
 of the petty house of Wiirtemberg rivalled the magnificent 
 buildings of the Polish Augustus, as Hohentwiel and Hohen- 
 asperg rivalled the prisons of Konigstein ; the old capital 
 became impoverished because it had pleased the mistress of 
 Eberhard Louis, the countess Gravenitz, to build, a few miles 
 from the charming gorge of the Nesenbach, a rival residence to 
 Stuttgart, the dreary Ludwigsburg, the most pompous and the 
 most hideous of all the numerous palaces of South Germany. 
 Unworthy favourites, the Jew Siiss, Wittleder, and Mont- 
 martin, carried on their greedy malpractices at court ; the 
 game in the ducal forests laid waste the fields of the thickly 
 populated and fertile country-side, for the duke was the 
 lord only of his own private domain, and what did he care 
 about the weal or woe of the rest of the country, from which 
 the revenues flowed only into the treasure-chest of the 
 permanent committee ? 
 
 Amid such experiences there came into existence among 
 the Wiirtemberg people that peculiar political sentiment, 
 strangely compounded of dynastic dependence and angry 
 suspicion, whose traces have not disappeared even to-day. How 
 often under stress of war did the country display its absolute 
 fidelity to its fugitive duke; innumerable songs celebrated 
 the glory of the ancient princely house, of the escutcheon 
 with the stag's antlers, from those folk-songs which had long 
 ago cried to the fierce exile Ukich, " You are the natural 
 master of the land of Wiirtemberg," down to the genuinely 
 Swabian poem of the youthful Schiller, which menacingly 
 demanded that " those elsewhere in the world " should humble 
 their pride before the renown of Eberhard the Whimperer. 
 
 594 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 Yet at the same time the land continually resounded with 
 justified and unjustified complaints against the court, and 
 the view widely prevailed that Swabian Hberties could be 
 maintained only if the duke, Uke a dangerous wild beast, 
 was carefully guarded in a cage. In Prussia the modern 
 German state came into existence upon the secure foundation 
 of universal military service and the duty of paying taxes. 
 In Wiirtemberg, on the other hand, there still prevailed, in 
 unbroken tradition, the pohtical sentiment of the middle ages ; 
 all taxes were regarded as extraordinary burdens for times 
 of special need, and exemption from military service was 
 considered the most valuable of territorial privileges. The 
 unwarlike sense which was ever5^where characteristic of the 
 retired life of the feudal German states was manifested more 
 unrestrainedly perhaps than anywhere else among the peaceful 
 prelates and burgomasters of the Stuttgart Landtag. With 
 the utmost obstinacy the estates resisted the formation of a 
 standing army, so that even the patient Duke Christopher 
 complained : "If my country is to be a princedom, it is 
 necessary that I should be able to conduct myself Uke a prince." 
 The only member of the house who displayed a certain 
 sense of monarchical greatness, Duke Frederick I, enforced for 
 himself by a breach of the constitution the right of recruiting 
 troops, because with keen prevision he recognised the immi- 
 nence of the confusions of the Thirty Years' War ; but he 
 died before the result had been secured, and the vengeance of 
 the dominant caste was immediately visited upon the head 
 of his able counsellor Enslin. The traitor, who was executed 
 in the market place at Urach, remained henceforward a bugbear, 
 to warn the dukes against military ambition. If the needs 
 of the time enforced the creation of a small army, the estates 
 could never disband it soon enough ; they grudged Duke 
 Eberhard III an additional vote of 1,500 florins, wishing to 
 compel him to disband his 170 riders in addition to the 
 infantry ; a few years later a terrible robber band of French 
 broke across the unarmed land. It was in this way that 
 Old Wiirtemberg became defenceless. Whenever a hostile 
 attack was made, the court fled the country, to await rein- 
 statement by foreign aid. Even in the eighteenth century, 
 the military system remained lamentably inefficient ; the 
 vigorous sons of the ducal house entered foreign service, and 
 the greatest warrior among them, Frederick Eugene, fought 
 
 595 
 
History of Germany 
 
 under the banner of Frederick the Great against his Swabian 
 fellow-countrymen. This valiant stock, which in the middle 
 ages had excelled all the other Germans in warlike renown, 
 disappeared from the annals of modem military history ; the 
 sole tolerably well-established territorial power which since 
 the fall of the Hohenstaufen had arisen out of the Swabian 
 territorial confusion, remained for two hundred years without 
 influence upon the history of Germany. 
 
 The officialdom suffered no less than the military system 
 under the feudal regime. A great part of the administra- 
 tion was in the hands of scriveners (Schreiber) of ill repute. 
 These entered as learners, without any academic training, 
 into the office of a town-clerk or of a clerk to a court, 
 and from this position, by nepotist influence, rose to the 
 office of burgomaster or some other high official position. 
 Amid such an ordering of affairs, there was no place for a 
 statesmanUke intelligence, for new political ideas. During 
 many decades the history of Old Wiirtemberg displays to us 
 only two men of diplomatic talent : the excellent negotiator 
 Burkhardt, and Vambiiler, who, in the peace of Westphalia, 
 effected the re-establishment of the duchy. 
 
 In the long run the intellectual life of the country also 
 suffered from the immobility of poUtical affairs. It was 
 with well-grounded satisfaction that the Swabians enumerated 
 the proud series of their poets and thinkers, and asked what 
 other stock, outside that of Upper Saxony, had given the 
 nation so many heroes of the intellect. Fiery imagination 
 and a profound spirit of investigation were happily united 
 in the Swabian nature, and here were manifested the most 
 characteristic Uneaments of Teutonic genius : a many-sided- 
 ness often transgressing into the realm of the vague and 
 illimitable ; and that creative and primitive power of thought, 
 which may, indeed, lose its way in obscurity and subtlety, 
 but can never become dull or meaningless. But the country 
 derived little advantage from this abundance of intellectual 
 energies. Since an educated officialdom was well nigh com- 
 pletely lacking, the prelates and their acolytes remained ahnost 
 the sole official representatives of higher culture. It sufficed 
 them that the Swabian probationers, next to those of Electoral 
 Saxony, were sought throughout the world as the^ best private 
 tutors. The time had passed away when the heads of all 
 the Lutheran princely houses had flocked to the illustrious 
 
 S96 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 college at Tubingen ; the university now bitterly complained 
 that it had to languish in a forgotten comer of Germany. 
 The free spirits of the new century found so Uttle under- 
 standing among the priestly leaders of the Wiirtemberg 
 educational system, that Duke Charles Eugene at] length deter- 
 mined to create a counterpoise to the rigid theology of the 
 Tiibingen foundation, and in his Karlsschule established a 
 sanctuary for secular science which, during the brief period 
 of its existence, completely ecHpsed the renown of the ancient 
 university. All the great Swabians who participated in the 
 labours of the new literature, from Schiller to Schelling and 
 Hegel, were forced to seek a sphere of activity outside their 
 own country, in many cases after having first carried on a 
 severe struggle against the petty prejudices of their home- 
 land. That tragical contrast between intellectual wealth and 
 political poverty which was the malady of our eighteenth 
 century, was nowhere more painfully conspicuous than here. 
 
 The remoteness of the country, which had long ceased 
 to be a thoroughfare for world commerce ; the manifoldedness 
 of the physical features of the region, with its jumble of rude 
 plateaus, richly forested mountain valleys, and smiling vine- 
 yards ; the misery induced by polyarchy, and the inborn 
 untamable peculiarities of the population, to whom nothing 
 seemed more intolerable than political discipline — all these 
 things in conjunction led in Swabia to a petty dispersal of 
 energies and to an isolation unparalleled even in Germany. 
 The lesser towns of the duchy, under the nile of their nepotist 
 burgomasters, lived a life as completely sequestered as was that 
 of the neighbouring imperial towns ; the unchangeable good 
 old law left no way open for the ideas of national unity, 
 or for the consciousness of common political aims, to penetrate 
 the lands. The whole of Swabia, Wiirtemberg no less than 
 the extraordinary state-structures of the imperial towns, the 
 princely provostships, and the imperial knightly condominions, 
 was regarded in Germany as the paradise of petty bourgeois 
 singularity. Indeed, "Gotham" was not far from Hohenstaufen, 
 and it was in Biberach that Wieland collected the materials for 
 his Abderites. It was not surprising that, in this narrow 
 world, the rich and busy imagination of the Swabians often took 
 the form of strange whimsies ; nowhere in Germany ^ were 
 the weak-heads rarer, and nowhere were the queer-heads' com- 
 moner. There was not a single Swabian town, however small, 
 
 597 
 
History of Germany 
 
 where there was not to be seen of an evening in the parlour 
 of " The Lion " or " The Ox," some misunderstood genius, 
 spinning his wonderful brain-cobwebs regarding the world and 
 the age, amid his eagerly disputing comrades. Even the 
 unspeakable self-satisfaction of the Swabians exhibited quite 
 peculiar traits. Not here, as among the Bavarians, the Saxons, 
 or the Hanoverians, did particularism display itself in political 
 pride and ambition (for who in Swabia could dream of political 
 power ?), but it manifested itself in social vices. With agree- 
 able self-complacency, all the glories of the homeland, from 
 Frederick Barbarossa and Kepler down to the admirable 
 products of the Swabian kitchen, were unweariedly extolled, 
 whilst everything foreign was decried with gloomy mistrust. 
 In the consciousness of his own wealthy inner life, the gauche 
 and bashful Swabian regarded, half with suspicion and half 
 with contempt, the other Germans, whose eloquence and 
 adroitness could so readily have put him into the shade ; and 
 never did the Old Wiirtembergers display their refractoriness 
 more intractably than when the duke " just like a foreigner 
 who deprives the children of his country of their bread " 
 had summoned non- Swabian Germans to his court. 
 
 As soon as the revolutionary wars broke over this corrupt 
 community, everything was immediately in a ferment. In a 
 country which had so long been wrangling with its prince, 
 the new doctrine of freedom necessarily found a well-prepared 
 soil. For the first time in many decades, the Landtag re- 
 assembled. More than one hundred and fifty pamphlets 
 appeared, demanding the abolition of the old malpractices, 
 an extension of the suffrage, and the regular summoning of 
 Landtags. Yet none of these publicists, not even Spittler, 
 knew how to solve the riddle in what manner, out of the 
 dualism of the feudal traditional law, the modem unified state 
 could be brought into existence without a coup d'Uat. Amid 
 these confusions, Duke Frederick II ascended the throne, the 
 most evil and the most talented son of the house of Wiir- 
 temberg, the refounder of the little state, a man of thoroughly 
 un-Swabian character, one whose merits and whose defects 
 were equally repulsive to the people, hard, brutal, and uncon- 
 scientious, but at the same time an able politician, a man 
 of quick decision, and free from pettiness. How ridiculous 
 seemed Swabian parochialism to the hereditary prince when, 
 after his extensive travels, after an eventful career in the 
 
 598 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 Prussian and Russian services, he at length returned to his 
 home as a stranger, rich in experience, equipped with all the 
 brilliancy and all the vices of the great world. The unre^ 
 stricted authority of an absolute ruler, such as he had formerly 
 admired in Frederick the Great and in Catharine of Russia, 
 remained his ideal, and now that he had brought back with 
 him an English princess, his conceit increased beyond measure. 
 With burning ambition he mmibered the hours until his grey- 
 headed uncle, and at length also his father, closed their eyes. 
 At his accession he was already forty-three years of age, so 
 there was no time to lose. 
 
 The first thing was to secure for the house of Wiirtera- 
 berg a respectable amount of plunder, as its share of the 
 robber campaign of the German princes against their smaller 
 neighbours. But at every step the duke found himself hin- 
 dered by his Landtag. Whilst he himself, as a sworn enemy 
 of the Revolution, had taken the side of Austria, the estates 
 demanded neutrality, or adhesion to the side of free France, 
 and sent their own envoys to Rastatt, Vienna, and Paris, 
 in order to counteract the policy of the ruler of the country. 
 Repeated admonitions from the committee, and arbitrary acts 
 on the part of the duke against the leaders of the estates, 
 increased the mutual embitterment. When, during the last 
 days of the Directory, the armies of Moreau streamed over 
 the south-west, and when the agents of France were working to 
 secure the foundation of a South German RepubUc, secret 
 Jacobin clubs came into existence in Swabia as in Bavaria. 
 A pamphlet propounded the question : What should we gain 
 if Swabia should become a Republic? Meanwhile the duke 
 recognised that he could not secure the desired enlargement 
 of territory without the favour of France. He approached 
 the French , and by the principal resolution of the Diet of 
 Deputation secured his plunder, until at length, overpowered 
 by Napoleon's extraordinary eloquence, he openly adopted 
 the French side, assisted in the destruction of the Holy Empire, 
 acqiiired a sovereign kingly crown, and with a single blow 
 destroyed the venerable structure of the ancient constitution. 
 The step was so sudden, and exercised so benumbing an 
 influence, that in the entire country only two officials, Georgii 
 and Sartorius, refused to swear allegiance to the new auto- 
 crat ; a few others declared that they yielded only to force, 
 and the rest unresistingly recanted their ancient constitutional 
 
 599 
 
History of Germany 
 
 oath. In the forcible rounding-off of his territorial domain, 
 King Frederick acted with all the violence of a highwayman, 
 and to the commissioners empowered to effect the occupation 
 of the territories of the smaller neighbours, commissioners 
 accompanied by a force of the dreaded black yagers and a 
 body of Ught horsemen, he gave the blunt instructions : " Whoever 
 among you is most frequently the subject of complaints from 
 foreign governments, will commend himself most to my 
 favour." Like, master like man. What a pleasure it was 
 for the rough, uncultured scrivener of Old Wiirtemberg to make 
 his entry into conquered territory as a " royal Wiirtemberg 
 sovereign staff-burgomaster," and to tame the " accursed 
 imperial-town arrogance " of the proud burghers of Reutlingen. 
 Even when thus enlarged almost threefold, the realm of 
 the new king of Swabia still remained an extremely modest 
 middle-sized state, the smallest among the petty kingdoms of 
 the Confederation of the Rhine. Nor did it comprise the 
 entire domain of the East Swabian stock, and northward it 
 extended for no more than a few miles into Franconian terri- 
 tory ; the whole region of the Swabian Alps, the beautiful 
 Algau, went to Bavaria, and so also did Augsburg, the greatest 
 and most renowned of Swabian towns. But in this narrow 
 area were to be encountered the most extreme poUtical, 
 ecclesiastical, and economic contrasts. Side by side with 
 the rigidly ascetic Lutheranism of Old Wiirtemberg, existed 
 the worldly and cheerful Cathohcism of Upper Swabia, with 
 its Josephan enlighteninent ; side by side with the petty 
 agriculture of the regions of the Neckar and the Rems, were 
 to be found the great estates of the nobles, and also the 
 enclosed peasant farms of Schussental ; side by side with the 
 bourgeois gentry of the duchy, were numerous princes, counts, 
 and imperial knights — and in Hohenlohe, at least, the inhabi- 
 tants preserved a strong sentiment of dynastic loyalty towards 
 their benevolent old princely race. The Hither Austrians 
 regarded their entrance into this petty state as a humiliation 
 from the first, and the spiritual domains adhered firmly to 
 the imperial house, the old opponent of Wiirtemberg Protes- 
 tantism. Among the imperial towns, Heilbronn alone possessed 
 a vigorous bourgeois Ufe, for even the wealthy Ulm was 
 impoverished and decayed; but all these towns, down to 
 Bopfingen and Aalen, were profoundly incensed at the loss 
 of their ancient liberties, and this was above all the case in 
 
 600 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 democratic ReutKngen, whose inhabitants still preserved upon 
 the town hall the ancient memorials of victories in feuds 
 with the counts of Wiirtemberg. 
 
 Intercourse between the old and the new portions of the 
 country had hardly existed prior to the union ; people in one 
 region and the other knew one another almost exclusively 
 through current phrases of mockery. Open resistance was 
 no longer ventured on after the unhappy inhabitants of 
 Mergentheim had atoned with their blood for an attempt 
 at revolt. But, full of animosity, the subjects avoided inter- 
 course with the royal officials, and even at the university 
 the new fellow-countrjmien from Ulm and Hohenlohe lived 
 in continual disputes with the Old Wiirtembergers. It was a 
 manifest political impossibUity to adopt this motley Uttle 
 world into the bourgeois-Protestant constitution of the old 
 duchy, nor was there any legal warrant for such a proceeding, 
 for a great part of the new acquisitions was regarded as 
 compensation for Mompelgard, which had never been repre- 
 sented in the Stuttgart Landtag. For some years, as a 
 temporary resource, the new domain, which was ever5rwhere 
 intermingled with the old, was treated as an independent state ; 
 the quiet pilgrimage-centre of EUwangen was constituted the 
 capital of this extraordinary realm of New Wiirtemberg, 
 because the authorities found a convenient place of residence 
 in the stately palaces of the old provosts. As a permanency, 
 the unnatural separation between the two halves of the country 
 could not be maintained, but their union could not be effected 
 so long as the constitution of Old Wiirtemberg still existed. 
 
 The coup d'etat of December 30, 1805, by which the 
 good old law was abolished, was not the outcome simply 
 of a tyxscai's overweening love of power, but also depended 
 upon an undeniable political necessity. Over the united Old 
 and New Wiirtemberg, all the terrors of despotism now raged, 
 but amid countless acts of an overwhelmingly arbitrary 
 character, the autocracy also gifted the coimtry with the indis- 
 pensable institutions of the modem state. The edict of 
 religions. King Frederick's best work, overthrew the dominion 
 of the Lutheran church, and gave equal rights to both creeds. 
 By the secularisation of the goods of the church and the 
 aboUtion of the treasury of the estates, unity of the national 
 economy was estabUshed, and the duty of pajdng regular 
 taxes was carried into effect, though with such harshness 
 
 601 
 
History of Germany 
 
 that the owners of landed property had to pay nearly four- 
 fifths of the net income in taxes. Finally, the defenceless 
 country once again acquired a Httle army fit for war, an 
 army which, as the king boasted, stood on an equal footing 
 with the troops of other monarchs ; and although the old 
 scandal of the scrivener-system was not completely abolished, 
 nevertheless, in the new law courts and administrative insti- 
 tutions there came into existence the first beginnings of a 
 monarchical, academically cultured officialdom, and all the 
 special privileges of the old class of gentry were abolished. 
 Even the educational system, which the king dealt with 
 roughly and disdainfully, at least acqiiired the possibility 
 of freer development now that the conduct of affairs passe d 
 into the hands of temporal authorities. 
 
 The entire transformation was effected forcibly, by fits and 
 starts, and therefore imperfectly. Patrimonial jurisdiction was 
 abolished, whilst the oppressive burdens on the land, the corvees, 
 the hunting rights, and the utterly corrupt guild-system, persisted. 
 Nevertheless the reign of terror introduced a certain order into 
 a chaos of outworn territories, and levelled the ground so 
 as to make it possible, perhaps, for a healthier national 
 life to be built up at a later date. With revolutionary 
 impetuosity, the enemy of the Revolution established modem 
 legal equality in his own state ; but with the reservation 
 that here, as in Napoleonic France, the first aspect of this 
 equality was the equal slavery of all. It was extraordinary 
 how much energy of life and work the fat, evil king continued 
 to preserve amid all the uncleanness of his excesses. He 
 himself was the soul of his realm, and showed himself inde- 
 fatigable in new schemes : the port of Freidrichshafen on the 
 Lake of Constance, the iron-works of the Friedrichstal, the 
 steel-works of Friedrichshall, were to hand down to posterity 
 the imperial glories of the first king of Swabia. All his coun- 
 sellors, whom he summoned by preference from elsewhere in 
 Germany, served him as blind tools, the only one who occa- 
 sionally exhibited a few ideas of his own being Wintzingerode. 
 Even in his relationships with the Protector, King Frederick, 
 despite all his devotion, knew better how to maintain his 
 princely dignity than did the other kings of the Confederation 
 of the Rhine. He refused to send his troops to Spain, and 
 Napoleon once exclaimed in a rage : "If this man had 100,000 
 soldiers, I would declare war against him." 
 
 602 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 It was impossible that the mass of the people should 
 have any understanding of the sound poHtical ideas which 
 co-operated in the overthrow of the old order. All that they 
 could recognise was the destruction of chartered rights, the 
 arbitrariness of the officials, the pressure of taxation, pecula- 
 tion and espionage. In addition, the ancient curse of princely 
 hunting-rights was wantonly increased. There was also the 
 repulsive spectacle of a court endeavouring, through its tasteless 
 extravagance, through the flaunting titles of its royal banner- 
 men, royal marshals, and royal heralds, to rival the glories 
 of the world-ruler. The respectable burghers of Stuttgart 
 blushed to hear of the way in which the father of the country 
 gave expression to his Voltairean mockery of religion, while 
 the effrontery of the depraved royal favourites recalled that 
 of the minions of Henry III of Valois. Just at this time, 
 too, a deplorable family drama in the royal house awakened 
 the indignation of the whole world. The king had forced 
 his daughter Catharine to marry King Jerome, and now, 
 after the fall of the French empire, demanded that she should 
 separate from her husband. The noble woman proudly 
 answered : "I have shared with him his good fortune, and 
 must also share his evil fortune." Thereupon the father had 
 the daughter brought by force from Austria to Wiirtemberg, 
 and then held husband and wife prisoner for a year in the 
 castle of Ellwangen, in order by threats and maltreatment to 
 force them to hand over their possessions. Poverty and 
 embitterment increased from year to year, and many desperate 
 people were restrained from emigration only by force of law. 
 When, after the despot's death, this prohibition of emigration 
 was annulled, many left the country. The first waves of 
 the great current of American emigration were manifested in 
 Wiirtemberg as early as 1817 ; the poor people of the Heil- 
 bronn region loudly declared on their departure that it was 
 only the severity of the officials and the burden of the taxes 
 which had driven them away from their homeland. 
 
 After he had been seventeen years on the throne, the 
 king was still a complete stranger to his own people. How 
 else could he have possibly beUeved that these loyal and stiff- 
 necked Swabians would speedily get over the loss of their 
 good old law ? He confidently reckoned upon the humble 
 thanks of his people when upon his return from Vienna he 
 determined, by the granting of a constitution, to anticipate 
 
 603 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the resolutions of the congress. He was soon to learn that 
 the most dangerous moment for a corrupt government comes 
 when it spontaneously undertakes reform. A royal manifesto 
 summoned an undivided Landtag for the new realm. It was 
 to consist of fifty representatives of the nobility, five members 
 of the clergy, and one deputy from each of the sixty-four 
 chief districts and from the seven towns which bore the 
 Napoleonic title of the " good towns." Even before this 
 assembly met, everyone in Stuttgart, and even the diplomatic 
 corps, knew that a great blow against the king was being 
 prepared. Now at length the unhappy people regained the 
 long-suppressed right of free speech, and at once all those 
 who had suffered from the violence of despotism reared their 
 heads : the estates of Old Wiirtemberg and their powerful 
 family connections, the princes and imperial knights who had 
 suffered injury beyond forgiveness, the imperial towns, and 
 the prelates. Hatred against the king awakened for the first 
 time a feeling of community between the old territories and 
 the new. The Old Wiirtembergers at once showed them- 
 selves resolved to demand the restoration of their beloved 
 constitution, which had, however, never legally existed in the 
 new territories. The New Wiirtembergers agreed in this pro- 
 posal, because the involved forms of the good old law offered 
 an entire arsenal of powerful weapons against princely excesses, 
 and because, with such a king as this, the control of the 
 monarchical authority was regarded by all as the most impor- 
 tant immediate task. It did not seem that it would be too 
 difficult a matter, by making a few additions regarding the 
 equal rights of the Catholics and the representation of the 
 nobles, to modify this amorphous constitutional structure 
 so as to make it habitable for the New Wiirtembergers as 
 well. 
 
 King Frederick alone had no inkling of these designs. 
 On March 15, 1815, he opened the Landtag in person, and 
 announced that on this day he desired to lay the foundation- 
 stone of the state-structure. Thereupon the new constitu- 
 tion was read, the king solemnly promised to observe it, amd 
 declared that herewith it immediately became binding on all 
 his subjects. A Landtag, constituted upon the same principles 
 as the present one, was in future to assemble every three 
 years upon the summons of the crown, to discuss new taxes 
 and new laws ; thus it could neither diminish the existing 
 
 604 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 intolerable burden of taxation, nor yet subject to its super- 
 vision the thousand and one royal rescripts which of late 
 years had reduced the country to despair. In order to make 
 matters quite certain, the king had in addition, during the 
 last few days, promulgated certain new and severe laws 
 regarding military service and territorial militia. Thus dis- 
 appeared every prospect of a peaceful improvement of the 
 condition of the country. The Prussian envoy, von Kiister, 
 an able man who hardly found it possible to endure his 
 residence at this court, wrote to his king in profound indig- 
 nation : " Your majesty will readily be able to judge whether 
 such a constitution corresponds to the wishes of the powers." * 
 The king handed the charter, in a gold casket, to the president 
 of the Landtag. Hardly, however, had he left the house, 
 when the hotspur of the mediatised. Count Georg von Waldeck, 
 rose to his feet, and read an address which had long 
 previously been prepared, and which in subservient phraseology 
 rejected the royal gift, bluntly declaring that the people had 
 elected their representatives solely in the belief that no other 
 basis could be proposed for the proceedings than the consti- 
 tution of Wiirtemberg, which had been inherited from their 
 ancestors, and which had been sworn to by all the rulers of 
 the country. The diet, passionately excited, approved the 
 address by a unanimous vote. The new constitution was 
 left unregarded upon the table of the house, and in a few 
 moments it had become a worthless scrap of paper. 
 
 The firm attitude of the estates gave the signal for an 
 outbreak of popular passion. The feudal stubbornness of the 
 good old time, the revolutionary sentiments of the nineties, 
 the suppressed fiuy of the days of the Confederation of the 
 Rhine, and the new desires for freedom which had been 
 awakened by the struggle against Napoleon, all jostled one 
 another. How much nearer than the nebulous questions of 
 German policy were to this generation the immediate concerns 
 of their homes ! A petition to the Bundestag for the ful- 
 filment of article 13 secured in Swabia no more than a few 
 isolated signatures ; but the Landtag of Stuttgart was over- 
 whelmed with petitions, statements of grievances, and resolu- 
 tions of approval. A number of contentious pamphlets were 
 pubKshed on behalf of the estates, many of them couched in 
 savage Jacobin phraseology. An Appeal to the High Liberator 
 
 1 Kiister's Report. Stuttgart, March l6, 1815. 
 60s 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of Germany bore upon the title-page the threatening remark 
 " imprimatur in virtue of the freedom from the censorship which 
 prevails in Wiirtemberg territory," and propounded the question, 
 " What does this crown cost us ? " The answer ran as follows : 
 " A perjury that cries to heaven, many thousand enforced 
 false oaths, numberless acts of arbitrary power, extortion, and 
 arrogance, and in addition the sale of the blood of from thirty 
 to forty thousand of the most hopeful youth of the country ! 
 The blood of so many thousand victims is surging, splashing, 
 and steaming around the throne of the despot ! " A second 
 Appeal demanded " a sworn brotherhood of right-thinking men 
 on behalf of the right, and nothing but the right, for the 
 good old right, with the watch-word ' God and our rights ' ! 
 Those who are free by right will be true by right ! " Thus 
 the sacred name of right, so irresistible to German hearts, passed 
 to and fro in a hundred echoes ; and those thus excited required 
 only a few sophistical fallacies to enable them to ignore the 
 incontestable fact that in the major half of the country, this 
 ancient right had never existed at all. The whole German press 
 enthusiastically took the side of the Landtag because it simul- 
 taneously represented the two most sacred sentiments of the 
 time, faithful affection for domestic customs and an indefinite 
 yearning for freedom. It was only the Alemannia of Munich 
 which, as always, advocated the cause of Rhenish Confederate 
 absolutism. 
 
 The address of the estates was followed by a strong state- 
 ment of their rights on the part of the mediatised, and of 
 the Catholic and the Lutheran prelates. Even the agnates of 
 the royal house protested against the new and severe military 
 law, being headed by Duke Paul, a dissolute man of unbridled 
 ambition, who would gladly have played the part of a Swabian 
 Philippe EgaUte. The king felt unable to cope with the fierce 
 hatred which manifested itself on all sides, and since the crown 
 prince represented to him how little reason there was to reckon 
 on any change of sentiments on the part of the estates he 
 prudently took a step backwards, and on April i6th declared 
 himself prepared to treat, through commissioners, with four 
 plenipotentiaries from the estates, who were to state what por- 
 tions of the ancient rights the Landtag desired to adopt as 
 part of the new fundamental law. Thus was abandoned the 
 ceremoniously announced inviolability of the new constitution. 
 But it speedily appeared that the Landtag aimed at nothing 
 
 606 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 less than the re-estabUshment of the ancient state of affairs with 
 a few unimportant alterations. 
 
 The elections in the towns and chief districts had resulted 
 in the return, apart from nine traders, of lawyers, burgomasters, 
 mayors, and scriveners. It is easy to understand that in such 
 an assembly those weU versed in historical law maintained the 
 upper hand, such men as Weishaar, BoUey, and Georgii, learned 
 lawyers, full of the ideas of the new hberalism, to whom the 
 oligarchical ancient constitution seemed the securest bulwark of 
 popular rights ; next came the good burgomaster Kliippel of 
 Stuttgart ; and, finally, Zahn and Feuerlein, two virtuosi of 
 the Old Wurtemberg scrivener's office, unequalled in all the 
 arts of petty word-splitting. Count Waldeck was the leader 
 of the mediatised, a man of restless intelhgence, always on the 
 spot when the South German nobiUty assembled for the preserva- 
 tion of the rights of caste. He found it possible in the 
 same breath to express enthusiasm for unre5,tricted popular 
 freedom, and to defend the privileges of his house. The highly 
 noble house of Limburg, he gave people to understand, had 
 hitherto recognised neither the Germanic Federation nor the 
 kingdom of Wiirtemberg, and could only bring itself to grant 
 them recognition if they would meet him on equal terms. 
 Among the lesser nobiUty, Baron von Vambiiler was promi- 
 ment, a typical imperial knight, brave, frank, and extremely 
 obstinate. Subsequently Colonel Massenbach also joined the 
 party of the knighthood, the man to whose name was attached 
 the curse of Jena and Prenzlau. By the publication of 
 unsavoury memoirs, he had already avenged himself for his 
 well-deserved dismissal from the Prussian army ; and now, as 
 a politician, he displayed the same fantastic and superabundant 
 activities which he had formerly displayed as a soldier. In 
 savage, screaming, demagogic writings, he demanded of the 
 nobles, that they should undergo a bourgeois baptism, and 
 annoimced : " All the princes must now conclude new treaties 
 with their peoples ; the change must go so far that every 
 citizen will be able himself to reckon his contribution to the 
 upkeep of the state." 
 
 For the time being, the opposition, compounded of such 
 fundamentally diverse elements, held firmly together ; five only 
 of the nobles subsequently withdrew their assent to the address, 
 and a portion of the mediatised also separated themselves from 
 the opposition in order to await the decision of the congress 
 
 607 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of Vienna concerning the rights of the former estates of the 
 empire. The form of the deUberations still corresponded entirely 
 with traditional custom.^! For the most part the deputies read 
 lengthy written opinions, and ^ only^ on rare ^occasions, when 
 exchanging personal grievances,^ did they speak extempore. The 
 four plenipotentiaries were supplemented by the Landtag by a 
 committee of twenty-five members, which was to represent the 
 former great committee, and which to every proposal of 
 the government subjoined detailed counter-considerations. Yet 
 notj even the tedious formalities of written procedure could 
 prevent frequent stormy outbreaks which voiced intense 
 embitterment with the king. The estates answered the 
 monarch's advances by a statement of grievances. What an 
 impression was produced when this interminable writing was 
 read, and when the incredible arbitrariness of the bailiffs and 
 the monstrous extravagance of the king were brought to light. 
 The court had annually consumed half J a million gulden, fully 
 a third of the income of the country. jThere was a general 
 silence of consternation, and many were in tears ; it seemed 
 as if the profoundly injured conscience of the people . sat in 
 judgment upon the sins of these nine years. Meanwhile no 
 advance was made in the work of instituting a constitution. 
 In the sharpest terms the estates reminded the king of his 
 broken oath ; they continually repeated that all the " nameless 
 misery " of recent years arose solely from the " contempt that 
 had been exhibited for the old and the tried " ; and they 
 declared that the most valuable constituents of the ancient 
 constitution were those two institutions which were least com- 
 patible with the unity of the modem monarchy, namely, the 
 permanent committee, and the treasury of the provincial diets. 
 Faithful to feudal tradition, they regarded the relationship 
 between prince and people as a natural state of war, and did 
 not hesitate to tell the king to his face that in case of a new 
 dispute the Landtag must possess means of its own for the 
 support of persecuted officials. 
 
 After six months of barren dispute, the king at last lost 
 patience. He determined to prorogue the assembly, instruct- 
 ing it to appoint certain plenipotentiaries to continue the 
 negotiations regarding the fundamental law, and promising 
 in the meanwhile to make a strict enquiry into grievances. 
 But the majority of the Landtag would not abandon the 
 formulas of Old Wiirtemberg constitutional law; they insisted 
 
 608 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 that a great committee must remain sitting as representative 
 of the rights of the country ; and when the monarch refused 
 to accept this accessory government of the estates, th« latter 
 defiantly separated without naming plenipotentiaries for the 
 work of formulating a constitution. Before breaking up, the 
 Landtag played its highest trump, applying, on July 26th, to 
 the guarantors of the ancient hereditary settlement, Denmark, 
 England, and Prussia, begging for their mediation, for the 
 acceptance of the royal proposal would be regarded by the 
 people as " treachery." Such was the level of national pride 
 in the south : the greatly celebrated first Landtag of these 
 years of peace came to an end with the endeavour to induce, 
 in the name of popular rights, two foreign powers to intervene 
 in the affairs of Germany. 
 
 The country had followed these disputes with increasing 
 excitement. It was with difficulty that during the last decisive 
 sittings the Landtag could restrain the serenades and hurrahs 
 of the populace of Stuttgart. After the prorogation, large 
 masses of the countryfolk flocked to Ludwigsburg, and the 
 king had to order his riders to make sallies from the gates in 
 order to protect the isolated palace from the clamour of the 
 petitioners. When the representatives of the people returned 
 home, they received a storm of extravagant homage which 
 served notably to increase the self-satisfaction of the " advo- 
 cates of ancient rights." How would it have been possible 
 amid this impetuous popular movement for the noble poet to 
 remain silent, the man who had always found the appropriate 
 word for the heart-secrets of the Swabian people, and whose 
 democratic burgher pride, juristic ciilture, and family traditions, 
 urged him to take the side of the Old Wiirtemberg party ? 
 Ludwig Uhland accompanied every phase of the confused 
 struggle with the straightforward popular strains of his patriotic 
 poems, and, avaiUng himself of the right of repetition which the 
 poUtical poet shares with the pubUcist, he turned over again 
 and again in manifold forms the single idea, writing always in 
 effect : 
 
 " Blest land of wheat and vineyards. 
 
 The finest Heaven e'er saw, 
 But one essential lacking : 
 
 The cotmtry's good old law ! " 
 
 These vigorous poems resounded far beyond the frontiers of 
 Swabia, and served mightily to fan the nebulous excitement of 
 
 609 2 R 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the time. However dignified the form of the verses might be, 
 they invariably expressed the revolutionary doctrine " all or 
 nothing," and voiced the bitter reproach that the wickedness 
 of ruthless rulers had cheated the people of their chartered 
 rights. Restricted within the circle of ideas of his Swabian 
 home, the rancorous feeling, which was not without justifica- 
 tion in the dull atmosphere of Wiirtemberg despotism, was 
 transferred by the poet to the conditions also of the entire 
 fatherland, and as early as the third day of the battle of 
 Leipzig, in the most beautiful and most revolutionary of his 
 poHtical poems, he described the situation of Germany as utterly 
 hopeless. At a moment when the statesmen of Prussia, so 
 recently returned from Paris, had their hands full of work in 
 connection with the organisation of the new administration, 
 Uhland was conjuring up the spirit of Theodor Komer, 
 declaring in the latter's name : " Hopeless is the outlook 
 on every side ! " This unjust saying bit into the very marrow 
 of the Teutonising youth, and by the parties of the opposition 
 was repeated in verse and prose, until at length, three years 
 later, the outlook did indeed seem hopeless. 
 
 The sole result of the appeal to the three guarantors was, 
 as every unprejudiced person might have foreseen, to rouse the 
 king to fresh efforts. Not one of the three courts considered itself 
 justified in intervening in express terms on behalf of a long- 
 abohshed constitution, whose existence was possible only upon 
 the basis of the ancient imperial law. Prussia, in particular, 
 held cautiously aloof, although Hardenberg honestly desired 
 reconciliation between prince and people, for King Frederick, 
 who had recently entered into close relationships with Russia, 
 displayed his ancient rancour against the North German great 
 power in so provocative a manner that Kiister was on several 
 occasions on the point of asking for his papers. In such cir- 
 cumstances, an attempted intervention on the part of the 
 cabinet of Berhn could do nothing but harm. Nor did King 
 Frederick himself find any help abroad. His reputation in all 
 the courts was as evil as could be ; and without exception 
 they demanded that the European scandal of Swabian despotism 
 should come to an end. Prince Mettemich went so far as 
 openly to espouse the cause of the Landtag, for his own family 
 belonged to the mediatised of Wiirtemberg, and had in recent 
 years suffered grave injustice.^ 
 
 * Kiister's Reports, November i, 1815, and subsequent dates. 
 
 610 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 The once all-powerful petty ruler was completely isolated : 
 the excitement in the country continued to increase, and from 
 a number of districts protests were now sent in against 
 the new taxes. After his decisive manner, the king quickly 
 adapted himself to the changed situation, and in his necessity 
 summoned to his cabinet Baron K. A. von Wangenheim, a 
 Thuringian, whose name alone sufficed to guarantee an honest 
 change of system. When quite a young man, Wangenheim,. 
 then an official in Coburg, had with courageous frankness, 
 opposed the maladroit regime of the minister Kretschmann, 
 and in punishment had been banished from the country. He 
 had found an asylum in Franconia, with the chivalrous Baron 
 von Truchsess, who was honoured by the romanticist world 
 as a second Sickingen, and there, at Bettenburg, in the new 
 place of refuge from oppression, had formed a Ufelong friendship 
 with the yoimg poet Friedrich Riickert. When, some years later,, 
 he came to Stuttgart, commissioned by the small Thuringiam 
 court, his brilliant conversation, sparkling with lively sallies, 
 his bright appearance, and his imperturbable sta5ang-power ini 
 a carouse, had won the good-will of the king, who immediately 
 took him into his service. Royal favour did not long endure. 
 " My student," as the king termed him, soon aroused offoice 
 by the free expression of his German sentiments, and the king 
 was ultimately glad to pack him off to Tubingen, as curatcM: 
 of the university. Here he showed himself to be a judicious 
 favourer of the sciences, associating on friendly terms with all 
 the notable men of learning in the university, but by preference 
 with Eschenmeier the mystic, who initiated the sensitive 
 dilettante into the cabalistic formulas of his nature-philosophical 
 doctrine of the state — for Wangenheim was a man receptive 
 for all the flights of imagination. When the constitutional struggle 
 became embittered, he suddenly came to the front with a 
 writing. The Idea of a State Constitution. This remarkable 
 book showed plainly how impossible it was to harmonise the 
 good old law with the modem idea of the state, and went 
 on, with ceremonious emotion, to develop the programme of 
 an inviolable and exemplary constitution which should satisfy 
 all claims of the abstract idea. This was the old doctrine of 
 Montesquieu, in a fantastical dress. The sacred triad of natural 
 philosophy was to manifest itself in the balance of three powers : 
 the popular masses were to display the energy of the idea ; 
 the commune was to supply imaginative force ; whilst the Landtag 
 
 6ii 
 
History of Germany 
 
 was to incorporate the appetitive faculty of the state. 
 Behind the doctrinaire wrappings there were concealed certain 
 excellent practical proposals, and since the king could find no 
 helper anjrwhere else, he commissioned this literary mediator 
 to adjust the constitutional quarrel. 
 
 With sublime confidence, Wangenheim accepted the call. 
 He was already affected by that immeasurable self-esteem which 
 men of talent are apt to display in cramped surroundings, and 
 believed himself foreordained to offer to Germany a brilliant 
 example of an incomparable constitution. Although he had a 
 genuine hatred for the Confederation of the Rhine, he could 
 not restrain himself from transferring his beloved mystical triad 
 to the general field of German politics, and long before had 
 puzzled out the system of a German trias, which unfortunately 
 resembled very closely the shameful tripartition of Napo- 
 leonic days. To him, Austria and Prussia both seemed semi- 
 foreign powers. Prussia in especial he regarded as the insatiably 
 covetous enemy of the hereditary princely houses. The totality 
 of the petty states, " genuine Germany," was to keep these 
 two powers within bounds, to establish a balance between 
 them, to lead them ever upwards towards freedom and civilisa- 
 tion : and among the genuinely German stocks, the most genuine 
 oi all was the Swabian. Wangenheim loved his new home to 
 the point ctf idolatry, and adhered to the royal house with 
 a chivaJlrous loyalty which never failed him even in moments 
 of well-grounded discontent. ^ He had, however, no more than 
 a superficial acquaintance with local conditions, and did not 
 understand how to deal with obstinate persons. Difficulties 
 enough were imposed upon him from the first by the fact 
 that he was " a foreigner," and that his pure High German 
 was offensive to Swabian ears. When he gave vent to free-and- 
 easy witticisms regarding the " venerable antiquities " of the 
 ancient constitution, and when, speaking of an Old Wiirtemberg 
 scrivener, he said that such persons as this knew nothing in 
 heaven and earth except how to make calculations which no 
 one but another scrivener could understand, to the Swabians 
 he seemed positively sacrilegious. A flood of mockery was 
 poured forth regarding the " appetitive faculty of the state " 
 and the other nature-philosophy crotchets of the " Wiirtemberg 
 Solon." 
 
 ' I utilise here, among other materials, a collection of letters from Wangen- 
 heim to his friend Privy-councillor von Hartmann, communicated to me by 
 Professor Hartmann of Stuttgart. 
 
 6l2 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 The Landtag, resummoned in October, 1815, proceeded once 
 again, in an address running into twenty folios, to demand the 
 ancient constitution for the entire country, adding threateningly : 
 " the people begin to despair of the future." At length, in 
 a ministerial council held on November nth, Wangenheim 
 won the king over to the proposal to accede their beloved principle 
 to the sticlders for the old law.^ Two days later, the king 
 astonished the estates by a message, which to the foreign diplo- 
 mats seemed " almost hke a miracle." In this he declared that 
 he did not contest the internal vaUdity of the old agreements, 
 but merely their applicability. He went on, in fourteen articles, 
 to offer the unrestricted right of granting supply, the responsi- 
 biUty of state-servants, and finally, and above all, the 
 general revision of laws passed since 1806. These articles 
 contained, in fact, everything which still seemed viable among 
 the feudal institutions, and granted in addition a long series 
 of new and valuable privileges. The king concluded with the 
 assurance that if these proposals were rejected he would have 
 no option but to re-estabhsh the old law in Old Wiirtemberg, 
 and to provide the new territories with an independent new 
 constitution. 
 
 After these great concessions on the part of the crown, 
 public opinion outside Wiirtemberg began to undergo modifica- 
 tion. Stein, Gagern, and many other well-wishers, who had 
 hitherto been on the side of the estates, now strongly advised 
 that the proffered hand of reconcihation should be accepted. 
 The Landtag, however, had already gone too deep into the 
 struggle ; the dispute had long before become a personal one, 
 and the embittered spirits of the disputants mocked at reason. 
 The estates did indeed agree to treat with the crown once 
 more through a committee ; but the committee immediately 
 proceeded, disregarding the fourteen articles, to elaborate a 
 shapeless constitutional proposal, which, in twenty-five chapters 
 and many hundreds of paragraphs, enumerated all the dusty 
 treasures of the old law, insisting above all upon the permanent 
 committee and the tax-treasury. 
 
 Upon these lines the dispute continued for months ; and, 
 to complete the confusion, Wangenheim's doctrinaire zeal led 
 him to attack the one point regarding which hitherto both 
 parties had been agreed, the traditional unicameral system of 
 bourgeois Wiirtemberg. Without two chambers, the idea of 
 1 Klister's Report, November 11, 1815. 
 613 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the sacred triad could not possibly be realised ; the aristocratic 
 element must not fail to constitute the " hypomochlion " which 
 represented the " oscillating counterpoise " between the 
 democracy and the autocracy. The king encouraged these 
 theoretical whimsies (which Wangenheim developed in detail 
 in a new writing) all the more willingly because they har- 
 monised with the calculations of his own sober policy of hard 
 reaUties. Like most of the princes of the Confederation of the 
 Rhine, he was suspicious of the nobles as the most dangerous 
 enemies of the crown, and regarded it as essential to seclude 
 these distinguished demagogues in an upper chamber, lest they 
 should lead astray the bourgeoisie and the peasants. It was 
 upon such wonderful grounds that the plan originated to con- 
 stitute a house of peers in a petty state which had mani- 
 festly no scope for a vigorous peerage. The advocates of the 
 old law offered vigorous resistance ; they had little confidence 
 in their aristocratic associates, and they believed that now, as 
 formerly, they could best make head against the interested 
 activities of the nobles in an undivided assembly of the estates. 
 It was easier to come to an understanding in respect of 
 another German peculiarity, which was to prove yet more 
 injurious to the power of Our smaller Landtags, namely, the 
 salaries of the members. It seemed to all to be a matter 
 of course that the representative of the people should be paid 
 for his honourable duties. Regard for the extreme poverty 
 of the cultured classes worked hand in hand with regard for 
 the class views of the officials ; the bureaucrat of the old school 
 could not conceive of anyone taking great pains except for a 
 salary. Meanwhile the despotic nature of the king broke forth 
 again and again, now some of those who had signed the address 
 to the Landtag, and now some hot-headed deputy, being haled 
 before the courts. The estates, also, permitted themselves 
 notable excesses. They contended that all the privileges which 
 the future constitution was first to secure for them, were already 
 in their possession, and formally maintained their rights when 
 the king again levied taxes, threatening in case this step was 
 repeated that they would advise the subjects to refuse payment. 
 This dispute dragged on for an entire year, becoming daily 
 more wearisome and more barren. In August, 1816, Count 
 Waldeck, on his own initiative, made a second appeal to the 
 three guarantors and also to Emperor Francis as the sometime 
 lord paramount of the empire — a document which in classical 
 
 614 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 phraseology expressed the unteachable presumption of the 
 idolaters of the old law. " The Old Wiirtemberg constitution," 
 it ran, " has, in virtue of the decision of the German imperial 
 court and of the high guarantors, in virtue of the unanimous 
 voice of Germany and the blessings of three centuries, main- 
 tained itself so conclusively as a work of human perfection, 
 that the annihilation of a single one even of its constituents 
 would, precisely on account of its artificially dehcate structure, 
 endanger its entirety, and thus imperil the well-being of the 
 people." * The whole country now resounded with the tur- 
 moil which since that time has accompanied almost all 
 disputes about German parUamentary life, and this by no 
 means served to increase the respect of the foreign world for 
 the storm in a tea-cup. A savage pamphlet threatened the 
 king with the fate of his ancestor, the refugee duke Ulrich, 
 and when an anonymous writer ventured to advocate the pro- 
 posals of the crown, his work was nailed to the pillory in 
 Stuttgart. 
 
 Everyone was forced to take a side. Even numerous 
 celebrated Swabians outside the country sent letters or printed 
 writings to convey their opinion to the homeland, and the hope- 
 less confusion of the strife was shown in the admiration for 
 the old constitution expressed by the deadly enemies ScheUing 
 and Paulus, the former because he regarded the historic law 
 as venerable, and the latter because he thought he could recog- 
 nise constitutional freedom in the old feudal liberties. Hegel, 
 on the other hand, fought with sophistical skill on behalf of 
 Wangenheim as representative of the modem idea of the 
 state, and proved, altogether in the spirit of the Rhenish Con- 
 federate bureaucracy, that it was only through the destruction 
 of the outworn German empire that the " genuine German 
 realm," the new kingdoms, had come into existence. In moving 
 terms the true-hearted Justinus Kemer implored his beloved 
 Uhland to abandon the " money-box system and caste spirit 
 of the scriveners and law-mongers." It was in vain. When 
 Wangenheim's friend Ruckert challenged the poet of the sticklers 
 for the old right to a poetic competition, the Swabian occupied 
 the advantageous position of being able to defend the cordial 
 sentiments of emotional politics against the sober considerations 
 of political wisdom, and prepared for the Franconian a poetical 
 
 1 Count Waldeck, Address to the courts of Austria, Prussia, Denmark, and 
 England, August 31, 1816. 
 
 61S 
 
History of Germany 
 
 defeat which was hailed in Wiirtemberg as a political triumph. 
 What help was it that the two best political intelligences among 
 the younger men in the country, Friedrich List and Schlayer, 
 eagerly supported the minister? In the Landtag, Wangenheim 
 had two adherents only, Griesinger, the jurist, and Cotta, the 
 bookseller, the latter becoming an object of suspicion to his 
 parochially minded fellow-townsmen because, as a business man 
 of wide experience, he looked beyond their narrow circle of 
 vision. But the king himself remained the most serious obstacle 
 to an understanding. There could be no doubt that he at length 
 honourably desired peace ; but who was wilUng to trust him ? 
 
 Now, however, a friendly stroke of fortune suddenly 
 removed this obstacle. On October 30, 1816, the king died, 
 lamented by no one. His successor. King William, was received 
 with rejoicing by the entire country. For several years past 
 the loyal populace had been accustomed to compare him with 
 the good duke Christopher because, like Christopher, he had 
 had to pass a joyless youth under the rule of a tyrannical 
 father. Nevertheless the new king, heartless and coldly reason- 
 able by disposition, completely lacked the good-nature of Duke 
 Christopher. Bom at Liiben, in the Prussian garrison, the 
 prince had in youth been as strongly Prussian in sentiment as 
 his grandfather, Frederick Eugene ; at that time he still signed 
 himself " Frederick William." When after the battle of Jena 
 he had learned to despise the Prussians, he still remained a 
 proud German officer, and definitely opposed the French policy 
 of his father. The violent dissension in the royal household 
 soon became generally known throughout the country, and 
 secured numerous secret admirers for the crown prince, although 
 the defiant spirit of the unaffectionate son was just as much 
 to blame for these domestic troubles as was the Bonapartist 
 sentiment of the harsh-spirited parent. Upon the king's 
 orders, the prince unwillingly contracted marriage with the 
 Bavarian princess Carohne Augusta, a marriage which was never 
 consummated and which was unhappy for both parties. ^ The 
 laurels of the Napoleonic campaigns offered no attraction to 
 him. It was not until Wiirtemberg had joined the side of the 
 
 ' A legend widely difiused in Wiirtemberg, and recorded in the first editions 
 of this book, maintained that Crown Prince William had contracted this marriage 
 in order to avoid marriage with Stephanie Beauharnais. The rumour is false, 
 for Stephanie was already betrothed to the elector Charles of Baden on 
 April 8, 1806, and the marriage of the crown prince William did not take place 
 till June 8, i8o8. 
 
 616 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 allies that he took part in the struggle, and during the winter 
 campaign in France, and especially in the sanguinary affair 
 of Montereau, he displayed himself an efficient commander, 
 so that the Swabian poet Wilhelm Hauff greeted him on his 
 return home as " Prince William, noble knight." These military 
 successes had an unfavourable influence upon his character, 
 increasing the tendency to excessive self-esteem and contempt 
 for others which he shared with his father ; and since his own 
 vision extended far beyond the parochial prejudices of his 
 fellow-countrymen his experiences in the domestic constitutional 
 struggle served merely to strengthen him in the illusion that 
 he knew everything better than anyone else. 
 
 His mind was continuously dominated by uncontrollable 
 ambition, and he believed himself to be superior to all other 
 German princes. For a long time Swabia had been too small 
 for his designs. At the congresses of Vienna and of Paris the 
 diplomatic world had several times been astonished by wonder- 
 ful proposals, suggesting for the hero of Montereau a brilliant 
 position of honour, such as the supreme command in Mainz 
 of the forces of the Germanic Federation, or the sovereignty of 
 Alsace. After the dissolution of his marriage with the Bavarian 
 princess, he espoused the czar's sister, the grand duchess 
 Catharine, a talented, lively, and enterprising woman, who, 
 formerly, during the Russian war, had worked at the equip- 
 ment of the army as vigorously as any man, and who now 
 found herself ill at ease in the petty relationships of her new 
 home. The prince's dreams now became still more aspiring. 
 " How would it be possible," wrote Kiister at this period, 
 " for three so remarkable, energetic, and vigorous individuals 
 as Frederick, William, and Catharine, to get on together ? " 
 A secret correspondence now began between the heir to the 
 Swabian throne and the prince of Orange, to the great cdarm 
 of the conversative courts. It was known that both princes 
 cherished revolutionary designs, and that the prince of Wiirtem- 
 berg felt profoundly flattered when here and there a pot- 
 house poUtician hailed him as the future German emperor. 
 Although both these princes profoundly despised the new liberal 
 ideas, they both hoped, as machiavellian poUticians, to secure 
 for themselves some definite good fortune out of a great revo- 
 lutionary change. Where Prince WiUiam's ambition came into 
 play, his sobriety of spirit no longer prevailed, and the most 
 airy structures of his imagination seemed to him attainable 
 
 617 
 
History of Germany 
 
 possibilities. For many years he brooded over the idea of a 
 South German federation, although he had himself done every- 
 thing to destroy any possible foundation for these plans for 
 a trias. Arrogant towards the court of Baden, he was pro- 
 foundly estranged from the court of Bavaria. The hatred of 
 the harsh Frederick for the good-natured Max Joseph was 
 inherited by their sons. The fantastical extravagance of the 
 Bavarian crown prince Louis was intolerable to the dry, self- 
 contained nature of Prince William, nor did the terms between 
 the two men improve when they competed for the hand of 
 Catharine of Russia, and the Bavarian lost the prize. 
 
 The simple patriotic enthusiasm of the wars of liberation 
 left this narrow-hearted character cold. His German policy 
 was entirely determined by dynastic pride and love of personal 
 power. Just as he detested Napoleon because the rule of the 
 foreigner over the house of Wiirtemberg seemed to him a 
 scandal, so was he unwilling to subordinate his sovereign house 
 to any powerful German centralised authority. It seemed 
 to him that the leadership of Germany was his own privilege, 
 and even the good-humoured Kiister declared that at heart 
 the crown prince's sentiments were just as particularist as those 
 of his father. 1 From the first he was on bad terms with 
 the two leading powers of the Germanic Federation. The 
 policy of dualism directly conflicted with his plans for a trias, 
 and his petty and irritable characteristics made it impossible 
 for him to repress a sentiment of personal hostility towards 
 the two monarchs. Soon after ascending the throne, he offered 
 the king of Prussia the hand of a princess of Wiirtemberg for 
 the young crown prince, and received the composed answer 
 that Frederick William would not exercise any constraint over 
 the inclinations of his children.^ WiUiam never forgave this rebuff. 
 At about the same time, Emperor Francis chose the divorced 
 wife of the Wiirtemberger for his own fourth consort, and 
 henceforward the emperor's old mistrust for the incalculable 
 schemer in Stuttgart continued to increase, and the ill-feeling 
 was cordially reciprocated. 
 
 Ever a zealous soldier, an administrator of secure percep- 
 tions and great industry, an excellent agriculturist, and an 
 admirable horse-breeder, simple in his manner of life, self- 
 
 ' Kilster's Reports. October 24, November 11, 1815. 
 
 ' Kiister to Hardenberg, Stuttgart, January 18 ; Instructions by the 
 chancellor, February 24, 1817. 
 
 6l8 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 controlled, and, though by no means strictly moral, free from 
 the utter shamelessness of his father, the new king was fully 
 adequate for all those practical affairs of life which could be 
 dealt with by prudence and energy. Whatever lay beyond these 
 fields was a closed book to him. Like his father, he regarded 
 the church with the mockery of the disciple of Voltaire, though 
 to him reUgion seemed indispensable to keep the stupid masses 
 in order. The " ideology " of free science appeared to him a 
 disagreeable riddle, half ludicrous, half alarming, and thus it 
 was that, as a genuine Rhenish Confederate professional soldier, 
 he never learned to understand the free spirit of the Prussian 
 army. Finally, his love of the arts, like the patronage of 
 many other of the petty princes, never transcended that stage 
 of culture which finds its ideal solely in nude female figures. 
 Such a man, too restless for the quiet life of a petty state, 
 and yet too egotistical to understand the vanity of sove- 
 reignty without power, could serve merely to tie a few addi- 
 tional knots in the tangled skein of German federal policy. 
 At heart he was as utterly estranged from the genial profundity 
 of the Swabian folk nature as had been King Frederick himself. 
 The jubilation of the first weeks was speedily dissipated. During 
 a long reign the king, despite his indisputable services to the 
 country, was never really loved by the maisses ; no one's heart 
 could go out to him, and people soon learned to dread the 
 most detestable trait of his character, his inability to forgive. 
 
 The new reign began with valuable reforms. The insane 
 pomp and the hunting scandals of the court were done away 
 with ; a number of the taxes were reduced ; many prisoners 
 were pardoned ; some of the favourites of the deceased prince 
 were quietly banished. During the famine and the subsequent 
 months, the queen devoted her virile energies to womanly 
 occupations. Faithful to her own saying, " a woman's highest 
 function in society is to help," she covered the country with 
 a network of women's societies, savings-banks, useful institu- 
 tions of aU kinds, and in this work of love displayed so great 
 a spirit that, shortly afterwards, her premature death was 
 deplored throughout Swabia as a misfortune to the country. 
 Even Uhland, the despiser of courts, laid a sweet-smeUing 
 garland upon the coffin of the mother of the people, and 
 Kemer's lament ran : 
 
 " All too soon by God selected, 
 A saint in heaven, lost to earth." 
 619 
 
History of Germany 
 
 The princess's grave was upon the height where the ancestral 
 castle of the princely house had formerly stood, and the Wiirtem- 
 bergers visited the chapel on the Rothenberg with similar 
 sentiments to those which inspired the Prussians in their pilgrim- 
 ages to the temple at Charlottenburg. 
 
 The king met the Landtag in a conciliatory spirit. All 
 the secret designs of his ambition rested in the first instance 
 upon the hope that the nation would regard him as the most 
 liberal-minded of all the German princes. Even though repre- 
 sentative forms of government were a nuisance, he felt himself 
 to be strong enough to keep these scriveners in check and 
 in the end to impose his own will, even as a constitutional 
 prince. Consequently he retained Wangenheim at the head of 
 affairs, although these two fundamentally divergent natures 
 had in fact only one point in common, their dreams of the 
 trias policy ; and the minister soon observed that the king 
 treated him with concealed hostility, nor always quite honour- 
 ably.^ With the aid of the proposal of the estates, a new 
 constitutional plan was immediately worked out — ^the third, 
 already, in this unending dispute — and submitted to the Landtag 
 on March 3, 1817. The son's offers went a great deal further 
 than the last proposals of the father. Nevertheless the obsti- 
 nate dispute about the old differences flamed up anew, concerning 
 the unicameral system, the tax-treasury, and the question of 
 permanent committees, and once again the mob of Stuttgart 
 displayed in noisy assemblies its advocacy of the old-established 
 rights. 
 
 When these disputes had endured for another three months 
 the king could no longer control his soldier's roughness. Behind 
 the minister's back, he consulted with his friend the baron von 
 Maucler, the leader of the domestic bureaucracy, and laid 
 before the estates an ultimatum which was to be accepted 
 within a week, and one which was, in fact, acceptable. New 
 and fierce anger was displayed at the peremptory measure. On 
 June 2nd the Landtag rejected this last offer, the majority 
 consisting of the Old Wiirtembergers, the greater part of the 
 nobles, and a small clerical party. Whilst almost all moderate 
 poHticians outside the country were now upon the king's side, 
 the embitterment of the majority in the Landtag', had increased 
 from day to day. The Old Wiirtembergers actually claimed the 
 itio in partes, that they might be enabled to retain their old 
 
 ' Wangenheim to|_Hartmann, Febniary 3, 1832. 
 620 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 peculiar privileges even against the will of the new portions of 
 the country. When the vote was taken, Baron von Varnbuler 
 bluntly declared that he would rather see the people remain 
 under the present government without a constitution, than 
 renounce, for all time, the claim to the ancient consti- 
 tution. The court could not get the better of him ; when asked 
 to return the chamberlain's golden key, he sent the precious 
 article through the post, after writing on the cover " sample 
 without value." The Landtag was dissolved amid all the signs 
 of royal disfavour, and the members were even forbidden resi- 
 dence in the capital. An attempt to carry the royal proposal 
 into effect by means of a referendum was a complete failure, 
 and hereupon the monarch declared that he would now await 
 the determiaations of the Bundestag regarding the rights of 
 the German provincial diets, and would meanwhile introduce 
 into operation all the other promises contained in his proposal. 
 For two years longer the king continued to rule as an 
 absolute sovereign, and in rapid succession gave the country 
 a number of beneficial laws which the two " reform ministers," 
 Wangenheim and Kemer (the poet's brother) had long before 
 prepared. Serfdom was at length completely abolished, and a 
 portion (although no more than a portion) of the land taxes 
 was declared to be redeemable, emigration was permitted, the 
 hitherto completely dependent communes received the ancient 
 institution of communal councils in an improved form, and four 
 circle governments replaced the baiUffs. The cathoUc theological 
 faculty of EUwangen was removed to Tiibingen, so that the 
 rigidly Lutheran ancient university now entered the ranks of 
 the universities in which parity of belief prevailed. In order 
 to educate officials who might usefully fill the administrative 
 positions hitherto monopoUsed by the scriveners, there now also 
 came into existence the somewhat unsuccessful institution of a 
 special faculty for political science. Since, during the years 
 of the famine, throughout the fruitful land agriculture was 
 almost everywhere in an extremely defective condition, and 
 since the petty peasantry, working almost entirely without 
 capital, largely fell under the dominion of Jewish usurers, the 
 king, with his keen sense of business, undertook vigorous action. 
 He founded a great agricultural union for the instruction and 
 assistance of the landowners, established stud farms and agri- 
 cultural model farms upon his own private estates, founded an 
 agricultural college in Hohenstein which, under the leadership 
 
 621 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of the vigorous Rhinelander Schwerz, soon rivalled that of 
 Moglin. It was to the king's personal activities that the 
 reawakening of a new spirit of enterprise among Swabian 
 agriculturists was due ; year by year the peasants thronged to 
 the cheerful agricultural festival which was held in Cannstatt 
 from 1818 onwards, and brought their staUions and bulls to 
 compete for the royal prizes. 
 
 Meanwhile the political sentiments of the country continued 
 for a long period to remain so greatly incensed that even 
 Wangenheim, as late as the spring of 1818, issued an urgent 
 warning against the summoning of a new Landtag.* Gradually, 
 however, a more peaceful mood was restored. More especially 
 the New Wiirtembergers began to repent the obstinacy of the 
 estates, and Friedrich List, " the friend of the people," an 
 ardent advocate of the new ideals of popular representation, 
 self-government, and the public administration of justice, found 
 increasing support among the younger men. But, on his side, 
 the king repented his vain offers ; he had learned that the 
 reputation of the most liberal-minded of the German princes 
 was, after all, not to be acquired with so much ease, and now, 
 profoundly disillusioned, he had returned to the thoughts of 
 bureaucratic absolutism which corresponded with his own 
 natural inclinations. Taking action once more behind the backs 
 of his councillors, the monarch summoned to his cabinet 
 Malchus, the finance minister of King Jerome. Wangenheim 
 and Kerner speedily recognised that they could not come to any 
 understanding with this representative of the prefectoral system, 
 and they resigned in November, 1817. 
 
 Henceforward the court of Stuttgart began to deceive and 
 confuse public opinion by a detestable double game. Whilst 
 the nomination of Wangenheim as envoy to the Bundestag 
 seemed to guarantee the unalterable liberal sentiments of the 
 king, the Wiirtemberg diplomats were secretly working for the 
 enactment of a federal law which should especially limit the 
 rights of the German Landtags, and should facilitate for the 
 crowns the rescinding of their promises.* Still more disastrous 
 was the effect of the fruitless Swabian constitutional struggle 
 upon the sentiments of the other courts. Loud was the rejoic- 
 ing of all the reactionaries at the excess of stormy passions 
 displayed in these negotiations. Now, they said, it was proved 
 
 ' Wangenheim to Hartmann, April i, 1818. 
 * See above, page 428 et seq. 
 
 622 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 that it was impossible to rule in Germany with a Landtag ; 
 a manifesto to the army had on one occasion even been planned 
 by the advocates of the old rights ! For a long time to come 
 the Swabian estates remained an awful example to every 
 German prince who was reminded of article 13 of the federal 
 act, and Mettemich wrote to Steigentesch in St. Petersburg : 
 " Wiirtemberg, with its imprudent dissensions with the Landtag, 
 has been of more use to the cause of the revolutionaries than 
 even the Tugendbund itself." 
 
 § 2. BAVARIA. 
 
 More quickly than Wiirtemberg, but not without serious 
 struggles, did Bavaria secure its constitution. Just as in 
 Wiirtemberg the crown had been hampered by the defiant 
 spirit of the old estates, so in Bavaria the crown was hampered 
 by the schemes of the Roman see. Favouring fortune has 
 decreed that the crassest contrasts of our national Ufe invarably 
 display themselves in closely allied stocks. It is for this reason 
 alone that the particularist spirit of the German tribes has been 
 unable utterly to destroy the bond of national unity, because 
 centrifugal forces are always counteracted by neighbourly 
 jealousy. As in the north, Westphalians and Rhinelanders, 
 Pomeranians and Old Prussians, Markers and Upper Saxons, 
 sharply distinguished from one another by tribal peculiarities 
 and by history, lived in close contiguity, so in the south lived 
 the Bavarians and the Swabians. Whilst Swabia, which had 
 long lost all political greatness, maintained its place in the 
 national life solely through its richness in men of distinction, 
 Bavaria was the oldest of all the German states, the only 
 one which preserved, not only its ancient territorial inheritance, 
 but also its ancient power, and its honourable tribal name, 
 and was consequently the home at once of a political and 
 of a social particularism whose luxuriant energy manifests, even 
 to-day, that the dismemberment of the four great tribal duchies 
 was the salvation of our ancient realm. The Bavarian stock 
 once gave the nation a Wolfram von Eschenbach and an Aven- 
 tinus ; it was the counter-reformation which thrust the country 
 back into intellectual dulness. But it had never been rich in 
 brilliant personalities, owing its historical significance chiefly 
 to the political power of its tolerably well-rounded domain, 
 and to the warlike virtue of a vigorous branch of the human 
 
 623 
 
History of Germany 
 
 race, whose close relationship with the ancient eastern Teutonic 
 world-conquerors was unmistakable. From Bavaria, Louis 
 the German and his Carlovingian successors ruled the German 
 realm ; and under the Saxons, the Salian Franks, and the Hohen- 
 staufen, Bavaria on several occasions maintained a predominant 
 position in the empire, until ultimately Emperor Louis the 
 Bavarian made his country the strongest of all the German 
 territorial powers. 
 
 But that disastrous destiny which invariably arrested 
 German state-construction at a stage of half completion, 
 exercised its sinister influence also over Bavarian history. After 
 Tyrol had passed to the Hapsburgs (1363), Bavaria relapsed 
 to the position of an inland power. The Austrian march, 
 which had first been colonised from Bavaria, henceforward 
 championed the struggle against the south-eastern neighbour 
 peoples, a struggle which had previously been led by 
 Bavaria, and outsoared the motherland to such an extent, 
 that the two countries (whose stocks were so closely akin) soon 
 came to occupy a similar relationship each to the other as did 
 Electoral Saxony and Brandenburg — on the one hand the 
 older, more distinguished power, whose development had been 
 arrested, and on the other the ambitious and fortunate upstart. 
 The domestic disputes which were the original sin of the Wittels- 
 bachs, and repeated partitions, weakened the power of the 
 princely race. Cut off from the lands of the Palatine cousins, 
 Bavaria no longer possessed adequate economic forces, inasmuch 
 as the wealth of the lower Bavarian plateau was outweighed by 
 the poverty of the mountain districts and of the stony foothills 
 of the Alps. 
 
 Nevertheless the house of Bavaria once again gave a 
 decisive turn to German destiny. The Wittelsbachs were the 
 first to repudiate the common cause of the nation, and, con^ 
 trary to the decisions of the empire, they expelled the Pro- 
 testant doctrine from the Bavarian land in those first hopeful 
 years of the epoch of the Reformation, when the peaceful 
 diffusion of the new doctrine throughout Germany still seemed 
 possible ; it was they who in addition to the Hapsbvirgs, were 
 responsible for the partial defeat of the Reformation in Germany. 
 The Falkenturm in Munich, where the first Protestant martyrs 
 suffered, was the cradle of the German counter-reformation, and 
 as late as the year 1800 the pope spoke with esteem of " the 
 ancient renown " of the country which, unhke any other in the 
 
 624 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 world, had ever remained free from heresy. Subsequently the 
 greatest son of the Bavarian house, the powerful Maximilian I, 
 devoted his rare gifts of statecraft to inflicting upon his father- 
 land the miseries o. a war of rehgions. He founded the 
 Cathohc League ; he persecuted, yet more relentlessly than 
 the emperor himself, his Protestant cousins of the Palatinate, 
 and even after the peace of Westphalia, in defiance of the 
 law of the empire, he forcibly restored the Catholic faith in 
 the Upper Palatinate, the fruit of his victory ; no heretic was 
 allowed to live in this land of reUgious unity, and residence 
 in Protestant domains was forbidden to every Bavarian subject. 
 The aUiance of the princely house with the Roman see was 
 all the more firmly established because the duchy possessed 
 no bishop of its own, and the rulers of the country required 
 the assistance of the pope to guard themselves against the 
 masterful claims of the seven neighbouring bishops, who were 
 immediates of the empire. This rigidly Cathohc poUcy advan- 
 taged the glory of the court, acquiring for it the dignity of 
 an electoral princedom, and provided for the younger sons of 
 the house valuable positions in the great ecclesiastical founda- 
 tions of the empire, so that Electoral Cologne was for nearly 
 two centuries ruled by Bavarian princes, while three, and at 
 times four, electoral votes were in the hands of the Wittels- 
 bachs. But after the death of the great MaximiUan, the 
 dynasty was no longer able to attain to a firm attitude of 
 independent power. Threatened by the lust of conquest of 
 the Austrian neighbour, it again and again formed a sinister 
 alliance with the court of Versailles, so that in Munich, as in 
 Cologne, the French envoy had a decisive voice. 
 
 Meanwhile the Old Bavarian people sank into the spiritual 
 slumber of an easy-going particularist life. Whilst Franconians 
 and Alemans everywhere got on well together, the most conser- 
 vative of all the High German stocks was inwardly more akin 
 to the stohd Lower Saxon populace than to its highland neigh- 
 bours. It was only the most northerly off-shoots of the 
 Bavarian stock which had mingled to some extent with the 
 Franconians. From the Austrians, to whom they were so closely 
 akin, the Bavarians were separated by ancient political hatred ; 
 whilst towards Swabia the Lech had long constituted a strong 
 natural frontier, which almost completely prevented neighbourly 
 intercourse. When compared with the well nigh incredible vanety 
 of Swabian life, the life of Old Bavaria seemed that of a 
 
 62s 2S 
 
History of Germany 
 
 circumscribed mass, and only in the Upper Palatinate were 
 trifling differences of dialect noticeable. No doubt the wealthy 
 wheat-barons of Lower Bavaria displayed their peasant 
 pride, their primitive energies, far more unrestrainedly than 
 did the more mobile-minded, song-loving yagers of the Alps, 
 or the straightforward foresters of the poor Bavarian forests ; 
 yet in essentials all Bavarians were chips of the same block. 
 Ever5rwhere were manifest the same lineaments of vigorous 
 courage, inexhaustible joy of life, and good-natured cunning ; 
 everywhere the same naive pride of blood, which in case of 
 need continued to speak of " Germany " as an accessory 
 country ; ever37where there was the same invincible dynastic 
 loyalty. Whilst Swabia sent forth to the world a long series 
 of renowned princely races, the Zahringens, the Hohenstaufens, 
 and the HohenzoUerns, in Bavaria one single race soon came 
 to dominate all the other dynasties. The extremely ancient 
 house of the Schyrens had already in Carlovingian days several 
 times worn the ducal hat, and had now for more than seven 
 hundred years uninterruptedly maintained its territorial suze- 
 rainty. Bavarian blood had been poured out in streams for 
 the ancient blue-and-white lozenge escutcheon. On days of 
 festival, the country's flag fluttered even above the dug-outs 
 which, as coarsely constructed still as in the days of the lake- 
 dwellers, continued to navigate the quiet Alpine waters of the 
 Chiem-See and the Walchen-See. 
 
 Urban life had never regained vigorous development since 
 Ratisbon, the ancient capital, had been severed from the 
 country. Even Munich, with its magnificent churches and 
 castles, with its seventeen monasteries and seventeen miraculous 
 images, continued to exhibit, in the middle of the eighteenth 
 century, as far as civic culture and industrial Hfe were concerned, 
 very Uttle pre-eminence over the wonder-working town of Deggen- 
 dorf and the other country towns which served the peasantry for 
 com markets and places of pilgrimage. The strength of 
 Bavaria lay in the peasants, and in a few renowned noble 
 houses ; but for the countryfolk the church remained the centre 
 of life, and the priests, themselves drawn from the peasantry, 
 were all-powerful advisers in temporal and spiritual needs. The 
 ecclesiastical year, with its endless series of feast-days, dictated 
 all the activities of the peasant household. In the adornment 
 of the chvirches and in the briUiancy of the processions, it was 
 possible to see how much vigorous sense of colour and form 
 
 626 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 was retained beneath a rough exterior. With breathless atten- 
 tion, the congregation watched at Pentecost until the Holy Ghost 
 should descend through an aperture in the ro©f of the church ; with 
 iron endurance, on the Friday after Ascension Day they remained 
 at prayer for hours hoping to avert hail-storms from their fields ; 
 the customary unending revels were associated with every feast 
 of the church. Nowhere in the world, so ran the Bavarian 
 proverb, was religion so agreeable, and devotion so joyous. 
 
 Under the last of the Bavarian Wittelsbachs, MaximiUan 
 III, a ray of Ught came first to penetrate this dense obscurity. 
 Ickstatt, the Rhinelander, aided by a few other courageous disciples 
 of the new enUghtenment, initiated a reform of the educational 
 system, and succeeded in securing that non-CathoUc books should 
 be admitted to use in the temporal faculties of the Jesuit 
 university at Ingolstadt. Under the auspices of this freer 
 temporal culture there grew up many of the men who, a 
 generation later, effected the reconstitution of the petrified state. 
 One of these was the talented humorist, Anton Bucher, who, 
 himself a priest, chastised with vmpolished popiilar wit the rude 
 superstitions of his feUow-countrymen. But just as, in the 
 Romance lands, the rule of the Jesuits, by a natural 
 reaction, everywhere favoured frivolous unbeHef, so also in Bavaria, 
 as soon as the clerical regime was shaken, there awakened 
 that fanatical hatred of the church which is characteristic of 
 immature free thought. The new secret society of the Illumi- 
 nati, founded after the example of the Society of Jesus, fought 
 against the " obscurantists " of the Church no less intolerantly 
 and no less unscrupulously than the Jesuits had fought against 
 heresy, and, notwithstanding severe prohibitions, secured numerous 
 adherents from among the upper classes. The reforms of 
 Maximihan III were arrested as soon as Charles Theodore, 
 Elector of the Bavarian Palatinate, ascended the throne. The 
 clergy regained its power, and shameless nepotism prevailed 
 throughout the administration ; the officialdom of the Bavarian 
 Palatinate even included a " Mademoiselle Frontier-Chief- 
 Customhouse-Official " and a " Madame Chief-Forester." When the 
 body of Charles Theodore was carried through the streets, the 
 populace threw stones after the coffin because the Palatiner, whom 
 the Bavarians had continued to regard as a foreigner, had desired 
 to seU the country to Austria. The detestation of this miser- 
 able regime and the secret influence of the Illuminati prepared 
 the way for the doctrines of the Revolution. After Moreau's 
 
 637 
 
History of Germany 
 
 entry, there came into existence in Munich a literature 
 whose Jacobin coarseness exceeded even that characteristic of 
 the contemporary writings of the discontented Swabians ; 
 savage poems announced " war and eternal struggle against all 
 the hypocritical canaille." 
 
 In such a situation, whilst the masses were immersed in 
 a dull slumber and a portion of the cultured classes were 
 childishly playing with revolutionary ideas. Max Joseph of 
 Zweibriicken celebrated his entry, and with him entered the 
 new time. The new djniasty at length reunited the long- 
 severed lands of the house of Schyren, and cherished the 
 ambition to resume in its statecraft at once the traditions of 
 the Bavarian and those of the Palatine Wittelsbachs. A sound 
 policy, but one very difficult to carry out, for the Bavarian 
 memories related to Maximilian and the League, whilst the 
 memories of the Palatinate related to Otho Henry, the Reformer, 
 and to Charles Gustavus, king of Sweden. 
 
 By means of the territorial donations of Napoleon an 
 entirely new social energy was introduced into the Bavarian 
 state, a brilliant circle of beautiful and celebrated towns became 
 associated with the Old Bavarian peasant lands. It is true 
 that the majority of these proud communes seemed to be 
 nothing more than picturesque ruins of ancient glories. The 
 change in the routes of world commerce had ruined the markets 
 of Lindau and Passau ; nor in the case of the ancient Ratis- 
 bon could isolated great businesses, such as the arms factory of 
 Kuchenreuter, restore the lost commerce. The grey turreted 
 walls of Nordlingen now surrounded a quiet country town, to 
 which the peasant from the Ries district came to market ; 
 the urban industry of Bamberg was of little significance 
 when compared with the labours of the market gardeners out- 
 side the gates. Rothenburg, with its magnificent churches and 
 council-houses, lay like a town of the dead on the height above 
 the Taubergrund valley. Even Nuremberg was heavily burdened 
 with debt, and in a condition of petrification under the nepotist 
 rule of the nineteen " privileged " families of the small council. 
 In Augsburg alone, thanks to the inexhaustible water-power of 
 the Lech, had an anciently celebrated weaving industry revived 
 to some extent since the middle of the eighteenth century. 
 The Bavarian government could not understand that the way 
 to reanimate this slumbering bourgeoisie was by the liberation 
 of industry. Whilst Munich, overwhelmed with royal favour, 
 
 62& 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 continued to grow, almost all the other Bavarian towns 
 remained, as late as the middle of the thirties, in a condition 
 of arrest and debility, so that the more active energies of the 
 North German communes gained an enormous start. 
 
 No less slowly did the old hostility between the Bavarians, 
 the Swabians, and the Franconians, disappear. Not one of 
 the three High German stocks was sufficiently numerous in the 
 new kingdom to dominate the others, whilst in the artificially 
 constructed state it was difficult for a sense of political com- 
 munity to come into existence. Since the severance of Salz- 
 burg and TjTol, only half of the population had consisted of 
 Bavarians. Altogether hostile towards the Bavarian masters, 
 with their well-established religious unity, was eastern Swabia, 
 a classical area of German religious dissension. In this region, 
 the caps worn by the girls and the methods of agriculture 
 were already sufficient to acquaint the traveller with the 
 religious belief of the district. Here lived the peasants of the 
 domain of the Fuggers and of the chapter-lands of Kemp ten 
 and Kaufbeuren, a strictly Catholic population which even as 
 late as the year 1809 was on the verge of making common 
 cause with the T5n:olese in their fight for the religion. Close 
 at hand were Memmingen, a town which had suffered for its 
 Protestantism, and Augsburg, where parity of behef prevailed, 
 and which for centuries past had been visited by ecclesiastical 
 dissensions, where even the position of town-lieutenant and 
 the coffee-house privileges were conscientiously shared between 
 the two faiths. The reputation for tolerance of the house of 
 Zweibriicken was indeed so well established that in Augsburg 
 the Protestants passed under the sceptre of the Wittelsbachs 
 more readily than did the Catholics, yet it was long before 
 the highly-cultured patricians of the proud Swabian towns 
 became accustomed to Bavarian ways. 
 
 Yet more vigorous was the resistance in Protestant 
 Franconia, the most valuable acquisition of the young kingdom. 
 Long ago, indeed, the Nurembergers had ceased to hope for 
 the re-establishment of their ancient liberties ; the political 
 vigour of the venerable community had become extinct, and 
 as early as the year 1796, the bourgeoisie had on one occasion, 
 by a great majority, voted to accept subordination to the crown 
 of Prussia. But here from the time of Gustavus Adolphus 
 the Bavarians had been regarded as enemies ; how often, indeed, 
 had the waggish humour of the imperial townsmen, which was 
 
 629 
 
History of Germany 
 
 now again finding clear expression in the dialect poems of 
 Conrad Griibel, led them to make merry at the expense of 
 these bad neighbours. The town suspiciously maintained its 
 ancient Protestant traditions ; since its university of Altdorf 
 had been closed by the new sovereign, at least the Nuremberger 
 gymnasitmi should faithfully maintain the spirit of its founder 
 Melanchthon, and, like the neighbouring Brandenburg university 
 of Erlangen, should remain the nursery of Protestant culture 
 in the new state with its parity of religious beliefs. This 
 vigorous Uttle university had continued to keep pace with the 
 literary movement of the north, and even amid the clash of 
 French arms had never renounced its loyal German sentiments. 
 The whole of Brandenburg Franconia continued to look back 
 with longing upon the brief happiness of the Prussian regime. 
 In Ansbach the Bavarian rule could not become firmly 
 estabHshed until Bayreuth had also been united with Bavaria ; 
 and even then the loyal populace would not wiUingly abandon 
 hope of reunion. When Frederick William at length summoned 
 his Prussians to the colours, the Franconians of the Fichtel- 
 gebirge prepared for battle, and it was only the ill-fortune of 
 the war which prevented them from rising. 
 
 The Catholic neighbours in the wealthy Franconian episcopal 
 lands had no such cherished memories to overcome ; the Wiirz- 
 burgers greeted with delight the departure of their grand duke 
 Ferdinand of Tuscany, who had always neglected his German 
 territory as an insecure possession. But even here the Bavarian 
 rule was accepted with disfavour. Delighting in his vineyards, 
 enlightened and witty, the Franconian of the Main, from the 
 jovial grace of his half-Rhenish life, looked down contemptuously 
 upon the rough existence of the Bavarians ; the members of 
 the imperial knighthood felt degraded by the change, for if 
 they had to obey anyone it should have been a Hapsburg. 
 The prudent lenity of General-commissary Lerchenfeld served, 
 however, to allay the disaffection. The court knew that the 
 priceless T5^ol, this Old Bavarian territory, whose whole 
 intercourse was with Bavaria, had been lost solely through the 
 headstrong roughness of its officials, and now therefore acted 
 with extreme caution in the occupation of the new territories. 
 
 Most circumspectly of all did Bavaria proceed in the yoimgest 
 of its provinces, the trans-Rhenish Palatinate, for here it had 
 to encounter a profound hostility which endured even longer 
 than the disinclination of the Rhinelanders towards the Old 
 
 630 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 Prussians. Since those distant days when the SaUan Franks 
 had held court at Limburg, and the Hohenstaufen at 
 Trifels, in this imperilled march no vigorous state authority 
 had ever been re-established. Spires and Worms, Sickingeuj'and 
 Leiningen, Nassau, Baden, Hesse, and Wittelsbach, existed 
 here side by side, all of them animated by that friendly and 
 neighbourly sentiment which found expression in the names 
 of the frontier towers, " Live and let live ! " and " Give 
 me my peace ! " The sport of two hostile nations, this 
 able and indefatigably industrious people had endured with 
 astonishing vital energy the misfortunes of petty princely des- 
 potism, repeated religious persecutions, and horrible devastation, 
 and had only reacquired a secure civic order under the prefects 
 of the empire. Nowhere on German soil did the Revolution 
 plough deeper furrows. Everything which in their history pre- 
 ceded the days of the French regime was regarded by the 
 Palatiners as mediaeval, and even those portions of the country 
 which had formerly belonged to the Wittelsbachs hardly gave 
 a thought any longer to their ancient princely house. The 
 nobility had disappeared ; the ancient subdivision of the estates 
 had been completely destroyed ; even the new race of rich 
 men, the wine-barons, who during the sale of the national goods 
 had secured possession of the favoured wine-lands of the Hardt, 
 had to adapt themselves to the bourgeois customs of this 
 thoroughly modem region. 
 
 The French principles of social equality and free economic 
 competition had become part of the very flesh and blood of 
 the Palatiners. In the Httle towns on the Hardt a speculative 
 petty agriculture flourished, utiUsing every comer of land and 
 finding free divisibility of the soil absolutely indispensable. 
 The shrewd Palatine peasant wore the townsman's doublet, and 
 boasted that for him even the ox must bear calves. All the 
 creeds were intimately intermingled, and all of them were 
 characterised by an aroma of Calvinistic sobriety and tolerant 
 enlightenment ; after so many changes of faith, people had at 
 length learned the art of mutual accommodation. When the 
 storms of the nineties had blown over, the Palatinate had little 
 experience of the terrors of the epoch of war. The industrious 
 inhabitants knew very well how to draw their profit from the 
 great French market ; never again did innkeepers and post- 
 masters see such fat times as these, when all the potentates 
 of the world passed through the country, year after year, on 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the journey to or from Paris. Well did the court of Munich 
 know how unwillingly the Palatinate underwent detachment 
 from France, and since the ruler of Bavaria continued for a 
 long time to hope to exchange this remote province for the 
 Palatinate on the right bank of the Rhine, the new governor 
 Zwackh left almost all the institutions of the country 
 temporarily undisturbed. Even when this hope had at length 
 to be abandoned, the government was too timid and too poor 
 in creative energy to make any important changes. Not only 
 did the province retain the code Napoleon, but also the entire 
 French system of administration ; every notice-board on the 
 high-roads reminded wagoners of the law concerning the 
 voienes publiques. What had Old Bavaria to offer this country ? 
 When compared with the purely bureaucratic and yet cumbrous 
 administration of the old provinces, the vigorous order of the 
 prefectoral system could not but seem eminently desirable. 
 
 Thus it was that a Franco-German distinctive hfe continued 
 to flourish undisturbed in a country where every ruined fortress 
 served to remind the beholder of the misdeeds of the French. 
 Particularist enthusiasm for the foreign laws here displayed itself 
 even more vigorously than in Prussian Rhineland. Everything 
 French was regarded as inviolable, because it was Palatine, and 
 it was honoured as a treasure of peculiarly native origin. It 
 was regarded as a visitation of nature that the French fury 
 had not left a single one undestroyed from among the ancient 
 churches and imperial palaces of the country ; no one 
 ventured to remove the red Jacobin cap from the church tower 
 of Landau ; on the walls of the frontier fortress the emblems 
 were still flaunted which the French had once brought there 
 for the humiliation of Germany — over the French gate was 
 the smihng, and over the German gate the frowning, sun of 
 the great Louis. The inhabitants gave httle thanks to the 
 Old Bavarians for their lenity. The endowments, the history, 
 and the culture of the two stocks were too widely divergent. 
 The enUghtened Palatiner spoke with boundless contempt of 
 the thickness of these Bavarian heads, although his own country 
 took but little part in the hterary activity of the nation. Since 
 the severance of Heidelberg and Mannheim, the intellectual life 
 of the trans-Rhenish Palatinate had fallen to an incredibly low 
 level, and the rich talents of the highly-gifted people were 
 shown almost exclusively in business affairs. When two quarrel- 
 some Palatiners exchanged home truths after the frank manner 
 
 632 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 of the country, the colloquy invariably terminated with the most 
 offensive term of abuse known to both, each calling the other 
 an Old Bavarian ! With infinitesimal exceptions, all the 
 Palatiners despised state service in the old provinces. It was 
 with profound disaffection that the thoroughly unmiUtary people 
 saw their sons " sent to Bavaria to fulfil the obligation of 
 military service." In so unnatural a situation, continually 
 excited by the party struggles in neighbouring France, half 
 independent and yet half chained to an unloved and ineffi- 
 cient German government, the country gradually became 
 dominated by a loquacious, unpatriotic, and revolutionary spirit, 
 whose aim it was to get rid throughout Germany of all historical 
 traditions as " radically " as in the unhappy Palatinate this 
 had been effected by the glorious Revolution. 
 
 It was fortunate that not one of these numerous centri- 
 fugal tendencies was by itself sufficiently strong to disintegrate 
 the Bavarian state and that not one of them would combine 
 with any of the others. It was fortunate also that the good- 
 natured king so speedily learned how to acquire the personal 
 regard of his subjects. Max Joseph had spent the best days 
 of his youth at Strasburg as an officer in the French service, 
 in a position which was well suited to his capacities, and his 
 fondness for France persisted throughout life, although the 
 Revolution drove him from Alsace. Soon after ascending 
 the Bavarian throne, he begged Alquier the French charge 
 d'affaires, to regard him as a Frenchman, saying, " When- 
 ever I hear of the successes of the armies of the 
 Repubhc, I rejoice to know that I am a Frenchman." ^ The 
 Rhenish Confederate policy corresponded not merely to his 
 dynastic interests, but also to his personal incUnations, and 
 it was unwilHrigly that he abandoned it, although his heart 
 had long been lacerated by all the sacrifices which the Pro- 
 tector demanded from Bavaria. The question whether he 
 did not also possess poUtical duties towards Germany never 
 entered his head ; the uprising of 1813 was a riddle to him, 
 and he lent a willing ear to the accusations levelled against 
 the " Prussian Jacobins." None the less, Hke many other 
 prmces of the Confederation of the Rhine, he remained, after 
 his manner, a German father of his country, honourably 
 desirous of making his people happy and of living at peace 
 
 1 Alquier's Report to Talleyrand, Munich, 6 Ventose, VII communicated to 
 me by Dr. P. Bailleu. 
 
 633 
 
History of Germany 
 
 with them. Wherever he appeared his friendly good-nature won 
 the hearts of the masses. Even in Berg, which belonged to him 
 for a few years only, his memory was held in great affection. 
 In Old Bavaria he was immediately received with exuberant 
 delight as the saviour of the country, and this filled him 
 with rejoicing. He found himself at home among the agree- 
 able customs of the country, which harmonised well with his 
 own rough naturalness ; he wore great earrings Uke a genuine 
 Bavarian, and loved the vigorous men of the high mountains 
 hke his own children, not excepting the Tyrolese rebels. It 
 was long before he could forgive the French for having shot 
 his beloved Andreas Hofer. During the later years of his 
 life he usually spent the summer by the Tegemsee, in the 
 old abbey by the quiet waters of the forest lake, where every- 
 thing beloved of an old Bavarian heart was to be found under 
 a single roof — a royal palace, a church, and a brewery. For 
 miles round, as far as the lonely mountain torrent of Kreuth, 
 there was not a single farm which father Max with his 
 charming daughters had not visited once at least, standing 
 godfather perhaps to the children, or overwhelming the 
 inmates with benefits. 
 
 It would have been well if this inexhaustible benevolence 
 had not been associated with so much thoughtless weakness ! 
 The court was never empty of rogues and beggars, and the 
 whole of Munich was familiar with the king's fondness for 
 amiable prodigals ; a swarm of parasites, among whom was 
 even to be found a court jester, received stately allowances. 
 The financial needs of the crown were unending, and the court 
 banker, Sehgmann Eichthal, became continually richer, although 
 the king needed for himself little more than he had done many 
 years before when, as a refugee from Strasburg, he conducted 
 his bourgeois household to Rohrbach-on-the-Bergstrasse. 
 When this man of soft and emotional nature became a prey 
 to fear, he repudiated his virile pride and his princely dignity, 
 and was not ashamed to cringe and to lie. All his disgraces 
 of recent years, all the humiliations of the house of Wit- 
 telsbach, which contrasted so painfully with the boastful 
 arrogance of the new kingship, were the direct work of the 
 monarch. Bavaria's double-tongued pohcy on the outbreak 
 of the war of 1805 might be excused on the plea of urgent 
 necessity ; it became contemptible only when King Max 
 pledged his word of honour to Emperor Francis while uttering 
 
 634 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 a deliberate untruth. ^ His lively correspondence with the 
 Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine was dictated 
 by circumstances ; it became disgraceful only through the 
 servility of the king who, often without an answer being 
 vouchsafed, besieged the Imperator with servile letters, 
 attended on him personally far more often than was neces- 
 sary, even asked his orders regarding the marriage of the 
 royal princes, and gave to Napoleon's tools, the dukes of 
 Bassano and Cadore, any gratuities they liked to demand. At 
 a later date, when the dispute concerning the Badanese Palati- 
 nate began, the cowardly prince displayed the same unkingly 
 attitude towards Czar Alexander. 
 
 He devoted himself to governmental business with praise- 
 worthy zeal ; it was beheved that he was more often idle 
 than was actually the case, because he was so fond of spend- 
 ing his free hours in the streets. An ordered Ufe was ever 
 burdensome to him, and since he possessed no more than 
 the superficial cultxure of a French officer of the old school he 
 speedily became dependent upon the superior knowledge of 
 affairs of his ministers and of Ringel, the skilful secretary of 
 the cabinet. He understood very little even of military 
 affairs. In the evening of his fife he seldom put in an 
 appearance among his troops, and in times of peace he allowed 
 the warUke efiiciency of his army, which under Napoleon's 
 leadership had been so remarkable, to degenerate rapidly. 
 Henceforward this unwarUke attitude remained a heritage of 
 all the Bavarian kings, and was subsequently to be of 
 momentous importance to the state. Easily dependent upon 
 the impressions of the moment. Max Joseph none the less 
 held firmly to two political principles. As a born Palatiner 
 he was so profoundly convinced of the untenability of the 
 Old Bavarian conditions that, in case of need, he did not 
 shrink even from radical reforms; and he greatly detested 
 the greed for power displayed by the priesthood. Here was 
 his strength; when he protected the North German professors 
 in Munich against the bigoted fancies of the mob, he dis- 
 played a quite unwonted firmness. He knew what it signified 
 that his house now ruled 1,200,000 Protestant subjects, and 
 he wished these to feel that they belonged to a just state. 
 It was a matter of rejoicing to him to live in a mixed 
 marriage, and it remains his historical glory that he inculcated 
 
 I See Vol. I, p. 6. 
 635 
 
History of Germany 
 
 this spirit of tolerance upon his children and grandchildren. 
 In three generations since then, the country has known 
 Protestant queens only ; and notwithstanding repeated struggles 
 and relapses, the German idea of religious parity which the 
 good king Max imposed upon his reluctant people, has never 
 been surrendered by the Bavarian state. 
 
 Since the treaty of Ried, the position of the all-powerful 
 minister Montgelas had been somewhat shaken. The allied 
 monarchs regarded the leading statesman of the Confederation 
 of the Rhine with natural suspicion, and when he appeared 
 in Frankfort after the battle of Hanau, they received him 
 with such disfavour that subsequently he thought it inadvisable 
 to put in a personal appearance at the congress of Vienna. 
 But he continued to control the three most important offices 
 of the state, foreign affairs, home affairs, and finance, and 
 could securely rely upon his indispensability, for not without 
 reason did he bear a king's crown upon his count's escutcheon. 
 He was the creator of the new Bavarian state. Since the 
 days of the elector Maurice of Saxony, the policy of undis- 
 guised and logically pursued particularism had not found so 
 able and successful a representative upon German soil. 
 Although by birth he belonged to Old Bavaria, Montgelas 
 was numbered among those diplomatic mercenaries who so 
 frequently appear in the history of the German middle-sized 
 states, among those men without a home, who, void of all political 
 traditions, seek a sphere of activity wherever ambition may 
 offer them a free field. His friendship for the king, with 
 whom he had already become intimate in the Palatinate, 
 constituted the one emotional tie which chained him to his 
 homeland ; in general he regarded country and people with 
 contempt. It was a matter he could never forgive that in 
 youth, as a member of the order of lUuminati, he had been 
 forced to leave the superstitious land of Bavaria ; and even 
 in old age he judged cette nation bornee with the critical detach- 
 ment of the foreigner. But the caprice of fortune which led 
 him back to this unloved land, had offered to him a rich 
 field of activity. In the consciousness of his own strength, 
 he regarded himself as predestined to raise Bavaria to the 
 position of an independent European power. To him power 
 was an end in itself, and nothing was further from his mind 
 than the question how it might best be used for the advantage 
 of Germany. Anything that reminded him of the confra- 
 
 636 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 temity of the great fatherland seemed to him nothing more 
 than a tiresome obstacle to the independence of Bavaria. A 
 cold-blooded gamester, never disturbed by moral considera- 
 tions, and rarely influenced either by hatred or by love, he 
 freely calculated on the favour of the moment, and selected 
 his friends wherever he could find them. His faithful 
 advocate, Ritter Lang, when, in the year 1814, he defended 
 the minister against the passionate attacks of the friends of 
 Stein, described the most intimate secrets of this materialist 
 cunning in the following terms : " The only true maxim of 
 Bavarian poUcy is the self-preservation of the state ; which- 
 ever one of the other powers recognises this principle and 
 supports it with its own authority, is to be regarded as the 
 most genuinely friendly." 
 
 For this reason, Montgelas, notwithstanding his semi- 
 French blood and his wholly French culture, took up a firmer 
 attitude against the Protector of the Confederation of the 
 Rhine than did the king. It was not out of any affection 
 for France that in former days he had broken the old 
 alUance with Prussia, but because he recognised that the 
 Bavarian desire for aggrandisement could at the moment 
 expect no help from Prussian weakness, whilst it might expect 
 everything from the vigour of Bonapartism. He zealously 
 participated in Napoleon's wars against Austria and Prussia, 
 because the strength of Bavaria, in his view, was conditioned 
 by the weakness of the German great powers ; but he never 
 desired the destruction of these two states, for an all-powerful 
 France might also become a danger to the independence of 
 Bavaria. On two occasions, and this was to him a matter 
 of pride, he hindered the development of the Rhenish Con- 
 federate constitution ; and again and again he adjured his 
 royal friend not to endanger the liberties of the state by 
 a contemptible servihty towards the Protector. 
 
 To this cold calculator, the uprising of Germany was 
 unwelcome, since it cut him off from all hope of further 
 enlargements of territory, and it was only with hesitation 
 that he determined to abandon the sinking ship of Bona- 
 partism. For a time he continued to flatter himself with the 
 hope that Bavaria might be able within the great alHance 
 to constitute the nucleus of a South German league, and that 
 Wrede might be able to play the part of another Tilly. ^ When 
 
 1 Montgelas to Wrede, October 21, 1813. Heilmann, Furst Wrede, p. 268. 
 
 637 
 
History of Germany 
 
 this hope proved delusive, he next endeavoured to safeguard 
 the sovereignty of the Wittelsbachs against the dualistic 
 schemes of Hardenberg, and secretly fostered the mutual 
 hostility of the two great powers. It was upon this that 
 depended Bavaria's zeal for the restoration of the crown of 
 Saxony. At the time of the second peace congress of Paris, 
 Montgelas even found it difficult to conceal his malicious joy 
 from the Prussian envoy Kiister ; what a piece of good luck 
 it would be if the dispute about Alsace and Lorraine were 
 to prove a permanent cause of disunion between Prussia and 
 Austria.^ But this expectation also proved fallacious, and all 
 that was left open to him was to paralyse the activities of 
 the Germanic Federation, and carefully to protect the 
 Bavarian people from the dangerous doctrines of the North 
 German Jacobins. He speedily noted with satisfaction that 
 there was very little to dread from the powerlessness of the 
 Bundestag, but he relentlessly suppressed the handful of 
 patriots in Bavaria. Even one of the king's favourites, Anselm 
 Feuerbach, was described as an emissary of Prussia, and 
 was banished from the capital because, in his writing Concerning 
 German Freedom, he had hailed with delight the overthrow of the 
 foreign dominion, and had declared that the blood of so many 
 heroes must be paid for by the granting of a free represen- 
 tative system. The experienced minister was not deceived 
 as to the instability of the new condition of German affairs. 
 Even in advanced age, it remained his hope that in the next 
 European crisis, perhaps with the help of some foreign power, 
 the smallest German princes might be mediatised, Baden and 
 Wiirtemberg compensated in Italy, and the whole of the 
 south-west subjected to the house of Wittelsbach. Prussia 
 might continue to grow in the north as much as she pleased, 
 if only one thing could be hindered which to the Bavarian 
 statesman seemed the most terrible, the unity of Germany. 
 Till the great opportunity came all that could be done was 
 to bide his time. It was only for passing moments that 
 his cool intelligence was influenced by fantastic notions about 
 Bavarian superexcellence. Nothing seemed to him more 
 childish than the illusion that a union of the powerless could 
 ever constitute a power, and for this reason he laughingly 
 rejected all proposals for a separate league of the minor 
 German or mid-European states, such as was mooted in Stutt- 
 1 Kflster's Report, Munich. August 28, 1815, 
 638 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 gaxt. From the first, moreover, he opposed as hopeless the 
 Palatine plans of the crown prince. 
 
 They were a singular pair of friends, the easy-going, 
 slovenly, popular, and homely king, side by side with the 
 courtly figure of the adroit minister. The latter's appearance 
 recalled the old French style, with his powdered hair, his 
 embroidered red court dress, and long sUk stockings ; his 
 keen and yet shifty brown eyes, and great overhanging nose, 
 projecting above the large and satyr-Uke mouth — a coun- 
 tenance expressing in all its Uneaments a penetrating under- 
 standing. Montgelas and his wife were largely to blame for 
 the frivolous tone which prevailed in the fashionable world 
 of Munich ; his Httle mansion in Bogenhausen, close to 
 Enghscher Garten, offered inexhaustible material to scandal- 
 mongers. The old Illuminate could never feel any enthusiasm 
 for the performances of the new German literature and art. 
 Nevertheless he knew that science was indispensable to the 
 reform of the state, nor at his own table could he dispense with 
 the hvely conversation of briUiant men of learning. Through 
 his long tenure of power he became autocratically inclined, 
 but was devoid of petty vanity. When contrasted with the 
 false self-praise of Mettemich's memoirs, the restrained self- 
 satisfaction which speaks from the memoirs of Montgelas 
 produces an agreeable impression. 
 
 In all departments of public hfe the despotic dispenser 
 of popular happiness had effected a revolutionary transfor- 
 mation, but the new order still displayed everywhere gaps 
 and contradictions, and everywhere were manifest traces of 
 overhasty work. The most successful reform was that of 
 education. The elementary school had been withdrawn from 
 the rule of the Roman church, and universal compulsory 
 education, introduced in 1802, began slowly to make itself 
 at home. The institutions for secondary education were under 
 the control of Niethammer, a worthy advocate of a strictly 
 classical education. At the philological seminary of Munich, 
 Friedrich Thiersch, the Thuringian, in many years of faithful 
 work, educated a number of efficient teachers, so that the 
 influence of the ideaUstic spirit of this prceceptor BavaricB 
 gradually made its way into most of the gymnasia of the 
 country. To the universities of Landshut and Erlangen, was 
 now added that of Wiirzburg, with the wealthy princely 
 episcopal Juliushospital, an important nursery of the medical 
 
 639 
 
History of Germany 
 
 sciences. The lethargic slumber of the ancient days of unity 
 of belief had passed away for ever. 
 
 Far less complete was the transformation of the legal 
 system and of the administration. The jumble of old 
 territories was, indeed, compacted to form Napoleonic depart- 
 ments, and the officials, for whom reasonable service regula- 
 tions were drawn up, thus acquired a position as secure as 
 that of the Prussian officials ; but in the lower grades the 
 judiciary and the executive remained combined, and the 
 " worshipful country justices," the terror of the peasantry, 
 continued to exercise unrestricted authority in the country 
 districts Patrimonial jurisdiction still prevailed upon the 
 large landed properties, and it not infrequently happened that 
 the state ceded its own serfs to favoured nobles, in order to 
 enable the latter to constitute independent judicial areas. 
 The evangel of the bureaucracy, the criminal code of 1813, 
 was an honour to the legal perspicacity of its author, Feuer- 
 bach, but secrecy of procedure and excessive severity of 
 punishment fostered the spirit of overbearing severity which 
 distinguished this officialdom ; more especially the barbarous 
 means of compulsion which it was authorised to use against 
 accused who obstinately denied their offences, were frequently 
 employed by country justices with revolting roughness. There 
 was also a secret police trained after the Napoleonic model 
 to practise the arts of espionage and to intercept letters. The 
 pressure of the officials was all the more burdensome because 
 Montgelas had destroyed the independence of the communes 
 even more completely than had the First Consul. What 
 a contrast between the towns' ordinance of Stein and 
 the almost simultaneously promulgated Bavarian communes 
 law. In Bavaria, the municipalities were even deprived of 
 the right of administering their own property, and, in a word, 
 they could do nothing without the approval of the royal 
 police officers. Although the new tax laws turned out well, 
 confusion and defalcation prevailed in the financial adminis- 
 tration ; the minister himself worked hard, but with the 
 irregularity of the great lord. For the years 1812-17 there 
 was a deficit of 8,800,000 florins, and the real amount of the 
 high total of the state debt was known to no one. 
 
 For the masses of the people, however, all these diffi- 
 culties were more tolerable than were the utterly unfortunate 
 attempts of the minister in the direction of economic reform. 
 
 640 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 Here it first became manifest how far Montgelas' talents fell 
 behind the statesmanlike energies of Stein and Hardenberg. 
 As far as social hberty was concerned, hardly anything had 
 been gained by all the forcible innovations and pompous 
 promises of these fifteen years. Serfdom had been abolished, 
 but the laws regarding the remission of ground-rents and 
 tithes were full of lacunae, and were not carried into effect, 
 so that nine-tenths of the peasants still remained serfs tied 
 to the soil and forced to pay ground-rent. The old guild- 
 system, which had nowhere degenerated more hopelessly than 
 in Old Bavaria, was to be done away with by the introduc- 
 tion of a system of poUce licences for occupation; and, with 
 customary boastfulness, the legislator proclaimed that he would 
 restore to honour the ancient German proverb " skill is not 
 inherited." Now, as formerly, every guUd persecuted the 
 work of non-guildsmen ; the braidmakers and the lacemakers 
 continued to live in eternal conflict ; and anyone who had 
 the good fortune to marry into the strictly closed corporation 
 of the master chimney-sweeps of Munich, was absolved from 
 all earthly cares. The reform remained a patchwork, and 
 served merely to arouse the hostility of the handicraftsmen. 
 In the towns, the right of contracting marriage was subject to 
 the permission to undertake an independent occupation, and 
 since in the country districts the landowners were privileged 
 to forbid marriage at their pleasure, and since the indivisi- 
 bility of the peasant farms rendered provision for younger 
 sons a matter of difl&culty, the result was that this roughly 
 sensual (though by no means immoral) people became tragic- 
 ally distinguished among all the nations of Europe by the 
 rate of illegitimacy. In Lower Bavaria, nearly one-fourth of 
 all the chUdren were bom outside the bonds of wedlock. 
 In the Palatinate, on the other hand, the proportion of ille- 
 gitimate births was barely one-third of this, for here the 
 social liberty of French legislation prevailed, with the severe 
 but wholesome prohibition of afiiliation suits. 
 
 Montgelas believed himself securely installed in power for 
 the king's hfetime. The great majority of the officialdom 
 was permeated with the spirit of Napoleonic despotism, and 
 m the capital there were only two strong parties, both equally 
 un-German and both equally particularistic : on one side 
 the clericals who during the reign of Max Joseph could never 
 enter into power ; and on the other side the adherents of 
 
 641 3 T 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the Illuminate minister. The members of the little colony 
 of North German and Swabian professors who, almost alone 
 in Munich, still held firmly to the political ideals of the War 
 of Liberation, were without influence, and could not venture 
 to resist the minister openly, for at least he offered them a 
 certain support against the anti-foreign hatred of the fanatical 
 Old Bavarians. One of the best men of this circle, Jacobs, 
 the philologian, had already returned home to Thuringia. 
 Being a sensitive man, he could not endure being continually 
 looked down upon as a " northerner," as a beggar growing 
 fat in the Bavarian Canaan. Still greater was the discontent 
 in Franconia. Here the enthusiasm of the years of war 
 persisted for a long time, the communes were furious at the 
 loss of their independent administration, and an emotional 
 writing by Homthal of Bamberg, which alluded to article 13 
 of the federal act, secured lively approval. But even here 
 the opposition seemed devoid of danger. In Aretin's Ale- 
 mannia, the unrepentant Rhenish Confederates continued 
 confidently to sing the praises of the great minister, and to 
 utter savage invectives against Germanism, Borussianism, 
 and Anglomania. In Franconia, when the anniversary of the 
 battle of Leipzig was celebrated, these writers in Alemannia 
 related in their report that the festival had , closed with a 
 cattle show, and that the prize ox had been decorated with 
 the order of the iron cross. 
 
 In court circles, where French was still preferred, Bona- 
 partism had secured fresh supporters since Max Joseph's 
 son-in-law, Eugene Beauhamais, had held his court in Munich 
 as prince of the blood and duke of Leuchtenberg, and had collected 
 round him a group of discontented Frenchmen. The most 
 amiable of the Napoleonides soon won the heeirts of the bour- 
 geoisie, and worked vigorously in secret for the restoration 
 of the empire. His aide-de-camp. General Bataille, carried 
 on intercourse with the Bonapartists in Milan. ^ The chief 
 superintendent of police winked at what was going on, and 
 many of the postal officials were numbered among the con- 
 fidants of the Leuchtenberg palace. Subsequently Eugene's 
 sister, Hortense, the former queen of Holland, found asylum 
 with her two sons in Augsburg, pla5dng here with charming 
 grace the role of bourgeoisphile princess, and weaving even 
 more zealously than her brother the threads of Napoleonic 
 
 ^ Kuster's Reports, Munich, May 17, August 20, 1815, and subsequent dates. 
 
 642 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 conspiracy. Paying no attention to the urgent warnings of 
 the two German great powers, the king let his darling Eugene 
 do as he pleased. For many years Bavaria remained the 
 nidus of German Bonapartism. 
 
 Amid such conditions no one suffered more severely than 
 did the high-minded queen Caroline and her stepson, the 
 heir to the throne. In the year 1813 both had ably 
 co-operated in the fortunate turn in Munich pohcy, and now 
 saw with much anxiety that an honourable relationship to 
 the new Germanic Federation remained impossible so long as 
 the imtrustworthy Montgelas held the rudder of state. In 
 the emotional temperament of the crown prince, there was 
 an element of straightforward enthusiasm for Germany's great- 
 ness, strangely coupled with fantastical dreams of Bavarian 
 aggrandisement. Bom in Strasburg, the prince had subse- 
 quently associated in exile with Alsatian emigres, and while 
 still quite a yovmg man had learned to detest the French 
 and their Revolution. The whole of his life since then had 
 been a continuous struggle against the pro-French pohcy of his 
 father. After the battle of Austerlitz, he had been forced in 
 his native town to participate in the festival of victory of the 
 empress Josephine, and with his customary frank disregard 
 of consequences he had declared : " To me it would be the 
 most agreeable festival of victory if my home were once more 
 to become a German town." A year later, when he was 
 fighting on the Vistula against the Prussians and the Russians, 
 he had akeady conceived the plan of constructing a magni- 
 ficent Walhalla for the great men of his fatherland, and in 
 halting verses demanded of the Germans that they should 
 break the chams of the Corsican. Very rarely indeed did he 
 give the lie to his German pride before the powerful 
 Imperator. He regarded Montgelas as merely the satrap 
 of the foreign despot. He made no concealment of his 
 hostility to the minister, publicly treated his brother-in-law 
 Eugene Beauharnais with the extremest contempt, and desired 
 the fall of Montgelas all the more impatiently because his 
 own most cherished plan, his designs upon the Badenese Pala- 
 tinate, could never succeed without the good wishes of the 
 German great powers. 
 
 In these endeavours he found a powerful ally in the 
 much-admired new field-marshal of the Bavarian reahn. 
 Wrede detested the North German patriots even more fiercely 
 
 643 
 
History of Germany 
 
 than did the minister himself. As he wrote to Montgelas 
 during the campaign of 1814, what he would like best to do 
 with this idiot, this devil, of a Stein, would be to load him 
 into a howitzer and send him as a present to Napoleon. It 
 was chiefly from wounded vanity that, in the year 1812, the 
 valiant mercenary, from being a humble servant of Bonaparte 
 had become an enemy, because the Imperator refused him 
 the great eagle of the Legion of Honour. But he was able 
 to boast that sooner than Montgelas he had recognised the 
 right moment in which to turn his coat, and that he had 
 brought the treaty of Ried to pass almost against the will 
 of the hesitating minister. Since then he had plumed him- 
 self, not merely as the commander-in-chief, but also as the 
 diplomatic saviour, of the Bavarian nation. His pretorian 
 pride scorned all decency, scorned even the laws of the state. 
 On his own initiative, during the campaign of 1815, he 
 promised the officers of the four cavalry regiments and 
 eighteen legions which had been formed for the war only, 
 that they should not be dismissed when peace came ; when 
 subsequently Montgelas, moved by the desperate financial 
 situation, demanded the urgently necessary reduction of the 
 army, the field-marshal appeared in the ministerial council 
 as " representative of the army," and carried his masterful 
 proposal with the monarch. It was not surprising that 
 Montgelas spoke of him as " the Bavarian Wallenstein," and 
 looked askance at the new princely title of this favoured 
 child of fortune. Since the congress of Vienna, Wrede had 
 been completely won over to the side of Austria, this very 
 Austria which quite lately, in his thundering proclamations, 
 he had stigmatised as " our eternal enemy." He, too, as a 
 bom Palatiner, had directed a greedy eye on Heidelberg and 
 Mannheim, and he knew that his aims in this direction could 
 be attained only through the favour of the Hofburg. 
 
 The mutual hatred of these two powerful opponents was 
 accentuated by the conduct of the minister in the constitu- 
 tional question. Although neither the crown prince nor 
 the field-marshal, who were both men of strongly despotic 
 predilections, had any love for constitutional methods of 
 government, they did not fail to recognise that after so many 
 solemn promises the constitution must at length be granted. 
 Montgelas, on the other hand, had, as the years passed, 
 become ever more obstinately confirmed in his bureaucratic 
 
 644 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 sentiments. He did not carry the unhappy constitution of 
 1808 into effect, and the man who, by a system of pitiless 
 centralisation, had annihilated all independent life in the 
 provinces, gradually attained to the same view as that which 
 was held by the feudalists of Prussia, considering that a 
 political sense must first be awakened through the pro- 
 vincial diets, since the Germans had no natural understanding 
 of the representative system. The minister could not prevent 
 the king, who desired to anticipate the proposal of the 
 congress of Vienna, from appointing a commission to investigate 
 that paper fundamental law ; but he gave the commission 
 clearly to understand that the Bavarian provincial diets were 
 to have no greater significance than the parliamentary institu- 
 tions of Napoleon. If from time to time a freer opinion 
 should be voiced in the commission, the blunt answer was to be 
 made that the king and his officials must always be regarded as 
 the proper representatives of the nation ; it was incredible 
 that anyone could even speak of any enlargement of represen- 
 tative rights, since it was merely as an act of grace that the 
 king had renounced certain sovereign prerogatives. 
 
 The commission, which, for the most part, consisted of 
 devoted servants of the minister, and contained also a few 
 ultra-conservative Old Bavarian nobles, took this hint to heart, 
 and brought forward a wonderful proposal which gave equal 
 expression to all the desires of the bureaucracy and of the 
 junkerdom. An upper house, adorned with the modest name 
 of " chamber of councillors of the realm," and a chamber of 
 deputies, combined to form the Bavarian " national represen- 
 tation." For the positions of deputies, three candidates were 
 chosen in each constituency by indirect election, out of whom, 
 according to the approved Napoleonic custom, the king 
 nominated one to become a deputy ; the serfs, that is to say, 
 the mass of the peasantry, were completely excluded from 
 representation, on the ground that they were already repre- 
 sented by the lords of the soil. The privileges of this popular 
 chamber corresponded to its composition. In case of urgent 
 need, the crown might even impose direct taxes on its own 
 initiative, and the crown could at any time alienate the public 
 lands without even informing the chamber. Such a situation 
 seemed a mockery. The crown prince felt this ; and when 
 the unhappy proposal reached Vienna in February, 1815, he 
 induced the king to refuse his assent. The commission 
 
 645 
 
History of Germany 
 
 was dissolved. Montgelas saw the shipwreck of the scheme 
 with quiet malicious joy, and for two years he allowed the 
 vexatious affair to rest untouched. There was no longer any 
 reason to fear that the detested Prussian rival would be before- 
 hand with the granting of a constitution, the Bundestag was not 
 pressing, and in Bavaria there was no trace whatever of a 
 feudal movement. The proud strength of the Old Bavarian 
 Landtag, which long ago, in the stormy days of the Lowler- 
 bund, had so often practised the right of armed resistance, 
 was already broken in the sixteenth century. When Max 
 Joseph ascended the throne, he found in existence nothing 
 more than the lifeless Landtag committee, the Verordnung, 
 and had aboUshed this last vestige almost without a struggle. 
 Vainly did Rudhart, professor at Wiirzburg, endeavour, by the 
 pubHcation of his erudite history of the Bavarian provincial 
 diets, to reanimate the thought of the ancient representative 
 liberties ; he secured the thanks of the learned, but his book 
 had no influence whatever upon the pohtical sentiments of 
 the country. 
 
 Meanwhile, Montgelas directed his attention chiefly to the 
 negotiations with the Roman see, which were destined to be 
 of importance for the whole of Germany, and to have an 
 entirely unexpected reaction upon the work of constructing 
 the Bavarian constitution. Notwithstanding their strictly 
 CathoHc sentiments, the old Wittelsbachs, like the Most 
 Christian Kings of France, had always vigorously maintained 
 the supremacy of their state in ecclesiastical matters. For 
 centuries it had been the aim of Wittelsbach religious poUcy 
 to found a Bavarian national church, in so far as this was 
 possible in conformity with CathoHc unity of belief. At the 
 very time when Bavaria was expelling Protestants, there was 
 instituted in Munich a spiritual council, a supreme ecclesiastical 
 authority appointed by the sovereign, a body resembling the 
 consistories of the Lutherans. As soon as the principal resolu- 
 tion of the Diet of Deputation had subjected to Bavarian 
 supremacy the neighbouring bishops, who were immediates 
 of the empire and were ancient opponents of the territorial 
 princely authority over the church, the court of Munich revived 
 this ancient plan of the Wittelsbachs with renewed zeal. The 
 king hoped that it would be possible to conclude with the 
 pope a concordat as advantageous as that which had so 
 
 646 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 recently been concluded by the First Consul, expecting to be 
 able to secure the formation of Bavarian bishoprics whose 
 boundaries should coincide with those of the state domain. 
 He had soon to leam how firmly, even on those days of 
 humiliation, the papacy held to its ancient masterful prin- 
 ciples. The papal negotiator. Cardinal della Genga, the 
 ecclesiastic who subsequently became Pope Leo XII, demanded 
 nothing less than the return to the old system of unity of 
 beUef. The equal legal rights of Protestants, the recognition 
 of mixed marriages, the supervision of the state over the 
 schools, all the valuable reforms upon which the legal order 
 of the new kingdom reposed in matters, of parity of belief, 
 were to disappear. In the year 1809, negotiations were broken 
 off. Nevertheless in Munich hope was not abandoned. How 
 was it possible that the curia should withstand the wishes of 
 a court which was so glad to boast itself as being, after 
 Austria, the first CathoUc power in Germany ? When the 
 prince-primate Dalberg, in those Rhenish Confederate days, 
 was unweariedly bringing forward airy plans for a German 
 or Rhenish Confederate national church, he found his most 
 determined opponent in Montgelas. At the congress of Vienna, 
 too, Bavaria maintained her proud self-sufficiency, and 
 demanded that ecclesiastical affairs should be withdrawn from 
 the competence of the Germanic Federation. 
 
 In view of the weakness of the new federal authority, a 
 change in this decisive resolution was neither attainable nor 
 desirable, for who could wish to entrust to the Bundestag 
 the difiicult negotiations with the Roman curia ? In this 
 question also, as everywhere else, particularism had won a 
 complete victory. AH the German states were now forced 
 to adopt the same course as that which Bavaria and Wiir- 
 temberg had previously adopted under the Confederation of 
 the Rhine. Individually or in groups, they were forced to 
 treat with the Roman curia, in order to secure the establish- 
 ment of new territorial bishoprics. All the courts were at 
 one in this well-grounded desire. With the innumerable 
 changes of frontier of recent years, it was simply impossible 
 that the dioceses of the Holy Empire should remain unaltered. 
 Moreover, all except five of the new bishoprics were practi- 
 cally destitute. Since the seciilarisation of the Catholic church 
 in Germany had deprived them of an annual income of at 
 least 21,000,000 florins, their economic needs were so intense 
 
 647 
 
History of Germany 
 
 that a remedy was possible only through the help of the 
 state. 
 
 Even the Prussian statesmen, who at the congress of 
 Vienna had vigorously favoured the idea of a common Ger- 
 man ecclesiastical policy, had now to abandon this idea as 
 untenable, just as they had been forced to abandon their plans 
 for a federal customs system, and many more of the patriotic 
 proposals of those sanguine days. The Prussian federal 
 envoys were instructed not to tolerate any intervention of the 
 Federation in ecclesiastical affairs, if only for the reason that 
 Prussia would never again allow the presence of a nuncio in 
 Frankfort. It was the king's intention to act independently, 
 and by voluntary concessions to set an example to the other 
 German states.' Even then, Humboldt proposed that the 
 Prussian state should place formally under the protection of 
 the Federation those rights which it proposed to concede to 
 the Roman church, asking in exchange that the rights of the 
 Protestants in the Catholic states should likewise be placed 
 under federal guarantee. The chancellor, however, rejected 
 this proposal, for he foresaw that neither Austria nor 
 Bavaria would ever agree to accept a plan which would 
 have placed the crown of Prussia in the position of protector 
 of German Protestantism. Since Bavaria now went her own 
 way, and Austria was from the first outside the negotiations, 
 Hardenberg was unable to anticipate any successful issue 
 from joint negotiation with the petty states ; the views of 
 the different courts were too widely divergent. The Prussian 
 state also ruled more Catholic subjects than Bavaria and the 
 petty states together ; Prussia alone, in the days of the Holy 
 Empire, had possessed territorial bishoprics, and had attained 
 to firm principles of ecclesiastical poUcy in the school of an 
 extensive experience, principles which, with trifling alterations, 
 could be adapted to the needs of the present day. The 
 minor Protestant dynasties of the west, on the other hand, 
 Baden, Wiirtemberg, Hesse, and Nassau, had all of a sudden 
 entered into possession of extensive Catholic domains, and were, 
 as yet comparatively ignorant of how to deal with the new 
 tasks which devolved upon them in this situation. They 
 knew, indeed, that the ancient Protestant ecclesiastical 
 authority of the lords paramount could no longer be exercised 
 under the new conditions, and honourably desired to concede 
 
 1 Instructions to the federal envoy, November 30, 1816, Section 31. 
 
 648 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 to the Roman church somewhat more freedom. But they 
 continued to cherish extremely exaggerated ideas of the rights 
 of the state authority, a self-deception which was not shared 
 by Hardenberg. Consequently, even from Paris instructions 
 were sent to Niebuhr that he was to treat with Rome on 
 behalf of Prussia alone, and that above all he was to effect 
 the re-establishment of the indispensable territorial bishoprics. 
 
 It was only Heinrich von Wessenberg who was still 
 unwiUing to abandon the idea of a German national church 
 which he had so strongly advocated at the congress of Vienna. 
 By the courts, the much-occupied vicar-general of Constance 
 was regarded as at once a welcome ally and a nuisance, 
 a disturber of the peace ; for, like him, they desired to restrict 
 as much as possible the power of the pope over German 
 prelates, while, on the other hand, the kernel of his plans 
 necessarily appeared an impossible anachronism to sober- 
 minded statesmen. Wessenberg failed to recognise how com- 
 pletely the poHtical character of the Catholic church of 
 Germany had been transformed by secularisation and by the 
 abohtion of the noble prebends. He dreamed of a German 
 ecclesiastical state which, under the protection of the Federa- 
 tion, led by a prince-primate, well furnished with noble 
 prelates and national and diocesan synods, could occupy a 
 position equally independent of the papacy and of the terri- 
 torial suzerains. With naive arrogance he spoke of this aris- 
 tocratic ecclesiastical constitution as " the German church," 
 although the great majority of the Germans outside Austria 
 were Protestants. He would hear nothing of territorial 
 bishoprics, an indispensable element of the modem national 
 unity ; his distinguished bishops were to exercise their 
 spiritual power simultaneously in several state domains. 
 What a prospect did this open of eternal disputes between 
 the pope, the primate, the Bundestag, the individual states, 
 and these semi-sovereign bishops, who were not to be subjected 
 to any single and specific territorial supremacy ! 
 
 Whence, moreover, was a German primate now to derive 
 the territorial and princely independence essential to his 
 dignity ? Dalberg himself, prince-primate of the Confedera- 
 tion _of the Rhine, had akeady cut the ground from 
 beneath his friend Wessenberg's patriotic proposals, when, 
 in October, 1813, he had voluntarily renounced the grand 
 duchy of Frankfort in favour of Eugene Beauharnais. This 
 
 649 
 
History of Germany 
 
 shameful political suicide had served only to increase the 
 hostility of the allies to the Bonapartist prince of the church, 
 nor was their anger diminished when, in the following year, 
 the weathercock enthusiast displayed another sudden change, 
 and paid homage to the revengeful archangel of Europe, Czar 
 Alexander. The discrowned prince then retired to his bishopric 
 of Ratisbon, and there passed the two years before his death 
 (February, 1817) in apostolic simplicity, devoted entirely to 
 the duties of his spiritual office and to works of Christian 
 charity. Many of his political opponents were won over by 
 the serene equanimity of the amiable old man. The peculiar 
 charm of his mind, so strangely compounded of enthusiasm, 
 vanity, and shyness, made him in the evening of his life even 
 more irresistible than he had been many years before when 
 Schiller and WUhelm Humboldt had taken so much pleasure 
 in his society. But with his territorial suzerainty, his 
 primacy had also been lost beyond rescue. To a Bavarian 
 subject and territorial bishop, no German state would con- 
 cede the rights of a German supreme shepherd ; least of all 
 would Prussia do this, for in Prussia's view, the Rhenish 
 Confederate title to the primacy had no legal validity. For 
 this reason, Wessenberg was coolly received almost everywhere 
 when, in the year 1815, he visited some of the courts, and 
 when he endeavoured to gain over some of the diplomats in 
 Frankfort to his plans for a national church. Not even yet 
 discouraged, in December he proposed to the German govern- 
 ments that before opening negotiations with Rome they should 
 first come to an agreement regarding common principles, and 
 that they should recognise the Bundestag as the supreme 
 judge in all disputes between state and church. To the 
 cousin of Metternich and to the brother of the Austrian privy- 
 councillor Wessenberg, it might seem a trifling matter that the 
 affairs of Prussian bishoprics should be subjected to the co-decision 
 of the emperor of Austria. In BerUn other views prevailed. 
 
 It was in Munich, above all, that Wessenberg's reception 
 was unfriendly ; Bavaria was self-sufficing, he was bluntly 
 assured, and would not tolerate any further attack upon her 
 sovereignty. In his innovations in matters of ecclesiastical 
 policy, Montgelas encountered but trifling resistance among the 
 bigoted Old Bavarian populace, and, with the arrogance of the 
 infidel man of the world, he inferred from this that 
 the Roman church no longer possessed much vitality. The 
 
 650 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 pride of enlightenment led this able man into an error, which 
 was, indeed, shared by most statesmen of the day, but which 
 was especially ill-placed in the mind of so obstinate an advocate 
 of the absolute power of the state. He hoped, not merely 
 to secure from the pope a buU which should delimit the 
 frontiers of the new Bavarian territorial bishoprics. He also 
 regarded it as a matter of trifling importance to enter into a 
 concordat which should regulate legal relationships between 
 state and church, failing to understand how grossly the 
 sovereignty of the state was endangered by the mere conclu- 
 sion of a concordat. Every state is empowered to determine 
 the extent of its own sovereign prerogatives, and must not allow 
 this inaUenable right to be diminished by treaties with foreign 
 powers, and least of aU by a treaty with the curia, which 
 has ever regarded all concessions to the temporal authority 
 as mere indulgences, as revocable favours. The hope, how- 
 ever, of outbidding the Napoleonic concordat, flattered Bavarian 
 pride ; and, in the worst event, the crown of the Wittelsbachs 
 was strong enough to alter the concordat should it choose to 
 do so, disregarding the complaints of the pope. The choice 
 of the negotiator was as utterly mistaken as was the funda- 
 mental idea of the whole imdertaking. The difficult affair 
 was entrusted to Hafiehn the octogenarian bishop. Montgelas 
 was under the illusion that in this gentle ecclesiastic he possessed 
 a thoroughly subservient tool, and overlooked the fact that 
 the weak old man, with his vanity and his fourteen illegiti- 
 mate children, was equally accessible to the allurements and 
 to the threats of the Vatican. 
 
 In such circumstances, the ultramontane party found 
 fresh courage. Since the year 1812, this party had become 
 more firmly knit together throughout South Germany ; and, 
 unaffrighted by the severe prohibitions of Montgelas, had 
 diffused among the credulous populace touching pictures and 
 anecdotes regarding the imprisonment of the pope. The 
 centre of their activities was the see of the bishop of Eich- 
 stedt. Count Stubenberg : it was from this place that, during 
 the congress of Vienna, the orators of the Cathohc church 
 received their instructions. The Uterary spokesman of the 
 party, Zirkel, suffragan bishop of Wurzburg, entered the field 
 against Wessenberg, and, being an enthusiastic romanticist, 
 demanded the unrestricted suzerainty of the pope over the 
 German church, giving this the high-sounding name of 
 
 651 
 
History of Germany 
 
 " ecclesiastical freedom." The clericals still possessed powerful 
 friends at court. They believed that they could even count 
 upon the heir to the throne, for the prince had been educated 
 as a strict Catholic by the court chaplain, Sambuga, and 
 was an enthusiastic disciple of the romanticist school. 
 
 The minister's arrogance received swift punishment. Bishop 
 Haffelin played a lamentable part at the Vatican, and at length, 
 in the autumn of 1816, despatched a proposal for a Roman 
 concordat in which there were reserved for the Catholic 
 church " all the rights which attach to it in accord- 
 ance with the prescripts of canon law." If these words were 
 honourably interpreted, this impUed the repeal of the equal 
 rights of the Protestants and the annulling of all the 
 ecclesiastical laws of the last decade. In return for the 
 unprecedented demand, the curia made only one important 
 concession, whose consequences were fortunately not fully 
 recognised in Rome. The papacy was wiUing to admit that 
 the concordat should be announced as a Bavarian state 
 law. The prudent monsignori manifestly hoped that such 
 an announcement would give the treaty greater stability, and 
 failed to remember that the king could at any time alter the 
 state law as he pleased. In the relentless hands of Mont- 
 gelas, the rash concession might readily become a dangerous 
 weapon, and as long as he remained at the helm, the humilia- 
 tion of the throne before the papacy was not to be dreaded. 
 
 Suddenly, to the general surprise of the country, there 
 ensued the fall of the minister. In November, 1816, the 
 king had journeyed to Vienna, to visit his daughter Caroline 
 Augusta who had just married Emperor Francis, and also to 
 re-establish the poUtical friendship which had been profoundly 
 disturbed since the Salzburg negotiations. He remained three 
 months in the Austrian capital, and was overwhelmed with 
 honours ; but whenever he touched on political questions, 
 he was met with a calculated reserve, and was finally forced 
 to recognise that the rancour of the Hofburg against Mont- 
 gelas remained unappeasable. A new cause for this dislike 
 had recently come into operation, for a despatch frorti the 
 French ambassador Mercy, who made disagreeable disclosures 
 regarding Montgelas' conduct in the autumn of 1813, had 
 fallen into the hands of the court of Vienna. In the presence 
 of the Prussian ambassador, indeed, Metternich assumed the 
 pose of having never troubled himself about these Bavarian 
 
 652 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 affairs. When the king disclosed his designs against Baden, 
 alike from the emperor and from Mettemich he received no 
 more than a dry assurance that they would not oppose his 
 plan. Even this promise was not honourably meant, for 
 Mettemich simultaneously informed the Prussian chancellor 
 that the undertaking was given solely par maniere d' acquit, and 
 in the conviction that the Bavarian plans would speedily 
 encounter powerful opposition on all hands. ^ Meanwhile the 
 new empress, a declared friend of the Jesuits, broke out into 
 vigorous accusations against the minister who was hostile to 
 the church, the man who was the sole obstacle to friendship 
 between the two courts ; the diplomats of the curia gave all 
 the assistance in their power, and from Munich there arrived 
 repeated statements of grievances from the crown prince and 
 Field-marshal Wrede. 
 
 Disheartened, but as yet by no means determined, the king 
 returned to Munich on February i, 1817, and announced his 
 intention to visit the minister on the following morning. 
 The carriage had already been ordered, and, as previous 
 experience showed, the interview could be expected to end in 
 no other way than with a fresh reconciUation of the two 
 friends. But at the last moment the crown prince set every 
 possible influence at work. He had had a severe illness, 
 and was still unable to leave his room, and for this reason 
 was able to count upon a friendly hearing from his affectionate 
 father. In a moving letter he reiterated all his complaints 
 against the minister's arrogance and neglect of business, and 
 begged for the dismissal of Montgelas as a proof of royal 
 favour to himself. Wrede took this letter to the monarch 
 in the morning of February 2nd. Trembling, in profound 
 anxiety, the king at length granted his heir's petition. A 
 good-natured weakhng, when he desires to display strength, 
 almost invariably errs on the side of harshness. Thus Max 
 Joseph dismissed in the most contumeUous way possible this 
 statesman who had won for him his kingly crown, doing it 
 quite after the manner of those capricious Old Wiirtemberg 
 despots who had been accustomed to get rid of their 
 favourites by theatrically kicking them out of the room. At 
 noon, when the minister was expecting the royal visit, he 
 received instead a blunt letter of dismissal. The blow was 
 
 1 Krusemark's Report, Vienna. February 8 ; Hardenberg's Instructions to 
 Kiister, March 25, 1817. 
 
 653 
 
History of Germany 
 
 so utterly unexpected that at first the inhabitants of Munich 
 beUeved that the all-powerful minister must have committed 
 some treasonable act. The crown prince exulted, and said 
 to the Prussian ambassador : " After all, my illness has been 
 good for something." The whole country breathed more 
 freely at the fall of the detested bureaucrat. Nor did the 
 two great powers conceal their delight ; on Hardenberg's 
 instructions, Kiister had to express the lively satisfaction of 
 his court.* 
 
 The outcome of the catastrophe cut both ways. It 
 removed the greatest obstacle to the work of constitution- 
 building, but it also removed the only force which was still 
 competent to give a tolerable turn to the unhappy concordat 
 negotiations. The clericals had got rid of a terrible enemy, 
 but none the less they had not attained to power. The 
 new minister of foreign affairs. Count Aloys Rechberg, was 
 their close ally ; but Baron von Lerchenfeld was summoned 
 to take charge of the finances, an open opponent of the 
 Roman claims, and a zealous advocate of the work of constitu- 
 tion-building ; the minister of the interior. Count Thiirheim, 
 a converted Illuminate, proved weak and incapable. More- 
 over, the directors-general of the ministries now received 
 enlarged authority, so that they ranked almost as members 
 of the cabinet ; even Wrede and the secretary-general Kobell 
 continually intervened in public affairs. It is not surprising 
 that old Haffelin was no longer able to hold his own in Rome 
 under this leaderless government. It is true that Thiirheim 
 sent him precise instructions, which had been drawn up under 
 Montgelas, expressly insisting upon the right of the state to 
 undertake independent management of the external legal 
 relationships of the church ; but he considered that since the 
 change of wind in Munich he was no longer seriously bound 
 by these instructions. Step by step he allowed himself to 
 be driven into a comer. Count Blacas, the favourite of the 
 Bourbons, who was also negotiating in Rome for a concordat, 
 exhorted the Bavarian to display a jdelding disposition. On 
 June 5th, Haffelin, in defiance of his instructions, signed a 
 concordat which satisfied all the hopes of the ultramontanes. 
 In the very preamble, the most arrogant of all the demands 
 of the Vatican was stated, the Romein church was to enjoy 
 
 * Kiister's Reports, February 12 and 16 ; Hardenberg's Instructions, March 4, 
 1817. 
 
 654 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 all the rights granted by God's ordinance and by the canon 
 law. 
 
 When this incredible news reached Munich, the ministers 
 were at first unable to believe it, and the king raged against 
 " the scroundrelly agreement." But the only answer appro- 
 priate to a self-respecting crown in such a situation was with- 
 held ; the negotiator who had forgotten his duty was not 
 recalled. Vainly did Lerchenfeld demand that no agreement 
 should be concluded without expressly reserving the rights 
 of the state. Count Rechberg, in the earUer negotiations with 
 Cardinal deUa Genga, had formed the opposite conviction ; 
 he considered that tacit reserve was sufficient, since the curia 
 did not carry out its conventions in a very precise spirit. 
 Finally, it was resolved that Xaver Rechberg of Eichstadt, 
 the much-loved brother of the minister, should be sent to 
 Rome, and with Blacas' assistance he effected a concordat 
 which agreed with the convention of June 5th except in a 
 few unessential details. The new convention was signed by 
 the king on October 24th. In addition to the recognition of 
 the vaUdity of the canon law, it declared that all ecclesiastical 
 affairs to which no express allusion was made in the concordat 
 were to be dealt with in accordance with the vigens ecclesia 
 discipUna, and that in doubtful cases there should always be 
 a new agreement between the pope and the king. In article 
 17 there was even announced the aboHtion of all laws and 
 ordinances conflicting with the concordat. The bishops were 
 to supervise the pmity of behef and morals in the state schools, 
 and had a right to demand from the state authority the 
 suppression of dangerous Hterature. The right to found new 
 monasteries, and the unrestricted disposal of property acquired 
 by inheritance, were secured to the church. For this price 
 the pope agreed to the foundation of the long-desired Bavarian 
 territorial church, with two archbishoprics and six bishoprics. 
 The proposed formation of one single archbishopric for the 
 entire kingdom was refused in Rome, for how readily could 
 such a metropoUtan play the part of a primate ! The king, 
 as a Catholic sovereign, received the right to nominate three 
 of his territorial bishops unconditionally, whilst the five others 
 were to be selected by him from a Mst of candidates. It was 
 in this matter, and in the tacit recognition of the sovereign's 
 right of patronage over incumbencies, that were to be found 
 the only safeguards of the rights of the state authority. Should 
 
 65s 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Bavaria desire to adopt a dishonourable course, there did, 
 indeed, still remain a loophole in article i8, which promised in 
 the same breath that the concordat should be kept inviolable — 
 and that it should be promulgated as a state law. 
 
 This was the first sample of the European policy of Munich. 
 It was the most disgraceful humiliation which a modern state 
 had ever suffered from the papacy, the well-deserved punish- 
 ment for the particularist arrogance which had first led to a 
 complete severance from all the other German states, and 
 which now desired to excel them all at any price. Even 
 Kiister's successor, the ultra-conservative old general Zastrow, 
 was horrified at the " complete victory of Rome," and wrote 
 to the chancellor, who followed all the ecclesiastical negotiations 
 with close attention, saying : "To this region, in which 
 enlightenment has so recently been introduced, the clergy will 
 once again restore the obscurity and the demoraUsing influence 
 of superstition." * The curia rejoiced, and gave the king 
 " appropriate praise." Max Joseph forgot his kingly dignity 
 so completely that he wrote to beg the pope to bestow a 
 cardinal's hat upon the unfaithful envoy Haffelin. The request 
 was granted, to the disgust of all good Bavarians ; even the 
 cardinals complained that upon such shoulders the purple would 
 be discredited. 
 
 It was impossible for the Vatican long to withhold from 
 the world so brilliant a triumph. Already in December the 
 concordat had been published by the curia on its own account, 
 and thereupon the league of Eichstadt immediately induced 
 the highest ecclesiastical authorities to express their gratitude 
 to the crown. The vicariate-general of Bamberg demanded 
 that the authorities should take action against the Franconian 
 newspaper which espoused the cause of Wessenberg. Among 
 the hotspurs of the clerical party the demand was already 
 voiced that all the children of mixed marriages and all 
 foundlings should be baptised and brought up in the Roman 
 church, and that conversion to Catholicism should be permissible 
 to all without distinction of age. These were unprecedented 
 claims which might, none the less, appeal with good reason for 
 justification to the introductory words of the concordat ! The 
 Protestants saw the very existence of their church threatened. 
 What right of the evangelicals could still be regarded as firmly 
 established when the canon law actually took precedence of all 
 1 Zastrow's Report, December lo, 1817. 
 656 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 the state laws of Bavaria ? The consistories of many of the 
 Protestant towns implored the king in moving terms to main- 
 tain the principles of the edict of reUgions of 1809 whereby 
 parity of beUefs was guaranteed. Even Schmitt, the queen's 
 chaplain, raised his powerful voice. But no one fanned the 
 flames of the movement more vigorously than Anselm Feuer- 
 bach, who once more did credit to his nickname " Vesuvius." 
 Among the Catholics, Ignaz Rudhart, with customary frankness, 
 espoused the threatened cause of parity ; even many of the 
 clergy did not conceal their anxiety. 
 
 The excitement continued to increase, for simultaneously 
 in France a storm broke out against the new concordat con- 
 cluded by Blacas, and the South Germans were already begin- 
 ning to follow every wave of public opinion in the neighbouring 
 country. The crown prince also, notwithstanding his roman- 
 ticist fantasies, began to become anxious, and reminded his 
 father of the example of their ancestor Louis the Bavarian. Max 
 Joseph was ashamed of his own weakness. He could not 
 deny that this concordat had been a faUing away, not merely 
 from the principles of his own ecclesiastical policy, but also 
 from all the good traditions of the old Wittelsbachs. But 
 after he had solemnly pledged his royal word there remained 
 open to him only the loophole of article 18, in virtue of which 
 the concordat was to be promulgated as a state law. The 
 government determined (as Rechberg informed the Prussian 
 ambassador in profovmd confidence) to interpret the convention 
 "in the best way possible." It was their intention to promul- 
 gate the concordat as a law for the kingdom, but simultaneously 
 to promulgate a second law which should take the edge off 
 the concessions of the concordat and should appease the Pro- 
 testants. ^ This was a lamentable way out of a painful situation 
 for which the Bavarian government was itself responsible, and 
 yet, after all that had happened, it was the sole available 
 means of reacquiring the sacrificed rights of the state authority. 
 
 The most convenient method of carrying out this design 
 was offered by the redemption of the promise to grant a 
 constitution. On February 11, 1818, on the proposal of Director- 
 general von Zentner, the ministry of state determined to append 
 to the constitution an edict concerning the legal relationships of 
 the Christian confessions. Thus the phability which had been 
 displayed towards the Roman see had at least one fortunate 
 
 1 Zastrow's Reports, February 15, April 15, 1818. 
 
 657 2 U 
 
History of Germany 
 
 outcome, namely, that the arrested work of constitution-building 
 was once again set in motion. The financial needs of the 
 country also came to the assistance of the friends of the consti- 
 tution. Under this many-headed regime these needs had 
 increased so greatly that the crown prince bluntly declared 
 that nothing but the summoning of the provincial diets could 
 re-estabUsh the shattered national credit.^ Dynastic ambition 
 exercised an influence yet more powerful than all these 
 considerations. Now, as before, the acquisition of the Badenese 
 Palatinate remained the leading idea of Bavarian statecraft, 
 and, since the arbitral decision of the great powers was 
 not yet forthcoming, in the spring of 1818 the courts of Munich 
 and Carlsruhe began an extraordinary rivalry for the favour 
 of public opinion, although this was really of very Httle 
 importance. The two opponents carried on their respective 
 constitutional deliberations with feverish zeal in order to gain 
 the approval of the daily press for the decision of the territorial 
 questions. It was chiefly for this reason that the crown prince 
 and the field-marshal adhered firmly to the side of the consti- 
 tutional party. 
 
 Since February, 1818, the reconsideration of the constitutional 
 proposals of 1808 and 1814 had been resumed. In the course 
 of these deliberations the prestige of Zentner increased day by 
 day. Next to Lerchenfeld, his was the best intelligence of the 
 Munich cabinet. At one time he had been professor in 
 Erlangen, but he was free from that doctrinaire egotism 
 by which, in practical politics, German professors are almost 
 always conducted to shipwreck. A bureaucrat through and 
 through, eloquent, prudent, and well-informed, thoroughly 
 imbued with the idea of the universal authority of the state, 
 he was brilliant and amiable in personal intercourse, although 
 his old-bachelor foppishness occasionally aroused a smile. As 
 director-general in the ministry of the interior, he speedily took 
 all the burdens of work from the hands of Count Thiirheim, 
 and therewith deprived the latter of any real power. He was 
 the reorganiser of the Bavarian officialdom, being the first to 
 introduce a certain amount of discipline and punctuahty into 
 the neglected service, and he gave all who wore the light blue 
 official uniform expressly to understand that it was from him 
 alone that favour and honours were to be expected. To such 
 a man, pariiamentary fife could offer no allurements, but he 
 
 ^ Zastrow's Report, March 15, i8i8. 
 658 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 understood that the young crown had need of popular favour, 
 and that the inchoate national unity required new clamps ; 
 and he beheved himself to have the power of maintaining the 
 spirit of absolutism even amid constitutional forms. By 
 his influence, the work of constitution-building was carried 
 through with extreme rapidity, so that the Badenese competitors 
 were beaten in the race by several months. 
 
 On May 26th the Bavarian herald, clad in blue-and-white, 
 rode through the streets of Munich, to read seven times the 
 royal manifesto announcing the promulgation of the new funda- 
 mental law and demanding " from the hearts of all Bavarians 
 their grateful recognition of this fatherly procedure." Thus 
 Bavaria was the first among the greater states of the Germanic 
 Federation to fulfil the promises of the federal act in the spirit 
 of the dominant constitutional doctrine. The country accepted 
 its king's gift with childlike deUght ; even the Brandenburg 
 Franconians now manifested for the first time an access of Wittels- 
 bach sentiments. An allegorical picture showed representatives 
 of the miUtary and scholastic professions and of the working 
 classes gracefully dancing round the royal crown, and this 
 gave appropriate expression to the feelings of the people. It 
 would have been well if this reasonable satisfaction had not 
 been intermingled with so much repulsive particularist arro- 
 gance ! At every success of the constitutional movement in 
 the south, a flood of scorn was poured out over the backward 
 Prussians, and the old Rhenish Confederate ideas were revived 
 in a Uberal dress. After the fall of Montgelas, hardly had the 
 hopes of the Bavarian friends of the constitution been 
 reawakened, when Feuerbach handed to Rechberg a memorial 
 regarding a league of the rulers of all the minor states which, 
 with the support of England, Denmark, and Holland, was to 
 cleave asimder its natural enemy, Prussia, and to the populace 
 of the two great powers was to display " the great and 
 cheerful picture of a free constitution," whilst to the governments 
 of these powers it was to hold up this picture before their 
 eyes as a Gorgon's head. 
 
 In truth this "great and cheerful picture" of the Bavarian 
 constitution fulfilled all reasonable expectations. It guaranteed 
 equality before the law, and a not too timorously restricted free- 
 dom of the press. In the composition of the two chambers, 
 the customary subdivision of the estates was carefully main- 
 tained. The chamber of councillors of the realm was to be 
 
 659 
 
History of Germany 
 
 composed of the great dignitaries, of hereditarily noble land- 
 lords, and of a minority of members nominated by the crown. 
 One-fourth of the chamber of deputies was to consist of repre- 
 sentatives of the lesser landed nobility and the lesser clergy ; 
 one-fourth of the' members were to be elected by the towns ; 
 the remaining half of the representatives were to be chosen by 
 the peasants. The deputies were not to represent the rights 
 of their respective estates, but the interests of the country 
 as a whole. The best guarantee for the tolerable success of 
 these constitutional forms was offered by the new communes 
 law, modelled after the towns' ordinance of Stein, and pro- 
 mulgated a few days before the constitution. Beyond question 
 this law was far inferior to its Prussian prototype ; a great 
 part of the affairs of the towns were not as yet to be placed 
 in the hands of the burghers, but were to be managed by salaried 
 commimal scriveners. The rural communes remained extremely 
 dependent upon the clerks of the country justices' courts, and 
 for this reason many of the most independent-minded among 
 the peasants refused to accept the office of parish magistrate. 
 But at least the principle of commimal self-government was 
 recognised ; the communes acquired the right of disposing of 
 their own property, and could freely elect their own communal 
 authorities. Thus was at length won a foundation for practical 
 popular freedom, a soil in which the new constitution might 
 perhaps take firm root. 
 
 As an appendix to the constitution, in addition to other 
 organic laws, there appeared an edict of religions which gave 
 to the concordat the desired " interpretation." In this docu- 
 ment the tried principles of the New Bavarian ecclesiastical 
 pohcy once again found expression : parity of beUefs was recog- 
 nised in plain terms, in the case of mixed marriages the 
 separate religious education of the children in accordance with 
 their sex was prescribed, and the Old Bavarian right of the 
 ■placet was reserved for the crown. There was not a single 
 sentence in the edict which did not flatly contradict the leading 
 ideas of the concordat. To the curia it seemed simple mockery 
 that the concordat itself should now be promulgated as a 
 state law, of course under reserve of the legal principles 
 of the edict of religions. Rome made vigorous complaints 
 regarding the manifest breach of the convention, and refused 
 to be appeased when the king sent Canon Helfferich, one of 
 the ultramontane orators of the congress of Vienna, with tran- 
 
 660 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 quillising assurances. Then old Haffelin, who had now lost all 
 shame in his enjojmient of the cardinal purple, ventured upon a 
 new and gross breach of duty. He gave an assurance, once 
 more upon his own initiative and without previous knowledge 
 on the part of Helfferich, that the edict of religions applied 
 only to non-Catholics, and the pope did not hesitate to announce 
 this disgraceful declaration to the world in a triumphant 
 allocution. 
 
 For the second time the Bavarian crown had been 
 pubUcly humiliated by the mifaithful envoy, and some of 
 the ministers urgently demanded " the punishment of the 
 traitor." But on this occasion also. Max Joseph's good-natured 
 slackness proved incoercible. He contented himself with issuing 
 a rescript to impress upon his circle governments that the edict 
 of reUgions applied to everyone in the kingdom ; and he had 
 now once more to undertake a disgraceful negotiation with the 
 embittered pope. Such hole-and-corner proceedings were hardly 
 likely to increase the repute of the Bavarian court among the 
 great powers, a repute which in any case had been profovmdly 
 depressed since the manifestation of the design for the conquest 
 of the Palatinate. Nevertheless, Bavaria was in an advan- 
 tageous position in relation to the pope. The curia had been 
 caught in its own nets, having hoped that the promulgation 
 of the concordat as a state law would redound to its own 
 advantage, and now foimd itself in an almost defenceless position 
 when the import of this state law was restricted by an 
 additional law. The great pubUc remained without any precise 
 knowledge of all the detestable turns of the confused negotia- 
 tion, and rejoiced unrestrainedly over the victory of the 
 temporal power. For some months Bavaria enjoyed the cheap 
 pleasure of being hailed by the entire German press as the 
 most liberal of all the German states. 
 
 § 3. BADEN. 
 
 In Bavaria, the fulfilment of article 13 delivered the secular 
 arm from the burden of the concordat ; in Baden it saved the 
 very existence of the state. For several years the young grand 
 duchy had been in a dangerous condition of intense confusion, 
 and it seemed almost as if this artificial state-structure were 
 
 661 
 
History of Germany 
 
 destined to disappear as swiftly as it had come into being. 
 The ancient house of Zahringen had at one time exercised a 
 wide dominion on the Upper Rhine, extending as far as the 
 Swiss tjchtland, and had striven with the Hohenstaufen for the 
 Swabian duchy ; its glories were witnessed by the foundation 
 of the town of Berne, of Freiburg-in-Breisgau, and of Fribourg. 
 Its decay began, however, in the thirteenth century, and the 
 Zahringens relapsed into the ranks of the minor d5nnasties. 
 When towards the middle of the eighteenth century Margrave 
 Charles Frederick of Baden-Durlach became ruler, it was over 
 a little territory of barely thirty square miles [German], dispersed 
 in several fragments from the Swiss frontier to the other side 
 of Carlsruhe, and contributing to the imperial army a total force 
 of ninety-five men. In the year 1811, when his reign of sixty- 
 two years came to a close, the domain had increased almost 
 tenfold. First of all the Catholic Baden-Baden was united 
 with the Lutheran Durlach ; then Napoleon compacted the 
 motley regions on the right back of the Rhine, from Constance 
 to Mannheim, to constitute an extraordinary state extending 
 for sixty miles [German] along the Rhine, consisting almost 
 exclusively of frontier districts, and no more than two miles 
 wide at its narrowest portion. The Hither Austrian territories 
 of Nellenburg, Breisgau, and Ortenau, the Palatinate on the 
 right bank of the Rhine, and fragments of the bishoprics of 
 Constance, Strasburg, and Spires, were thrown together, with 
 numerous similar domains of princes, counts, imperial knights, 
 and imperial towns. Two- thirds of the subjects of the Pro- 
 testant dynasty were Cathohcs ; nearly one-third of the country 
 belonged to the discontented mediatised houses of Fiirstenberg, 
 Leiningen, and Lowenstein. This confused mass of territories 
 had almost nothing in common in the way of living historical 
 memories ; even in Breisgau, the tribal seat of the princely 
 house, no one thought any longer of the old Zahringen days. 
 And yet, after all, this entirely modern territorial structure 
 was by no means so unnatural as might appear at first sight. 
 Upon the ridge of the Black Forest, almost upon the very 
 spot where Badenese and Wiirtemberg land now come into 
 contact, there had stood at one time, in the early years of 
 the Christian era, the boundary stones between the Celts and the 
 Teutons ; and even later, when the Alemans advanced west- 
 ward as far as the Vosges, the Black Forest still remained 
 a natural frontier. To the east, the Swabian nationality main- 
 
 662 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 tained itself in its primitive strength, cut off from the world. 
 The western valleys of the Black Forest and the rich plain 
 beneath the hills were at an early date drawn into the 
 activities of Rhenish life ; through the Upper Rhenish country 
 ran the great military road between south and north, whereas in 
 the direction of Swabia there passed quiet mountain roads 
 only, and even intercourse with Alsace was rendered difficult 
 by the wild and unruly waters of the Rhine. From the days 
 of antiquity, since the Romans had constructed their flourishing 
 spas in the valleys of Baden and upon the height of Baden- 
 weiler, a life of careless enjoyment had been characteristic of 
 this favoured land. Nowhere in Germany did people live more 
 luxuriously ; and the cumbrous Swabian abused cis " verbose 
 Frenchmen " these Aleman kin of his on the Upper Rhine, in 
 whose veins there certainly ran much Celtic and Latin blood. 
 The Upper Rhenish people, far more receptive and mobile than 
 their Swabian neighbours, although poorer in creative intelli- 
 gence, had at all times embraced with noisy enthusiasm the 
 new ideas which were inflaming the world. As long as the 
 church knew how to stimulate the masses by the demagogic means 
 of the crusades and the mendicant orders, there was no German 
 land more devout than the Upper Rhine. Subsequently, with 
 like impetuosity, the people threw themselves into the struggles 
 of the Reformation, and yet only the minority possessed 
 sufficient energy to hold fast to the Protestant faith in the days 
 of trial. Once more, when the fashionable culture of the French 
 made its entry into Germany, nowhere did it find such zealous 
 disciples as upon the Upper Rhine. 
 
 The rationalist wisdom of the new enlightenment, which 
 regarded all historical products as utterly arbitrary structures, 
 exercised of necessity an irresistible influence upon this impres- 
 sionable people, among whom three creeds and a number of 
 powerless, chance-created territorial structures were intermingled 
 within so narrow a space. Here rationaUst enlightenment 
 remained supreme, even after elsewhere in Germany classical 
 and romanticist poetry had long before awakened the historical 
 sense ; and now, when through the caprice of the foreigner 
 all these ancient chance-states had been compacted to form a 
 new one, originating as it were out of the void, the region 
 became the natural home of a liberalism without a state and 
 without a history, which speedily modified its political and 
 religious life in accordance with the infallible principles of 
 
 663 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the so-called "law of reason," and in which the stimulating 
 proximity of France and Switzerland served to encourage the 
 formulation of increasingly bold demands. 
 
 It is true that in the large peasant farms of the Black 
 Forest there had still been preserved numerous traditional 
 manners and customs, although less so than in the neighbouring 
 Alsace, where foreign dominion cut the inhabitants off from 
 the new German culture. Moreover, in a few out-of-the-way 
 comers, a strong religious sentiment still prevailed. Here and 
 there, and especially round Pforzheim, there were to be found 
 a few scattered Old Lutheran communities ; a portion of the 
 Lake-Swabians still remained clerical ; the Franconians from 
 the remote valleys of the further Odenwald continued to make 
 devout pilgrimages to Walldiim, in honour of the Precious 
 Blood, and in their Catholic zealotry they hardly lagged behind 
 the dwellers in Miinster — ^for as in Westphalia had happened 
 with the Anabaptists, so here, in these picturesque and desolate 
 regions, the murderous passions of the Peasants' War had left 
 bloody traces ; the peasants' battle-field of Konigshofen and the 
 scandalously mutilated church of Creglingen still remained to 
 tell of the saturnalia of the mad Lutherans. But the dominant 
 sentiment of the country was thoroughly modern, urban, and 
 characterised by worldly enlightenment. In Breisgau and the 
 other Hither Austrian domains, the religious and political prin- 
 ciples of Joseph II had struck root far more deeply than in 
 the eastern crown-lands of the house of Lorraine ; the philo- 
 sophical emperor was here generally regarded as the ideal prince. 
 On the other hand, after aU the horrible wars of rehgion which 
 had desolated their beautiful homeland, the Palatiners wished 
 now at length to enjoy religious peace, and nowhere was such 
 peace more indispensable than here, where in almost every little 
 town was to be found an undenominational church ; they 
 prided themselves upon their Charles Louis, the tolerant elector, 
 who in Mannheim had established the " Peace Church " for all 
 three confessions. Paulus and Voss set the tone in Heidelberg, 
 and Rotteck in Freiburg. The Protestant rationalism of the 
 lowlands joined hands with the Josephan Catholicism of the 
 highlands, and the ideas that filled the minds of the cultured 
 classes permeated deeply among the masses of the people, for, 
 owing to the uncontrolled joy of life charcteristic of the Upper 
 Rhine, there did not here exist so]] sharp a distinction of classes 
 as still prevailed in the north ; in the innumerable little towns 
 
 664 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 there was everywhere to be found a comfortable inn, where 
 on market-days the peasants mixed with people of culture. 
 
 It was not by chance that precisely in this country of 
 democratic customs the first genuinely popular books of our 
 new literature made their appearance. Since Grimmelshausen, 
 the author of Simplizissimus, there had not been any notable 
 poet on the Upper Rhine ; but now high and low alike took 
 deUght in the first-rate stories of Rebel's Schatzkdstlein des 
 rheinischen Hausfreundes and in his poems written in the 
 Alemannic dialect, which spoke of the joys of the charming 
 highlands in the cordial folk-speech, of the dark forests and 
 murmuring brooks, of the chestnut trees and the wines of the 
 country, of the hveliness, the roguishness, the vigorous intelli- 
 gence, of its tall lads and handsome lasses. In these charming 
 idyls, sun and moon, day and night, the seasons of the year, 
 and the powers of destiny which influence the life of the 
 countryfolk assume the figure and the speech of the Aleman 
 peasants, so that Goethe declared that the upland poet pasto- 
 ralised in the most frank and charming manner in the world. 
 For this reason, too, Hebel appeared a genuine folk-poet, because 
 he was entirely fulfilled with the spirit of the enUghtenment 
 which was here in the very air. A childishly pious rationalist, 
 he regarded the dispute of the creeds with a mildness which 
 seemed almost alarming to the rehgious zealots, and seldom 
 failed to endow the merry tales of his Hausfreund with a home- 
 made moral which, however, never trangressed the limits of 
 true art. 
 
 The centre of gravity of the new state lay in the mainly 
 CathoUc highlands. It was long before the men of Breisgau 
 could reconcile themselves to the separation from their beloved 
 imperial house. The nobiUty did not forget the closing of the 
 Freiburg house of estates, and carried on a suspicious inter- 
 course, at -first with the French emigres, and subsequently 
 with the court of Vienna. The burghers complained that the 
 Old Badenese received the preference in the state service, and 
 that the regions which had constituted the old margravate 
 always secured the most efficient officials. Yet at long last 
 the Hither Austrian Alemans could not fail to find their union 
 with their Badenese kin entirely natural. 
 
 Far more slowly did the Palatine Franconians of the low- 
 lands accommodate themselves to the new regime. What could 
 Baden's modest history exhibit in comparison with the proud 
 
 665 
 
History of Germany 
 
 memories of the oldest of the Rhenish electoral princedoms, 
 which had so long borne the imperial orb, and which, as a 
 dreaded disturber of the peace to the surrounding spiritual 
 neighbours, had constituted a stronghold of the fighting Pro- 
 testant church on the lower reaches of the Neckar ? Notwith- 
 standing all the distresses of recent electoral times, the people 
 still held fast to the ancient saying : Frdhlich Pfalz, Gott erhalt's ! 
 [Happy Palatinate, God guards it!] They continued to speak 
 with delight of the ancient days when there were such grand 
 times round the great tun at Heidelberg ; and happy mothers said 
 proudly to their beautiful daughters that they looked just like 
 Countesses Palatine. Those of free intelligence, when their 
 beloved old community collapsed before their eyes, turned to 
 embrace German nationahst ideas. Nowhere else in the south 
 did so good a German sentiment prevail. The Palatiners of 
 the right bank had always distinguished themselves from those 
 on the other side of the river by a more lively intellectual 
 life, and even when the left bank of the Rhine passed under 
 foreign dominion they had never lost touch with North German 
 culture ; how should the Gallicism of the Upper Rhine strike 
 roots here, where people gave their dogs the names of the 
 French incendiaries Duras and Melac ? But there was not as 
 yet any trace of Badenese sentiment ; even the old university 
 still desired to belong to the entire fatherland, notwithstanding 
 the fact that it owed its new blossoming to the Badenese 
 princely house. In Mannheim, the residence of the last elector, 
 there still existed a strong Wittelsbach party, which gladly 
 lent itself to the covetous designs of the court of Munich. The 
 former Bavarian officials and the unscrupulous nobles looked back 
 with longing to the frivolous court of Charles Theodore. In 
 those merry days even the bourgeoisie had earned much money, 
 and they complained in addition of the loss of their theatre, 
 which at one time, under Dalberg and Iffland, had rivalled 
 the best stages of Germany, and which had been the first 
 to produce Schiller's Robbers. In the Palatinate, no one would 
 recognise Carlsruhe as the new capital of the country. This 
 dreary place, founded hundreds of years before by the caprice 
 of the margrave Charles William, in the ugliest part of the 
 beautiful country, continued to grow very slowly out of the 
 alleys of the Hardtwald ; the monotonous rows of houses in 
 the straight streets looked even more hideous since Weinbrenner 
 had adorned them with his temple buildings, and had given 
 
 666 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 proof that of all forms of pedantic style, the worst of all is 
 a debased classic. 
 
 No one but a ruler with the personal prestige of the 
 venerable Charles Frederick could hope to succeed in incorpo- 
 rating into a new commonwealth such strongly conflicting forces. 
 The old man had for a long time been regarded as the pattern 
 father of a small country. EnUghtened and tolerant, a friend 
 of Charles Augustus of Weimar, he nevertheless adhered 
 firmly to the traditional Christian faith, and among the men 
 of talent of the new literature he favoured those in especial 
 who displayed warm religious sentiments, such as Klopstock, 
 Herder, Lavater, and Jung Stilhng. Receptive for the ideas 
 of the new France, an admirer of the economic doctrine 
 of the physiocrats, he yet remained German through and 
 through, always thinking in what way the tottering old empire 
 might be restored to new hfe by a league of princes, and of 
 how the " universal spirit " of the nation might be awakened 
 by a German academy, and it was in truth an undeserved 
 and cruel destiny by which, in the evening of his hfe, this 
 true patriot was subjected to the curse of particularism, and 
 was compelled with a heavy heart to endure the fetters of 
 the foreigner. He favoured the culture and the well-being of 
 his country by farsighted legislation which was incomparable 
 in southern Germany, and he was a master also in that speech 
 of the heart which to the patriarchal peoples of our petty states 
 has always seemed more estimable than poUtical service. In 
 every inn of Old Baden was to be seen the " Badenese national 
 picture " — the portrait of the prince beneath which was inscribed 
 his fatherly answer to the expressions of gratitude which his 
 country had sent him on the occasion of the aboUtion of serf- 
 dom. What a chorus of delight arose when Charles Frederick 
 erected a monument to the excellent timber-merchant, Anton 
 Rindeschwender, the benefactor of the Murg valley — ^when the 
 lord paramount of the country erected a monument to the 
 subject. In Herder's opinion, he was the first prince quite 
 devoid of princely arrogance. 
 
 It was for this reason that the propaganda of the French, 
 when from Basle they circulated through the highlands the 
 constitutional charter of the German Republic, found no more 
 than isolated adherents in the contented margravate — far fewer 
 than this propaganda secured in Wiirtemberg and Bavaria. In 
 the new portions of the country, Privy-councillor Brauer, the 
 
 667 
 
History of Germany 
 
 organiser of the Badenese administration, worked with a far 
 more considerate hand than did the severe bureaucrats of the 
 neighbour states ; it was only the clergy who complained that 
 even this pious Christian could not overcome the mistrust of 
 the Catholic church characteristic of all Old Badenese officials. 
 Since the nobility in the Palatinate and in Breisgau regarded 
 the new state with suppressed discontent, the officialdom pre- 
 served its predominantly bourgeois character. The new order 
 was completed by the introduction of the Badenese civil code, 
 a clever elaboration of the cocie Napoleon. Everything in this 
 state was modern. 
 
 It was not until after Charles Frederick's death that the 
 forces of disintegration threatened to overpower the new state. 
 Charles Frederick's grandson, the young grand duke Charles, 
 had been rendered disinclined for serious work by the influence 
 of an ambitious mother. Through early indulgence in excesses 
 he had dissipated his vital energies while still in the prime 
 of life. Gifted and amiable by nature, he lapsed into a mood 
 of duU and gloomy brooding ; whole rooms of his palace were 
 filled with documents, letters, despatches of all kinds, which he 
 would neither deal with himself, nor allow anyone else to 
 handle. Thus the poor sick man passed his life, friendless, 
 secluded, unfathomable, always looking around with his fine 
 but cunning eyes, to see who might be deceiving him. It 
 was only his wife, Stephanie Beauharnais, * whom he had 
 unwillingly married upon Napoleon's command, who now drew 
 nearer to him when he was declining towards a premature death, 
 and made him happy with the wealth of her cheerful heart. 
 
 Under the rule of such a prince everything became incal- 
 culable. With the support of Bignon, the French envoy, the 
 Bonapartist party gained control, and undertook to transform 
 the little state forthwith in accordance with the Parisian 
 example ; by severity and arbitrary measures the new regime 
 now forfeited all the confidence which had so laboriously 
 been acquired. The officials degenerated with astonishing 
 rapidity. Even in the good old time they had been noted for 
 bureaucratic paternalism, and now Baden, with Darmstadt and 
 Nassau, became classic examples of superfluous governmental 
 activities. On many high-roads travellers could wonder at the 
 numbered fruit trees ; and at the entrance to a wide country- 
 road they were greeted sometimes by the inscription " Passage 
 along this road is permitted." At appointed dates the 
 
 668 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 justiciaries would hold the celebrated " courts of vmchastity," 
 for the punishment of all girls suspected of being pregnant, 
 and these justiciaries knew well enough how to provide a sub- 
 stitute for the abolished torture, being legally empowered to 
 condemn to a whipping any accused person who told an untruth 
 in the course of the hearing. While practising all these super- 
 abundant activities, the petty despots were lax in the perform- 
 ance of their official duties, having no longer to fear the eye 
 of the " master " — for as such did they speak of the duke. 
 The finances soon became seriously embarrassed, owing to 
 the needs of the war and to the debts incurred through 
 careless administration ; for the year 1816 there was a deficit 
 of 1,100,000 florins. During the closing years of the Napo- 
 leonic epoch an equitable system of taxation was introduced 
 by two able young financiers, Boeckh and Nebenius, a system 
 which subsequently proved extremely valuable, and which for 
 the most part still persists to the present day ; but years 
 passed before the inhabitants became accustomed to the new 
 burdens. Discontent increased unceasingly. Everj^where was 
 heard the cry that nothing but a Landtag could impose Umits 
 upon the sultanism of this officialdom. The mediatised and 
 the imperial knights had even been deprived of their territorial 
 jurisdiction, in conflict with the promises of the Rhpnish 
 Confederate act ; they manifested their displeasure with the 
 greatest bitterness, and did not conceal that they no longer 
 beheved in the future of this state of yesterday. The work 
 of Charles Frederick was falling to pieces on all sides, and to 
 the internal troubles was now superadded pressure from with- 
 out, the covetousness of the Wittelsbachs. This was all the 
 more distressing to the grand duke because King Max Joseph 
 had as yet disclosed his Palatine plan to the great powers alone, 
 and did not even vouchsafe an intimation to his brother-in-law 
 in Carlsruhe. 
 
 The court of Munich based its pretended claims, not only 
 upon the terms of the treaty of Ried, but also upon the view 
 that the dynasty of the Zahringens was near to extinction. 
 Margrave Charles Frederick had in advanced age contracted a 
 second marriage with thej baroness von Geyersberg, whom he 
 raised to the rank of Countess von Hochberg, and at the time 
 of the marriage had expressly reserved the right of succession 
 to the throne for the issue of this marriage, in case his other 
 issue should die out. Since all the agnates had recognised 
 
 669 
 
History of Germany 
 
 this reservation, and since there were no other claimants, the 
 claim of the counts of Hochberg to the succession was incon- 
 testable. Moreover, since the destruction of the empire, the 
 house of Baden had been sovereign, and was therefore 
 empowered to arrange its own domestic laws at its will. But, 
 as is well known, these questions of equality in rank belong 
 to those controversies insoluble beyond all power of human 
 understanding in which the German princely law abounds. In 
 the great German princely houses, the accession to the throne 
 of the son of a mother of inferior rank had always been a 
 rare exception, and although both the Zahringens and the 
 Wittelsbachs had themselves among their ancestry women 
 descended from the lesser nobility, the Bavarian cabinet greedily 
 seized the welcome excuse, and assured all the courts that there 
 could be no question of a Hochberg right of succession. The 
 Hofburg gladly accepted this confidential assurance ; all the 
 secret conventions regarding the Palatine succession rested upon 
 the prospect of the dying out of the Zahringens. 
 
 Should this ensue, Bavarian royal jurists had a second 
 and no less astonishing legal claim ready. The county of Spon- 
 heim, on the Nahe, had formerly, during four centuries, been in 
 possession of the houses of the Palatinate and of Baden, and, 
 in accordance with the Beinheim decision of the year 1425, 
 on the extinction of either of these two houses, the entire 
 county was to accrue to the survivors. Beyond question, the 
 ancient treaty of succession had long ago lapsed, for, in the 
 peace of Lun6ville, both the owners had ceded the county to 
 France, receiving fivefold compensation for its loss. Never- 
 theless, Bavaria now demanded further compensation in case 
 the last issue of the first marriage of Charles Frederick 
 should die. This extinct hereditary claim to Sponheim was 
 to restore to the Bavarian crown prince the desired " cradle " 
 of his fathers, the castle of Heidelberg, together with Mannheim 
 and the beautiful Lobdengau ; what a compensation for the 
 impoverished little territory in Hunsruck, for a domain of 
 twenty-three thousand inhabitants ! Here was a tissue of 
 legal artifices which showed once more how completely the 
 Rhenish Confederate policy had deprived the petty courts of 
 all shame and of all sentiment of justice. 
 
 The situation of the court of Carlsruhe became more sinister 
 day by day. The grand duke had returned from the congress 
 of Vienna still weaker than before. He regarded his nephew, 
 
 670 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 the crown prince of Bavaria, as his sworn enemy, and declared 
 in bitter jest that it was unprecedented that a grown man 
 should long so greatly for his cradle. In a moment of morbid 
 irritability he went so far as to suspect that while he was 
 in Vienna the Bavarians had mixed poison with his food. In 
 the year 1812 his own heir had died, immediately after birth. 
 In May, 1816, another son was bom to him, but died suddenly 
 also, a year later. Gloomy reports circulated through the 
 town. Why was it that death had snatched away both the 
 prince's sons, while the princesses all remained aUve ? Was 
 it not possible that the restless Wittelsbach inheritance-snatcher 
 had his hand here at work ? The Bavarian envoy actually 
 encouraged the insane suspicion by referring everywhere, with 
 malicious deUght, to the prince's misfortune, significantly adding 
 that in such visitations one could recognise the destiny of a 
 declining state. ^ Of the old Zahringen line there was now only 
 one survivor, the grand duke's unmarried uncle. Margrave 
 Louis ; should he also die, the crown would then devolve upon 
 coimt Leopold von Hochberg, whose claim was disputed by the 
 court of Munich. 
 
 Nothing but the protection of the great powers could save 
 the djmasty from destruction, yet the grand duke could not 
 make up his mind to the dismissal of the wretched minister 
 who was chiefly responsible for the desperate situation of the 
 country, and whose reputation in all the courts was of the 
 worst. Baron von Hacke, a rough and frivolous epicure of 
 the school of the old Maimheim court, had been a willing 
 catchpoll to the Imperator, and still continued to practise the 
 Rhenish Confederate poUcy, in so far as his incurable laziness 
 permitted. Even at the peace congresses of Paris he had 
 endeavoured to found a separate league of the middle-sized 
 states, and towards the Bundestag he displayed himself an 
 obstinate particularist. He treated the Bavarian claims with 
 irresponsible levity, while the cession of the Palatinate in 
 exchange for monetary pajonent seemed to him not unaccept- 
 able, so that the Prussian charg6 d'affaires, Vamhagen, wrote to 
 the chancellor : " If the grand duchy of Baden is to continue to 
 exist, it must be actually forced to do so."* 
 
 No progress was made in the matter of constitution-building. 
 Upon urgent representations from Stein and Czar Alexander, 
 
 * Varnhagen's Report, January 4, 1817. 
 
 2 Varnhagen's Report, Carlsruhe, May il, 1817. 
 
 671 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the grand duke, whilst still in Vienna, had summoned a commission 
 to discuss the new fundamental law ; and in the spring of 1815, 
 this body drafted a constitution, based upon a proposal brought 
 forward by Baron von Marschall, a good patriot of the best 
 days of Charles Frederick. The alarms of war of the following 
 summer brought all this to nothing. Thereupon the lowland 
 nobility took action, demanding in repeated and menacing 
 petitions the fulfilment of article 13, using language as defiant 
 as that which had long before been Employed by the Landschadens 
 of Steinach and the other knightly associates of Franz von 
 Sickingen in converse with their neighbour princes. Massenbach 
 and Count Waldeck, the noble demagogues from Wiirtemberg, 
 gave eager assistance ; and even from bourgeois circles written 
 petitions were |sent in. The government, in accordance with 
 Old Rhenish Confederate custom, visited the complaining 
 knights with severe punishment, and Martin, professor of 
 criminal law at Heidelberg, was forced to resign his position. 
 None the less, the work of constitution-building was once more 
 set in motion. In March, 1816, the grand duke formally promised 
 his people to summon a representative assembly on August ist, 
 and in the course of the summer a third and a fourth proposal 
 were in fact elaborated. Yet on this occasion, too, no decision 
 was attained. Whilst Marschall, an honourable constitutionalist, 
 urgently advised that the dissatisfied knighthood should be 
 conciliated by the constitution of an upper chamber, the 
 Bonapartist officials, secret enemies of the constitution, 
 expressed decisive opinions in favour of the unicameral system 
 being suspicious of the nobles as bom enemies of the 
 officialdom, and the doctrinaire hatred of the nobiMty inspiring 
 the Prussian charge d'affaires played into their hands. Quite 
 uninvited, and without even consulting Berlin, Varnhagen gave 
 his advice to the court of Carlsruhe, advice which strangely 
 coincided in all respects with the infallible law of reason voiced 
 by his friend Rotteck. " A chamber of nobles might aU too 
 readily endanger the throne at the expense of the people. Who 
 were the first in Wiirtemberg to utter revolutionary language ? " 
 If there must be an upper chamber, let it consist of men dis- 
 tinguished by age or official position. " These propositions," 
 he concluded, with all the self-satisfaction of youthful liberalism, 
 " are truisms, and posterity wiU never be able to understand 
 why they have not been universally accepted. ^ 
 
 ' Varnhagen to Berstett, May 8, 1816. 
 672 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 Amid these and other disputes, a considerable time now 
 elapsed, until at length the opponents of reform succeeded in 
 persuading the irresolute prince to aj fresh procrastination. 
 On July 29th, at the very moment when everyone was expect- 
 ing the promised summoning of the Landtag, the country was 
 astonished by a rescript postponing the promulgation of the 
 constitution, and declaring that, first of all, the Bundestag must 
 estabhsh the leading principles for the German territorial consti- 
 tutions. Such were the words that issued from the mouth of the 
 very prince who had concerned himself with constitutional plans 
 solely because he wished to safeguard his sovereignty against 
 the encroachment of the Germanic Federation ! The disap- 
 pointment, the wrath, were general. Here, where there were 
 so many genuine grievances, the folly of inconsiderate promises 
 was ptmished more severely than in Prussia. A poisonous 
 lampoon entitled A Picture of the grand duchy of Baden 
 pilloried the gluttonous minister Hacke, who wished to turn 
 the whole country into sucking-pig and asparagus ! The 
 troubles were augmented by the distresses of the year of famine 
 and by the increasing pressure of taxation. In the highlands 
 there was open disaffection when it suddenly became known 
 that, from considerations of economy, the government was 
 thinking of amalgamating the university of Freiburg with that 
 of Heidelberg. All the inhabitants of Breisgau regarded this 
 plan as an attack upon their ancient hberties. Rotteck vigor- 
 ously espoused the cause of his countrymen, for he was well 
 aware that his Josephan sentiments could not permanently 
 thrive in the Protestant air of the Palatinate. The government 
 did not feel competent to overcome this fierce opposition. The 
 unlucky idea was abandoned, and the venerable Albertina uni- 
 versity was preserved, a modest but fruitful centre of culture 
 for the highlands, a continued source of such life as its founder. 
 Archduke Albert, had desired. 
 
 Meanwhile the unfortunate country was visited also by 
 religious confusions — ^by a dispute with the curia, which was 
 to be almost as fruitful for German religious policy as the 
 struggle concerning the Bavarian concordat, for it completed 
 the defeat of the schemes for the foundation of a national 
 church. For years Heinrich von Wessenberg had administered 
 the bishopric of Constance as vicar-general. Esteemed dike by 
 clerics and laymen were his lenity, his conscientious activity, the 
 
 673 2X 
 
History of Germany 
 
 apostolic purity of his life ; and from the hands of their beloved 
 shepherd they willingly accepted innovations which gave expres- 
 sion to the Josephan enhghtenment of the highlands, but which 
 could hardly be reconciled with the strict unity of the Roman 
 church. Wessenberg introduced German devotional books into 
 the congregations ; he had the Bible, which he was fond of calling 
 the book of liberated humanity, circulated among his flock 
 in German translation ; he reduced the excessive number of 
 feast-days, and permitted the celebration of mixed marriages, 
 on condition that the children were brought up in the 
 respective faiths in accordance with their sex. In the matter 
 of rehgious services, he endeavoured to unite the formal beauty 
 of the Cathohc ritual with the impressive doctrines of the 
 Protestants. Even at the present day, old people on the lake 
 of Constance love to tell how splendid it was at that time in 
 church, when the sermon received as full justice as the mass. 
 His seminary for priests at Meersburg gave a thorough scientific 
 instruction to aspirants for the priesthood, bringing them up 
 in the principles of a pacific and broad-minded tolerance which, 
 indeed, in certain cases led to an imclerical vagueness of mind. 
 It was not long before the little clerical party of the bishopric 
 began to complain at Rome about the heretical iimovator ; the 
 curia expressed its disapprobation on several occasions, and the 
 nuncio at Lucerne was at open feud with the vicar-general. 
 
 Wessenberg, however, had no idea that the grandiose consist- 
 ency of the Roman church leaves to the Christian the sole choice 
 between subordination and apostacy ; he imagined that he 
 could resist the pope's orders and yet remain a Catholic prince 
 of the church. It was not given to this man of pious and 
 affectionate nature to understand the great contrasts of ecclesias- 
 tical fife in their pitiless severity. By diligent reading, emd 
 in intercourse with the learned prelates of the old days, he 
 had acquired an abundance of the most varied ktiowledge, and 
 yet had never got beyond the stage of scientific dilettantism. 
 The munerous poetical, philosophical, and political writings, and 
 the works dealing with ecclesiastical history, which he published 
 for the diffusion of " sentiments of Christian philanthropy," 
 ultimately effected nothing more than the formulation of weU- 
 meaning moral considerations. They were never utterly trite, 
 but they were never profoimd, vigorous, or individual ; not 
 one of his books acquired any place in literatiure. From child- 
 hood he had grown up to venerate Joseph II, had been an 
 
 674 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 enthusiast for Sailers gentle Catholicism, without entering 
 deeply into the brilhant mysticism of the Bavarian prelate, and he 
 now hved in the honourable behef that it was possible to make 
 the wheel of time turn backwards, and to lead the strongly 
 centralised church of the coimter-reformation to accept without 
 demur the reforming ideas of the fifteenth centmy. 
 
 Nevertheless he remained a thoroughly sincere Cathohc, 
 and despite all his tolerance he rejected the "immeasurable sub- 
 jectivity " of Protestantism. Whilst to the horror of the 
 clericcils he regarded the evangeUcals as a party withiuj the 
 church, this served only to show how firmly he behevedin the 
 unity of the visible church, in the eventual return of its erring 
 children. The priests under his immediate control, whom he 
 was accustomed to caJl together frequently in priestly assembhes, 
 honomred him as a saint. As a distinguished man with a 
 knowledge of the world, he felt himself superior to the plebeian 
 clergy who were now growing up around him, whilst to his 
 fellow aristocrats he appeared a miracle of learning. The conse- 
 quence was that he gradually passed into a mood of excessive 
 self-esteem, although to his gentle spirit arrogance was 
 primitiveiy altogether unknown. He saw the Jesuits engaged 
 " in replacing the rehgion of the spirit of love and of truth 
 with a compost of formal Judaism and reconstructed 
 Peiganism," and he considered himself predestined to avert this 
 danger from the church. When the Society of Jesus was 
 re-estabhshed, he at once recognised the serious consequences 
 that would result from this step, and wrote wamingly to his 
 cousin Mettemich, to the effect that this order had at one 
 time been aboMshed through pressure from the Cathohc courts, 
 but that now the curia was bold enough to re-establish the 
 order without any consultation with the powers, and this offered 
 a gloomy prospect for the future. Mettemich returned an 
 indifferent answer to the effect that his emperor had nothing 
 to fear, for that in Austria the Jesuits would never again be 
 allowed to estabhsh themselves. 
 
 At about this time, Dalberg, as bishop of Constance, appomted 
 his vicar general as co-bishop, with the right of succession. 
 He immediately received a sharp reprimand from Rome, with 
 an order that he should forthwith deprive this iU-famed Wessen- 
 berg of his of&ce as vicar-general (November 2, 1814). The 
 timid primate was careful to keep the btdl secret, but did not 
 venture to carry through the nomination. The diocese remained 
 
 675 
 
History of Germany 
 
 in this remarkable condition until the death of Dalberg, where- 
 upon the chapter unanimously elected the vicar-general as 
 administrator. Once more the Vatican declared the election 
 null and void. In a papal brief, dated May 2i, 1817, the pope 
 now explained to the grand duke why he felt compelled to 
 reject this man, " one whom all good men look upon with 
 horror, one who is absolutely without our approval." The 
 grand duke, who had already sanctioned the election, wished his 
 prelate well, having been accustomed to ask his advice even in 
 political affairs, and he felt, moreover, that his princely honour 
 was affronted, for in accordance with the Josephan doctrine 
 of the Badenese officialdom, the nomination of the bishops was 
 one of the inalienable sovereign rights of the lord paramount. 
 Although the slothful Hacke counselled that a dispute should 
 be avoided, the prince nevertheless determined, upon MarschaU's 
 advice, 1 to maintain his reputed rights in a strongly worded 
 answer, and to defend the accused man (June i6th). 
 
 To Wessenberg, however, it seemed that the moment for 
 a great decision had now^ arrived. Armed with a letter of 
 recommendation from his court, he went in person to Rome, 
 hoping, as he openly declared, that he would either by the 
 force of his personal intervention induce the pope to change his 
 mind, or else that his failure would lead the nation to take 
 a more vigorous resolution. His maladroit admirers, of whom 
 he had but too many, in the public press, did not hesitate 
 to compare this pilgrimage to Rome with Martin Luther's 
 journey to Worms, although the new Luther was under the 
 powerful protection of the Austrian embassy, and could at any 
 time find a safe asylum in the palace at Venice. In the 
 Vatican, the German ideahst was received with the contemptuous 
 calm of an old world-power which has long been accustomed 
 to contemplate occasional disorder in one or other of its numerous 
 dioceses. He was not admitted to audience with the pope. 
 Cardinal Consalvi conducted the negotiations, cool and prudent 
 as ever, subnutting to the prelate a recantation which, in the 
 Roman view, was couched in extremely mild terms. Wessen- 
 berg was simply to disavow what his hohness had disavowed. 
 For some months accusations and letters of defence passed 
 between the two. Consalvi remcdned absolutely firm. 
 Wessenberg had lost the game, for he would neither follow 
 the example of his beloved Fenelon and sign a recantation 
 ^ Varnhagen's Report, July i, 1817. 
 676 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 " which would have enslaved him to the Roman curia," nor 
 yet would apostatise from holy church. On December i6th 
 he informed the cardinal that he was about to return to Baden, 
 and would leave matters in the hands of his territorial 
 sovereign. 
 
 At home he was received by numerous signs of warm 
 approval. Almost the whole of the clergy of the diocese 
 remained loyal to him ; the officials, to whom the entire 
 ecclesiastical policy of the South German minor states was 
 entrusted, were all on his side ; Werkmeister, for instance, in 
 Wiirtemberg, and Koch in Nassau. He was supported also by 
 Kliiber's vigorous pen, and by the majority of the newspapers 
 and pamphlets which discussed the case. But there was no 
 sign of a stormy popular movement, for how could these 
 flabby half-measures arouse strong passion ? The Badenese 
 gow^emment allowed the offender to administer his diocese 
 unopposed, and the curia was prudent enough to remain silent 
 for the time. Rome could afford to wait ; for the grand duke 
 urgently desired the establishment of a Badenese territorial 
 bishopric, and this was impossible without the pope's good-will. 
 One hope still remained, the Bundestag. In a detailed 
 memorial, dated May 17, 1818, the court of Carlsruhe expounded 
 the course of affairs to the Germanic Federation, declaring in 
 conclusion that Baden " now considered the Constance dispute 
 to be a church matter which was the common concern of the 
 German nation." But since ecclesiastical affairs unquestionably 
 did not fall within the competence of the Federation, Baden 
 did not venture to bring forward a proposal in Frankfort, and 
 the Bundestag avoided all discussion of the affair. The 
 memorial was translated into almost all the languages of Europe, 
 and was widely circtilated at the courts and among the clergy. 
 For a time Rotteck and his friends continued to write pathetic- 
 ally in the newspapers of the great " German church dispute." 
 Then the movement became extinguished, without ever having 
 deeply permeated the masses of the people. It was only at 
 the little courts of the south-west that Wessenberg continued 
 to retain some influence. At one time these courts had opposed 
 his designs for a national church, on account of their 
 particularist anxieties, but now he appeared to them to be a 
 useful ally against the Roman see. He himself at length 
 began to recognise the impracticabihty of his eariier dreams, 
 and soon after his return published an anonymous writing, 
 
 677 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Considerations upon the Relationships of the Catholic Church 
 of Germany, in which he recommended the institution of 
 territorial bishoprics, but at the same time demanded that the 
 German governments, or as many of them as were inclined to 
 do so, should combine to treat jointly with the curia, and to 
 subordinate their territorial bishoprics to a common archbishop. 
 In this way, the German national church shrank to the 
 dimensions of an ecclesiastico-political Sonderbund of German 
 individual states. 
 
 The courts of Carlsruhe and Stuttgart had for some time 
 been occupied with this idea on their own account. After 
 Bavaria had received such a shameful defeat in Rome, they 
 no longer ventured to credit themselves with the possession of 
 the energy which would enable them individually to effect 
 anything with the curia ; but if such powers as Baden, Wiirtem- 
 berg, and Nassau were to collaborate, the pope would inevitably 
 be forced to yield. Wangenheim advocated this plan in Frank- 
 fort, with fiery zeal. Here at length the opportunity offered 
 of founding the desired federation within a federation, the 
 German trias, and by the humiliation of Rome, to prove to 
 all the world the power of " genuine Germany." Extra- 
 ordinary contradictions were able to live peacefully side by side 
 in this versatile head. For example, notwithstanding his 
 enthusiasm for natural philosophy, he remained a doctrinaire 
 liberal, and was at the same time an advocate of the Josephan 
 omnipotence of the state. He had a very low opinion of the 
 vital energies of the Roman see, believing that he could already 
 discern in Germany the indications of schism, although the 
 enormous majority of German'' Catholics remained absolutely 
 faithful to their ancient church, and he confidently hoped that 
 the curia would soon be led by fear to concede all that 
 might be demanded of it. In December, 1817, Wangenheim 
 applied to the federal envoys of Baden, Nassau, the two Hesses, 
 Hanover, Oldenburg, and Luxemburg, and invited these courts, 
 through the instrumentality of their plentipotentiaries in Frankfort, 
 to agree upon the principles of a concordat. The appended 
 proposal was almost identical with the ideas of Wessenberg. 
 It demanded the placet as indispensable, the nomination of 
 bishops by the territorial sovereigns, and the training of 
 priests by the state. The imaginative statesman fancied that 
 all this could immediately be secured by an ultimatum to the 
 holy see, although everyone knew that the pope had never yet 
 
 678 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 formally ceded the right of nominating bishops to any non- 
 Catholic prince. Baden, Nassau, and the two Hesses, accepted 
 the invitation, and in March, 1818, the Frankfort conferences 
 opened under the presidency of Wangenheim. A few of the 
 North German minor states, which were at first parties to the 
 conferences, speedily withdrew. The loudly trumpeted under- 
 taking soon became restricted to the design of instituting a 
 small common archdiocese which should be supreme over the 
 territorial bishoprics of the Upper Rhenish minor states. 
 
 Wangenheim had also vouchsafed an invitation to the 
 Prussian federal envoy. If the court of Berlin were willing to 
 accept the ecclesiastico-political leadership of Wiirtemburg, it 
 might be allowed to participate, but otherwise " genuine 
 Germany " would suffice for itself. Even the good-natured 
 Goltz was repelled by the idea that Prussia should be treated 
 in this casual way, as a mere accessory to the future Upper 
 Rhenish ecclesiastical province, nor could he understand (so he 
 wrote to the chancellor) why Wiirtemberg should always and 
 everjrwhere press to the front in this manner.^ Hardenberg 
 did not vouchsafe an exchange of notes, and contented himself 
 with informing his German envoys that Prussia held aloof from 
 the " conventicles of the minor courts," inasmuch as the peculiar 
 religious interests of the monarchy " could not endure any 
 intermingling," while the masterful tone assumed by the minor 
 states was not likely to secure any results from the Roman 
 see. Mettemich also regarded this undertaking of the Frankfort 
 allies as hopeless." Both the great powers knew that it was 
 no longer the pliable curia of the eighteenth century with 
 which they had to deal ; they knew, too, that Consalvi regarded 
 the Frankfort conferences as the work of Wessenberg, and there- 
 fore from the first looked upon them with suspicion. It was 
 unquestionably a disaster, one whose influence persists to the 
 present day, that even this great opportunity was sacrificed 
 to partictilarism. But so long as Germany lacked a national 
 state, a German national church remained an irrealisable dream. 
 
 Meanwhile a fortunate change had taken place at the court 
 of Carlsruhe. Hacke had received his dismissal, and the barons 
 von Reizenstein and Berstett had entered the ministry. Berstett 
 
 1 Wangenheim to Goltz, December 13 ; Goltz's Report, December 18, 1817. 
 
 2 Krusemark's Report, Vienna. April 22 ; Instructions to Krusemark, May 20, 
 
 679 
 
History of Germany 
 
 was a person of little account, no better informed than the 
 average of his old comrades in the Austrian cavalry, but con- 
 scientious and punctual in the fulfilment of his duties, uncondi- 
 tionally devoted to the princely house, and, notwithstanding 
 his ultra-conservative disposition, not so timid as to be afraid 
 of a Carlsruhe Landtag. Reizenstein, on the other hand, was 
 a man of statesmanlike intelligence, worthy of a greater sphere 
 of activity, and he had been the confidential adviser of Charles 
 Frederick in the latter's last years. Reizenstein, an object 
 of suspicion to the French as a German patriot, had co-operated 
 in all the reforms of that difficult time. It was to him that 
 was chiefly due the reanimation of the university of Heidelberg ; 
 not even the caste pride of the professors prevented their admit- 
 ting that the brilliant, learned, and thoroughly liberal-minded 
 curator was their equal. He immediately recognised that, after 
 the death of the heir to the throne, a definite decision upon 
 the question of the succession was essential, and induced the 
 grand duke to issue a decree on October 4, 1817, declaring 
 the indivisibihty of the country, and reiterating the right of 
 the counts of Hochberg to the succession. The Bavarian court 
 was infuriated, and diplomatic intercourse between Bavaria and 
 Baden was tacitly broken off. Even Mettemich, who was still 
 encouraging the Bavarians with ambiguous phrases, displayed 
 himself affronted. So arbitrary a step, he said to Krusemark, 
 could be explained only by the infatuation which had seized 
 the minor princes ; this decree reminded people strongly of 
 the one and indivisible repubUc of the French. ^ 
 
 The imperturbable minister in Carlsruhe did not allow 
 himself to be diverted from his purpose. Upon Reizenstein's 
 advice, the grand duke determined to take the bull by the horns, 
 to make an open attack upon the enemy who for years past 
 had in obscurity been threatening the little country. In a 
 letter to King Max Joseph, dated March 12, 1818, the 
 threatened prince declared that Austria was endeavouring to 
 pay her debts " with provinces which belong to me." " In 
 so serious a situation," he continued, "it is impossible for 
 me to separate the Bavarian government from its monarch, 
 to continue to see in the monarch my brother-in-law and 
 friend while the country displays itself as my most deadly 
 enemy." Should Bavaria employ force, " then I shall call 
 public opinion to my aid, and your majesty will with difficulty 
 
 1 Knisemark's Report, October i8, 1817. 
 680 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 find an ally equally powerful." Manifestly embarrassed. Max 
 Joseph's only way to meet this sharp accusation was his cus- 
 tomary one of telling a direct he. Never, he declared, had the 
 Bavarian government cherished any hostile plans towards 
 Baden ; Bavaria was content " quietly " to await the decision 
 of the great powers, These two letters were communicated 
 to certain friendly courts in the most profound confidence ; 
 shortly afterwards they appeared in print in a Hamburg liberal 
 newspaper, to the deUght of all slanderous tongues, the radicals 
 at home and the enemies of Germany abroad. 
 
 The traitor was Vamhagen von Ense, the vainest and most 
 untrustworthy of all the diplomats of Prussia. The youthful 
 husband of the celebrated Rahel burned with desire to display 
 himself worthy of his wife's renown by the performance 
 of statesmanlike deeds. During the congress of Vienna, he 
 had devoted his pen to the cause of Prussia, and subsequently 
 the grateful chancellor, who was readily bUnded by brilliant 
 conversation and many-sided culture, had appointed him to the 
 difficult post at Carlsruhe. With all the naivety of the literary 
 pedant, he at once began to practise politics on his own 
 account, overwhelming the co\ui of Baden with unsolicited 
 advice, defending revolutionary doctrines which ran utterly 
 counter to Hardenberg's opinions, and entering into confidential 
 intercourse with the Hberal party in a way quite inconsistent 
 with his official duty. Yet this bold hberalism by no means 
 prevented him from displa3dng a byzantine and servile devotion 
 towards the chancellor, continually asking for promotion, and 
 relating with circumstantial self-satisfaction how long the grand 
 duke and grand duchess had remained in conversation with him. 
 Nothing could be more sugary than his letters to Berstett, whom 
 he hated, and whom, at a later date, he calumniated in his 
 memoirs. A well-turned gigantic period of twenty lines hardly 
 served him to express how ardently " I anticipate and hope 
 to see accelerated your return from furlough, how I look forward 
 to renewed intercourse with a man I so cordially venerate, 
 a moment, if II may say so, for which I long with mcreasing 
 interest." ^ In ""endless reports he communicated to the chan- 
 cellor his judgments concerning matters of high policy and 
 communicated also his most] confidential intelligence, consisting 
 for the most part of utterly worthless items of gossip, quite in 
 the style of his subsequent diaries. Very rarely did he glean 
 ^ Varnhagen to Berstett, October 8, 1817. 
 681 
 
History of Germany 
 
 trustworthy information regarding the private proceedings of 
 the court of Carlsruhe, for no one had any real confidence 
 in the feline amiability of this smooth-spoken man. When 
 the constitution at length came into existence, Vamhagen did 
 not even know who was its author, and confidently communi- 
 cated to the chancellor two wrong names. ^ 
 
 His conduct in the Bavario-Badenese negotiations was 
 precisely indicated to him in advance from Berlin. He was 
 to assure the grand duke that Prussia would not tolerate any 
 exercise of force against Baden, but in other respects he was 
 to adopt a reserved attitude, and above all was to prevent 
 the detestable dispute from degenerating into any open scandal. 
 Accordingly he first of aU sent a report concerning the 
 grand duke's letter. The letter received his general censure 
 "as an ill-considered and in the best case a superfluous 
 procedure, which can lead only to a rebuff." Shortly after- 
 wards he broke his pledge of official secrecy, and sent 
 this censurable letter to the Hamburg newspaper. It was a 
 telling blow ; almost all the press expressed itself in favour 
 of the good rights of Baden ; even the Augsburger AUgemeine 
 Zeitung took side against Bavaria, for the prudent Cotta was 
 unwilling to lose the favour of the king of Wurtemberg. Now 
 Vamhagen wrote innocently, sajdng that the unauthorised publi- 
 cation had attracted great attention, but that the upshot seemed 
 favourable to the court of Baden ; " the appeal to pubUc 
 opinion in the grand duke's letter has powerfully deflected that 
 opinion to the side where it feels itself to be flattered."' 
 
 To retain the favour of public opinion on the side of 
 Baden, it was necessary to enter decisively into the channel of 
 constitutional politics. Reizenstein was under no illusion 
 upon this point. He also recognised that the promulgation of 
 the constitution was the only means by which the discontented 
 populace could be reinspired with confidence in the future of 
 the state, and by which, at the same time, the favour of 
 Czar Alexander could be regained for the house of Zahringen. 
 The czar displayed a very cool attitude towards the rights of 
 his Badenese cousins. It was he who, at the congress of 
 Vienna, had first mooted the unhappy idea of the restoration 
 of the Palatinate — so at least Wrede assured general Zastrow.' 
 
 1 Vamhagen's Report, August 26, 1816. 
 
 2 Varnhagen's Reports, March l8. May 6, 1818. 
 ^ Zastrow's Report, Munich, November 2, 1818, 
 
 683 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 As far as Munich was concerned, nothing was spared to keep 
 the Russian well-wisher in a good humour ; the envoy, Count 
 Bray, laid before the czar for his approval all the new consti- 
 tutional laws designed for Bavaria, and to the Russian autocrat 
 none of the proposals seemed sufficiently liberal.^ It was in 
 these days that Alexander's Christo-hberal enthusiasm reached 
 its climax. For the anxious letters of Mettemich, who to his 
 friend Nesselrode was continually describing " the serious disease 
 that affects Europe," Alexander had merely a contemptuous 
 smile. How much finer did it sound when the emotional 
 Capodistrias, who was now Alexander's honoured confidant, 
 ardently announced his central principle, " institutions are the 
 great demand of the century ! " On March 27, 1818, the czar 
 opened the first Reichstag of the new kingdom of Poland, in 
 a moving address from the throne which resounded throughout 
 Europe. It demanded from the Poles that they should prove 
 to their contemporaries that Uberal institutions, in conjunction 
 with order, constitute the true happiness of the nations, and 
 it promised the Russians that in a short time they should 
 participate in the like happiness. 
 
 Two days later, Capodistrias, in a memorial " concerning 
 the act of September 26, 1815," boldly attempted to expound 
 to the courts of Europe that the new constitutional sovereignty 
 was nothing other than the necessary outcome of the ideas 
 of the Holy AlUance. The principles of the Christian moral 
 doctrine recognised by the Holy Alliance, he assured them in 
 unctuous terms, had now found their application in Poland ; 
 it might be hoped that the lofty wisdom of his majesty's allies 
 would do justice to this example. " To the states which already 
 enjoy liberal institutions, the example will show that only 
 the fatherly authority of princes has the power of granting 
 constitutions, and that these institutions, thus apphed for the 
 purpose of general welfare, are not merely compatible with order, 
 but even constitute the most powerful guarantee of order. The 
 example of Poland will prove to the nations that the course 
 of civic freedom is" henceforward open to aU peoples." 
 " Perhaps," he said in conclusion, " even now these con- 
 siderations may be regarded as belonging to the realm of dream- 
 land . So be it. We ourselves, however, are assured that^ they 
 are no dreams, and we endeavour to establish the same conviction 
 
 1 Blittersdorf's Report, St. Petersburg, August 17, 1818. 
 683 
 
History of Germany 
 
 among those who exhibit to us their devotion" ^ Thus 
 Russia formally placed herself at the head of the liberal move- 
 ment of Europe. The German cabinets, however, had good 
 reasons for keeping the wonderful programme of Christian 
 liberalism a dead secret. The czar's address from the throne 
 had already sufficed to cause a lively excitement among 
 impatient constitutionalists ; the whole liberal press broke out 
 into comparisons between Polish freedom and German slavery. 
 Mettemich, WeUington, and Richelieu did not conceal their 
 anxieties. Gentz bitterly complained of the czar's lack of con- 
 sideration for his neighbours. Even men of more courage asked 
 in astonishment why anyone should play with fire in this way 
 among the Poles, who were already once more entering into 
 secret conspiracies against the Russian yoke. 
 
 For the court of Baden no choice was now left. Again 
 and again Blittersdorf reported how urgently Capodistrias was 
 reminding him of the promised " institutions." Hardenberg, 
 too, repeatedly expressed the same warning, simultaneously 
 recommending that the well-grounded desires of the mediatised 
 should be satisfied, for in this way " the endeavours of Bavaria 
 would be completely neutralised." ^ As early as April the 
 constituent committee reassembled. The financial adviser 
 Nebenius, the most learned political economist in Germany, 
 diligently elaborated a fifth proposal, taking as his model the 
 master work of the Russian well-wisher, the glorious Polish 
 constitution. Then came the alarming news from Munich that 
 Bavaria had completed her constitution, that the rival in the 
 great race had won by a head ! To timid spirits the threaten- 
 ing chorus of approval of the liberal world sounded like the 
 death-knell of the house of Zahringen. Max Joseph, how- 
 ever, did not regard it as inconsistent with his royal dignity 
 to choose this particular moment for a cure at Baden-Baden, 
 where, after his cheerful manner, he announced to everyone 
 what a splendid thing it was that Bavaria had established 
 its constitution first ! As soon as this friendly visit to his 
 dominion was announced to the grand duke Charles, the latter 
 immediately left his palace in Baden and went to the quiet 
 Black Forest spa of Griesbach, and the whole court left Baden 
 with him. One only remained — of course Varnhagen. He 
 could not deny himself the opportunity of displa5dng his political 
 
 ^ Capodistrias, Mimoire sur I'acte du 26 Septembre, Warsaw, March 29, 1818. 
 2 Instructions to Varnhagen, July 11, i8i8. 
 
 684 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 light before the king of Bavaria, to whom he was not 
 accredited. He forced himself into the presence of Max Joseph, 
 and, once more on his own initiative, gave the king such tact- 
 less and unveracious declarations concerning the intentions of 
 the Prussian court that a great diplomatic dispute ensued. A 
 sharp reprimand from BerUn at length quieted his mischievous 
 tongue.^ 
 
 Meanwhile, in the evening of his tragical days, the grand 
 
 duke had found another personal friend, the bold Russian 
 
 cavalry leader of the War of Liberation, General Tettenbom, 
 
 a native of Baden. The cheerful mercenary soldier was the 
 
 daily companion of the sick man, and employed his influence 
 
 for the good of the covmtry. Though no friend of the liberals, 
 
 he nevertheless possessed a secure soldierly insight into what 
 
 was inevitable. It was thanks to him and to the loyal Reizen- 
 
 stein that the prince at length examined Nebenius' proposal, 
 
 and ultimately adopted it quite unaltered except for one single 
 
 paragraph.^ Even during the final weeks, distressing incidents 
 
 were not lacking. The much-worried Nebenius had to elaborate 
 
 the new electoral law a second time, because the grand duke 
 
 had locked up the dociunent, and could not make up his mind 
 
 to have the box unlocked again. 
 
 Enough, on August 22, 1818, the constitution was signed, 
 and the effect of this step was even stronger here than had 
 shortly before been that of the promulgation of the constitution 
 in Bavaria. The discontented spirits in the new territories 
 were momentarily silenced. Round the sick-bed of the dying 
 prince were now heard the jos^ul acclamations of a grateful 
 people which expected an indefinite and wonderful happiness 
 from the new Uberties. The infaUible judge, however, public 
 opinion in Germany (that is to say, the Uberal press), gave 
 judgment as follows on the competition now concluded: 
 Bavaria has shown itself brisker in the fulfihnent of the popular 
 wish, and yet the prize must be allotted to the liberal-minded 
 Baden. Certainly the Badenese fundamental law, as might 
 be expected from the character of the country, exhibited a 
 modem aspect. Whilst the Bavarian Landtag consisted princi- 
 paUy of landowners, Nebenius, a true son of a hterary 
 generation, started from the standpoint that culture chiefly 
 must be represented; and since, like aU liberals, he sought 
 
 1 Instructions to Varnhagen, July 22, August 22, 1818. 
 
 a F. von Weech, History of the Badenese Constitutxon, pp. 93 et seq. 
 
 685 
 
History of Germany 
 
 culture in the towns, the JBadenese electoral law gave to fourteen 
 towns twenty-two representatives, whilst to the rural electoral 
 districts, whose population was far greater, were allotted only 
 forty-one representatives. Speaking generally, the work did 
 honour to the practical sense of the learned compiler. The 
 fundamental law was not overloaded with particular provisions, 
 so that room was still left to profit by the teachings of constitu- 
 tional experience, and it was only in outward features, in the 
 formal arrangement, that it resembled the disastrous PoUsh 
 example. The nobihty was satisfied by the constitution of an 
 upper chamber ; the Landtag received an effective power of 
 control, for every two years the entire budget must be sub- 
 mitted to it. Even Haller, " the restorer," had to recognise 
 the German sense of justice which found expression in this 
 constitution, " although," he said, " it has the supreme defect 
 of being a constitution at all." 
 
 With all this, however, the Palatinate was not yet safe- 
 guarded. The four powers in whose hands the decision lay had 
 made up their minds that the matter should be finally settled 
 in the congress which was to take place in the ensuing autumn. 
 But the impatience of the court of Mrmich was hardly to be 
 controlled, for the health of the grand duke declined day by 
 day. Both Max Joseph^and his minister Rechberg declared 
 to the Prussian envoy that they were ready for a compromise, 
 but that if the grand duke should die before the compromise 
 had been effected then Bavaria would regard the Palatinate 
 as having escheated to her, and would enforce her rights.* 
 Soon afterwards reports were current in Carlsruhe that Bavaria 
 was arming, and was moving her troops to the Palatine frontier. 
 The grand duke now recalled all soldiers on furlough. The king 
 of Wiirtemberg also felt his country seriously threatened ; his 
 cherished plan of a " genuine German " trias was breaking to 
 pieces in his hands. On September 25th his envoy Gremp 
 had to ask the Bavarian minister if it was really true that the 
 king was thinking of carrying out a coup de main upon his 
 brother-in-law's death ; such a step " would have as a certain 
 consequence the effectual separation of Bavaria from the 
 Germanic Federation " ; a definite contradiction of the rumour 
 seemed urgently requisite, " above all the present moment, 
 when a straightforward understanding between 'genuine Ger- 
 man ' federal states is of such importance." In a disdainful 
 * Zastrow's Reports, August 5 and 30, 1818. 
 686 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 and arrogant reply, Rechberg expressed his amazement, saying : 
 " His majesty has not hitherto given a moment's thought to 
 the possibility of the event to which allusion is made in your 
 memorandum, an event whose only eiiect could be to fill him 
 with the profoimdest sorrow. "^ The gross dishonesty of this 
 asseveration sufl&ces to show that the suspicions of the court 
 of Carlsruhe were not unfounded. For the second time within 
 two years, the ambition of the Wittelsbach ruler threatened 
 to cause a civil war in Germany. The foreign press was 
 already aware of the new querelle aUemande. The rights of 
 Baden secured dubious aid from the Napoleonic diplomat 
 Bignon, who henceforward in all German affairs regularly 
 utUised his skilful pen on behalf of the rights of oppressed 
 petty princes. Meanwhile the weak vital flame of the grand 
 duke was not being extinguished with such speed as had been 
 anticipated ; the four powers had time in which to keep 
 Bavarian insolence within bounds. 
 
 § 4. NASSAU AND HESSE DARMSTADT. 
 
 In Nassau, too, the begimiings of constitutional Mfe were 
 not unaccompanied by storms. Here, even before the con- 
 gress of Vienna, on September i, 1814, a constitution had been 
 promulgated, and the aU-powerful minister Marschall plumed 
 himself on having led the way for the rest of Germany. But 
 the liberal world would not allow its darling Charles Augustus 
 of Weimar to be deprived of the glory of having been the 
 first constitutional prince, and the hberal world was right. For 
 although all the ofl&cials in Nassau had already taken the 
 oath of allegiance to the constitution, four and a half years 
 elapsed before the Landtag was summoned, and Marschall 
 utilised this interval to provide for the httle country 
 an abimdance of orgemic laws and to introduce a new glory 
 into German history — the centrahsed, unified state of Nassau. 
 Whilst the powerful house of Nassau-Orange in the Netherlands 
 had filled the world with its warUke renown, the history of 
 the last centuries had had hardly a word to say about the 
 German Nassauers beyond recording ever-repeated subdivisions 
 into new family lines of descent. They indulged this inborn 
 
 1 Memorandum from Gremp. September 35 ; Rechberg's Answer, September 
 29, 1818. 
 
 687 
 
History of Germany 
 
 passion of the German petty princes with a tenacity in which 
 they could give points even to the house of Wettin. For a 
 time in the Uttle town of Siegen here existed two Knes of 
 Nassau-Siegen, one CathoHc, the other Protestant, each in its 
 own palace, the two halves of the town being separated by 
 a high wall and a fiercej national hatred. But fortune was 
 unkind to these diligent endeavours, and the new lines, planted 
 out with such care, continually died out. In the year 1816, 
 succumbed the last of the Usingens, and now the line of Weil- 
 burg entered into exclusive possession of that fragment of 
 territory which, as Stein said jestingly, the plastic hand of 
 Gagern had in Paris and Vienna fashioned for the house of 
 Nassau. No other German minister vaimted so loudly as did 
 Marschall the legitimacy of his tribal princely house, and yet 
 this self-praise sounded nowhere more ridiculous than here, in a 
 country whose extent was only eighty-five square miles [German], 
 and in one which had a few years before been distributed 
 among seven-and-twenty different lords paramount. 
 
 After the cession of Saarbriicken, Lahr, and Siegen, little 
 was left of the ancient possessions of the house of Nassau, 
 nor had the Old Orange territories much more than the name 
 in common with the German ducal house. What could a petty 
 state offer to this vaHant people upon whom the sunshine of 
 world-wide renown had once shed its glories ? In the rough 
 mountains of Westerwald, and in the remote corners of Dilltal, 
 every house had stories to tell of the pilgrimages made by 
 their ancestors to Holland. Here was still standing the Hme 
 tree under whose shade WiUiam the Silent had received the 
 envoys of the Dutch rebels; and here was Herbom, at one 
 time the university of Calvinism, ever ready for battle ; but now, 
 instead of contentious theologians, peaceful tillers of the soil 
 passed through the Chaldaergasse of the quiet country town. 
 Still more indifferent to the new princely house were the Rhine 
 valley officials who had formerly worked for the Palatinate, for 
 Treves, or for Hesse. To the bigoted inhabitants of Electoral 
 Treves, it seemed hard that they should come to be lumped 
 together with the Protestants of Katzenellenbogen {Cattimeli- 
 bocus), and that the proud frontier fortresses of the two hostile 
 neighbours, " the Cat " and " the Mouse," should now lie in 
 niins ; but still harder did it seem that the wonder-working 
 pilgrimage church of Our Lady of Sorrows of Bornhofen should 
 immediately be closed by the bailiff of Nassau. Least of all 
 
 688 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 would the Rheingau of Electoral Mainz come to terms with 
 the new regime. For Rheingau was the Paradise of the 
 Rhenish joie de vivre, the delightful land where the poesy of 
 wine filled even poverty with rejoicing. Here, in the busy 
 market-towns and villages, situated so closely together on the 
 banks of the stream as almost to form a single town, revolu- 
 tionary arrogance was in the very air, and the minister did 
 all he could day by day to provide new material for the 
 mockery of the merry-witted people. 
 
 Since a ministry of state, together with a council of state, 
 a military staff, and a treasury, were manifestly insufficient for 
 the happiness of 300,000 souls, the organiser of Nassau added 
 a central governing board, which worked under the same roof 
 with the ministry, but which was allowed to communicate only 
 in writing with the supreme authority ; there were also twenty- 
 five local authorities, among which were the communes, whose 
 mayors nominated the government. Besides the lower courts, 
 there were two primary courts of appeal, and a supreme court 
 of appeal. This enormous army of uniformed officials was freed 
 for itself and for its children from the duty of military service, 
 enjoyed a privileged legal position, and rivalled the minister 
 in rudely despotic manners. The good President Ibell, a strict 
 but well-meaning and able official, did his best with the new 
 legislation, but could not make headway against Marschall's 
 e\dl example. The Prussian authorities had often occasion 
 to complain of the pugnacious arrogance of these neighbours ; 
 an agreement had already been arrived at with Prussia concern- 
 ing a military road, but Marschall wished subsequently to 
 make changes in this, and only gave way when General Wolzo- 
 gen in effect put a pistol to his head. Bureaucratic red-tape 
 remained undisturbed. When, after half a century, the new 
 duchy disappeared, the road through the thickly populated 
 Rhine valley had not even then been completed ; anyone 
 wishing to drive along the Rhine had to cross over to the 
 Prussian high-road on the left bank. 
 
 Thus the organisation of the boards and of the communes 
 was established without the help of the Landtag, although the 
 constitution promised the provincial diets that they should 
 co-operate in new legislation. There followed the separation 
 of the domain treasury from the tax treasury, an apparently 
 harmless measure, which was intended to pave the way for a 
 serious coup de main. This separation of the treasuries had 
 
 689 2 y 
 
History of Germany 
 
 hardly been completed when Marschall astonished the country 
 by announcing that all the domains were the private property 
 of the territorial sovereign, and thereby opened the endless 
 series of struggles concerning the royal domains which remained 
 for many ensuing decades a hateful peculiarity of German 
 particularism, and which helped to destroy the monarchical 
 sentiment of this primarily well-disposed population. The 
 question whether the royal domains belonged to the state or 
 to the princely house was certainly one difficult to decide, and 
 one which could not everywhere be answered in the same 
 manner, for most of the minor territories had as late as the 
 beginning of the new century been ruled in accordance with 
 the principles of the patrimonial state, and had therefore known 
 hardly anything of the distinction between constitutional law 
 and civil law. The political kingdom of the Hohenzollems had, 
 a hundred years before, declared the domains to be national 
 property ; Bavaria and some of the other great princely houses 
 now followed this example. On the other hand, the minor 
 princes were inclined to regard their countries as private estates, 
 and to consider their sovereignty simply as a right useful to 
 themselves ; they felt that their power reposed principally upon 
 their wealth, and hastened to secure their houses against the 
 vicissitudes of the future, for the fate of the mediatised was 
 before their eyes. Thus, in Nehenius' proposals for a constitu- 
 tion, there was only one point which aroused anxiety in the 
 mind of the grand duke of Baden, and he insisted that the 
 domains should be assigned to his house, as patrimonial pro- 
 perty. In Nassau, at least a portion of the claims of the 
 lord paramount were utterly without justification, - for the 
 domains of Electoral Mainz, that glorious vineyard of 
 Rheingau, whose wines were stored in the renowned monastery 
 cellars of Eberbach, had unquestionably belonged to the 
 archiepiscopal foundation, that is, to the state. 
 
 A fresh and still more astounding demand of Duke 
 William's at length threw the whole country into a fury. In 
 the year 1818, the revenues derived from hereditary servitude 
 were abolished, the lords of the soil receiving compensation for 
 their losses. A medal had been struck to commemorate this 
 act of enfranchisement effected by the house of Nassau. But 
 now the dxike, who inertly followed the lead of his masterful 
 minister, suddenly came forward with the demand that the 
 national treasury should pay him 140,000 florins yearly for the 
 
 690 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 long-before abolished dues of hereditary servitude on the royal 
 domains, which he himself had just annexed as his own property 
 by an arbitrary exercise of power ! Baron von Stein, who 
 from his castle at Nassau on the Lahn could watch what was 
 going on close at hand, could hardly find words sufficiently 
 strong for the expression of his contempt. "The time will 
 come," he said, " when this crime will be punished, and when 
 Providence will execute a severe judgment upon the criminal ; 
 of this I have no doubt whatever." 
 
 In March, 1818, the Landtag was at length summoned, and 
 it entered upon its work with a step which displayed all the 
 mental poverty of this officialdom — the exclusion of Stein. As 
 a Prussian subject, the baron could not take without reserva- 
 tion the oath which was demanded from the members of the 
 upper chamber. The government did not raise a finger in 
 order to secure some trifling concession in this purely formal 
 matter, and allowed the first man of the country to be 
 excluded from the chamber. What valuable work he could 
 have done here in the deplorable quarrel about the domains, 
 and in dealing with the insatiable monetary demands of the 
 father of the country ! The estates soon followed the example 
 of those of Old Wurtemberg, and rushed into a barren dispute 
 about rights, opposing injustice with injustice by desiring to 
 declare all the domains national property. This dispute con- 
 tinued for nearly twenty years, until the Landtag paid the 
 duke a portion of his claims ; but the legal questions involved 
 were never completely settled as long as the duchy existed. 
 Meanwhile, Marschall continued to rule light-heartedly in his 
 customary manner, deciding all things as he pleased by arbitrary 
 edicts, Down to the year 1848, only six laws of any importance 
 were laid before the Landtag. Nevertheless the Nassauers, 
 priding themselves upon their constitutional liberties, looked 
 down compassionately upon Prussian slavery. 
 
 Hesse-Darmstadt secured its constitution, the most artificial 
 among the state structures of the Confederation of the Rhine, 
 later than the other South German territories. The strangely 
 compounded land of Nassau at least constituted a connected 
 area ; but the territories which now received the names 
 of the grand duchy of Hesse and By-Rhine were dispersed 
 in two larger fragments, and in a number of smaller pieces 
 whose situation was known only to initiates, stretching from the 
 
 691 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Neckar valley of Wiirtemberg into the Westphalian mountains. 
 Especially in the Frankfort region, where the grand duchy came 
 into contact with four other states, there was to be found an 
 extraordinary variety of haphazard frontier-lands which pro- 
 cured for the federal city the favour of all the vagrants of 
 Mid-Germany. Anyone who was expelled from Darmstadt 
 took a short walk through Homburg or Nassau, and cheer- 
 fully found his way back again by another route. In 
 Odenwald there was even to be found a Badenese-Hessian 
 condominion, whose frontiers were altered ever and again 
 when a peasant sold a small area of land. To crown all, 
 these ornaments, of the map of Germany, were not, as were 
 the equally dispersed territorial fragments of Thuringia, an 
 inheritance from the Holy Empire, but were the work of up-to- 
 date German policy. 
 
 In the two centuries since its separation from the main 
 stem, the younger line of the Hessian house had frequently 
 changed its possessions. The landgraves of Darmstadt had 
 first ruled over no more than the upper county of Katzenellen- 
 bogen in Odenwald and a few strips of Wetterau. In 
 accordance with German princely custom, they manifested their 
 independence by continual quarrels with their cousins, and 
 as strict Lutherans always took the side of Austria, whilst 
 Cassel inclined to the reformed church, and was allied first 
 with Sweden and subsequently with Prussia ; the reformed 
 university of Marburg was counterpoised by the Lutheran 
 Giessen. Subsequently County Hanau-Lichtenberg was acquired, 
 and now the centre of gravity of the territory began to move 
 towards the left bank of the Rhine. The court resided by 
 preference in the beautiful castle of Buchsweiler, and in 
 Pirmasens created for itself a South German Potsdam for its 
 world-renowned giant guards. Even Caroline Henrietta, the 
 friend of Frederick the Great, known as " the great land- 
 gravine," was unable to disperse the spiritless tedium of this 
 land where people played at soldiers. The minister, Carl 
 Friedrich von Moser, had also to learn from his humiliating 
 dismissal that there was no place here for a fiery spirit who 
 wished " to disaccustom the Germans from a dog-like submissive- 
 ness." It was only through the presence of Merck and his 
 circle of friends that the quiet town of Darmstadt was able 
 to remain to some extent in touch with the new German 
 culture. During the wars of the Revolution, the trans-Rhenish 
 
 6<)2 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 possessions were lost, and the dynasty received in compensation, 
 among other regions, the remote duchy of Westphaha. After 
 the fall of Napoleon, this unnatural acquisition was also aban- 
 doned, in exchange for the narrow strip of land on the left 
 bank of the Rhine between Worms and Bingen. It was thus 
 that the new grand duchy first received its political character 
 through the treaties of Vienna at a later date than the other 
 High German states. Henceforward its history consisted of 
 the struggles between the left and the right bank of the river. 
 Except for certain Westphalian territories, the whole 
 country was South German, Franconian. Since ancient days, 
 the frontier between North German and South German civili- 
 sation had passed straight across the upper valley of the Lahn, 
 between Giessen and Marburg. But what contrasts existed 
 among these fragments of the Franconian stock. Of the two 
 provinces on the right bank of the Rhine, Upper Hesse was 
 entirely restricted to intercourse with the north, whilst Starken- 
 burg associated rather with the south. In both regions, urban 
 life w£is but little developed. Neither the imperial cities of 
 Friedberg and Wimpfen, nor yet the charming Uttle towns dis- 
 persed among the vineyards of Bergstrasse, possessed a well- 
 developed bourgeoisie, one which would have been able to 
 encounter the grand duke's army of officials in an independent 
 spirit. In the lonely forest vaUeys of Odenwald, on the barren 
 heights of Vogelsberg, and even in the rich plain of Wetterau, 
 the peasants continued to practise many time-honoured customs. 
 The subjects of the numerous mediatised, of the Erbachs, the 
 Isenburgs, the Solms, and the Leiningens, still continued loytd 
 to their tribal dynasties. Mare especially County Erbach 
 remained a little world by itself. When the inhabitants of 
 Odenwald flocked annually to the favourite popular festival, 
 the Eulbach fair, they spoke ^only of the founder of the festival, 
 the artistic-minded count Francis, whose collections in the castle 
 of Erbach greatly excelled those in the Darmstadt museum ; 
 whilst everyone was disaffected towards the Hessian regime, 
 because its first effect had merely been to double the burden 
 of taxation. 
 
 How was the newly-acquired trans-Rhenish strip of terri- 
 tory, which now received the tasteless name of Rhenish Hessia, 
 to accommodate itself to these patriarchal conditions ? In 
 this region the peasants were almost more urbanised than in the 
 Bavarian Palatinate, and were perhaps even more eagerly devoted 
 
 693 
 
History of Germany 
 
 to "profiteering {das Profiiieren)," while the townsmen were accus- 
 tomed to wider relationships through the world intercourse of the 
 great river. Contemptuously did the citizens of Mainz look down 
 upon the miserable new capital city in the sand plain on the 
 river Darm, mocking at its servile-minded inhabitants; and 
 at the one and only referendary who at noon " swarmed " 
 into the Rheinstrasse. In golden Mainz there was now, indeed, 
 hardly to be heard a word of the great days of old, of the 
 power of the former imperial archchancellor, of the civic great- 
 ness of the Walpodens and of the Gensfleisches. The episcopal 
 city of St. Boniface, which had at one time been so glad to 
 term itself a true daughter of the Roman church, remained for 
 a generation the most revolutionary town in Rhineland, 
 and the one animated by the most ardent French sentiment. 
 The spirit of the lUmninates and the immorality of the later 
 electoral times had here encouraged the growth of a frivolous 
 and loquacious arrogance, which came to a climax in the arid 
 activities of the republican clubs, and which was not silenced 
 until the days of the strict Napoleonic regime. But now, 
 under a government which was at once weak and detested, this 
 movement again appeared in all its audacity. A short time 
 before, the bourgeoisie had greeted the German conqueror as 
 a liberator, and had wished ill to the retiring French who 
 had left traces of their barbarism in the desecrated cathedral 
 and in almost every street. But soon all this was forgotten. 
 Now people thought only of the services of the excellent pre- 
 fect, Jean Bon Saint-Andre, of the numerous advantages which 
 the Imperator had vouchsafed to his favourite German town, 
 and the code Napoleon was regarded as the bulwark of Rhenish 
 Hessian liberties. The new ruler had in fact guaranteed the 
 province the undisturbed enjoyment of its French institutions, 
 but the Mainzers knew very well with what dislike the Old 
 Hessian officialdom viewed this concession, and at every change 
 of ministry they trembled at the possibiUty of an attack upon 
 their territorial liberties. The deplorable quarrels among the 
 troops of the federal garrison, could hardly serve to strengthen 
 the prestige of the German regime ; and the Bundestag was 
 made a mock of, if only for the reason that it sat in Frank- 
 fort, for every child of Mainz drank in hatred of the neighbour 
 city with his mother's milk. Nor did Hessian Rhineland secure 
 any extensive share of the blessings of peace. In earlier days, 
 as long as the valley traffic predominated, Mainz had remained 
 
 694 
 
South German Constitutional Struggles 
 
 the chief town among the cities of the Rhine. But since 
 colonial trade had increased, and mountain roads had been 
 constructed, the centre of gravity of Rhenish trade necessarily 
 moved towards the mouth of the river. The illiberal legisla- 
 tion of electoral and of Napoleonic days continued for a time 
 to exercise a restrictive influence whereby the ports of Holland 
 were favoured at the expense of Cologne. It was only in the 
 nature of things that under the protection of the Prussian laws 
 Cologne should become the first commercial city of the Rhine, 
 but the men of Mainz ascribed this natural growth of their 
 ancient rival chiefly to the sins of omission of the Darmstadt 
 government. 
 
 To Hesse, the French particularism of the Rhinelanders 
 was far more dangerous than it was to Prussia or Bavaria, 
 for Rhenish Hessia comprised nearly one-third of the population 
 of the grand duchy, and in its economic development was 
 greatly in advance of the regions on the right bank of the 
 Rhine. In view of these difficulties, the grand duke Louis I 
 adopted in the first instance as his only resource a strict bureau- 
 cratic regime, a policy which in any case harmonised with 
 his inclinations and customs. He was the refounder of the 
 state, remaining on the throne for forty years from 1790, and 
 by servile Darmstadters was gladly compared with Charles 
 Frederick of Baden. In intelligence and magnanimity he was 
 unquestionably inferior to the Zahringen rulers. He had dis- 
 played his honourable intentions at the very outset of his reign 
 when he gave due satisfaction to the ill-used Carl Friedrich 
 von Moser. Towards the Imperator he did now show himself any 
 more servile than the majority of the Rhenish Confederate 
 princes. Prince Emil displayed greater zeal for the French 
 cause, thus acquiring the special favour of Napoleon, and after 
 the peace he long kept alive Bonapartist sentiment in the 
 vigorous little army. The difficult days of the Confederation 
 of the Rhine brought the country a Napoleonic prefectoral 
 system, the annihilation of all freedom of the communes, and 
 the inevitable abolition of feudal representative institutions ; 
 but it brought also many valuable reforms, such as the abolition 
 of serfdom, and the beginnings of that excellent agrarian legisla- 
 tion which was henceforward the pride of the Darmstadt official- 
 dom. To the prince's love of the arts, the capital owed the 
 theatre, the library, the museum, and the awakening of a more 
 vigorous intellectual life. Every year the principal families of 
 
 69s 
 
History of Germany 
 
 Darmstadt spent their summer holidays in the charming pleasure 
 palace of their patriarchal ruler at Fiirstenlager in Odenwald. 
 
 Like the other South German princes, the grand duke had 
 recognised at the congress of Vienna that a representative 
 constitution was inevitable. But on his return home, finding 
 plenty of work in the difficult task of incorporating Rhenish 
 Hessia, he postponed the decisive step from year to year. 
 Meanwhile the country, which was severely visited by the 
 distresses of the years of famine, began to grow restless. The 
 burden of taxation and the arbitrariness of the officialdom were 
 no longer to be borne. Disrespectful and threatening petitions 
 exhorted the grand duke to keep his word ; revolutionary pam- 
 phlets consoled the countryfolk with references to the approach- 
 ing revolution. At the university of Giessen, party spirit ran 
 high. F. G. Welcker, the talented philologian, had to resign his 
 professorship, because he was unable to get on with the cele- 
 brated Bonapartist, Crome. Finally, the people ventured to 
 hold great public meetings, begging the prince to establish the 
 longed-for constitution, the certain remedy for all earthly ills. 
 But all was still in vain. 
 
 Such was the situation of the south in the autumn of 1818. 
 In Wiirtemberg and Hesse there was a notable condition of 
 ferment; in Bavaria and Baden there were loud rejoicings 
 over the happily acquired new constitutions, with childish 
 dreams of the wonderful liberties which were to ensue. At 
 the same time among the students at the universities there 
 was in progress a turbulent movement which seemed to warn 
 the perturbed governments of the approach of a general revolu- 
 tion. 
 
 696 
 
APPENDIXES 
 
 TO 
 
 VOL. II. 
 I.— E. M. ARNDT AND WREDE. 
 
 (appendix to p. 19, VOL. II.) 
 
 In his well-known book Meine Wanderungen und Wande- 
 lungen mit dem Freiherrn vom Stein (p. 218), E. M. Amdt 
 relates the following incident : " Stein's anger against Wrede 
 had very special causes. Among all the German troops under 
 French command, the Bavarians and the Darmstadters had in 
 North Germany earned the most evil reputation for roughness, 
 lack of disciphne, and inclination to plunder. Wrede was 
 certainly blamed with justice, not merely for having looked on 
 while his men misbehaved themselves, but even for having 
 set them the worst possible example. Stein had now caught 
 him in the act. Wrede was stationed at Oels in Silesia, in 
 the castle of the duke of Brunswick. Here he had thoroughly 
 imitated the greedy and unashamed methods of the French 
 plunderers, the methods of Soult, Massena, and men of that 
 ilk, who made it their custom to pack up the silver (spoons 
 and plates) with which they were served by their hosts, and 
 to carry it off with their baggage. Thus Wrede, in Oels, quite 
 after the manner of a French marshal, had on his departure 
 added^all the ducal plate to his baggage. The unfortunate 
 steward of the castle had been able to do nothing to prevent 
 this, but lest he should himself be regarded as responsible for 
 the robbery of the ducal treasure, he asked the marshal for 
 a document to the effect that the silver had been handed over 
 
 697 
 
History of Germany 
 
 under stress of war. With German simplicity, and quite taken 
 by surprise, the field-marshal on his departure had actually 
 given the desired written assurance. Now, in the year 1813, this 
 paper fell into the hands of Stein, and in the following year 
 Wrede was forced to compensate for the robbery by the 
 payment of a handsome sum of money." 
 
 The form of this report produces the impression that it 
 was based upon Stein's own communications, that is to say, 
 that it was direct evidence ; it contains nothing antecedently 
 improbable, and is penned by a man whose strict love of truth 
 is well-known, whilst no less well-known is the astonishing 
 vigour of his memory, which was preserved into advanced age. 
 In Silesia the deplorable story was frequently repeated among 
 the circles of the older men who had had personal experience 
 of the French invasion, was repeated by them, as I Imow on 
 the best evidence, long before Arndt's book was published. 
 Consequently there was no reason to doubt its truth. 
 
 Arndt's book appeared in that blossoming time of arro- 
 gance of the middle-sized states which a few years later was 
 to find its punishment upon the battle-fields during the Main 
 campaign to 1866. The Bavarian government was not sufficiently 
 dignified to leave the events of a chapter of history which 
 had been closed for fifty years to the decision of historical 
 science, but had the author prosecuted for slandering the 
 Bavarian army. Many of my readers will still remember what 
 a painful attention this trial aroused throughout Germany. In 
 the initiation of this criminal procedure Amdt could see nothing 
 more than dehberate spite ; he refused to appear before the 
 Bavarian court, and in December, 1858, was sentenced in 
 contumaciam by the assizes of Zweibriicken to two months' 
 imprisonment. The decision of the court was inevitable, for 
 anyone who, in a matter where questions of honour are con- 
 cerned, fails to bring before the court evidence of the truth, 
 must necessarily be declared guilty of slander. But for the 
 historian, who is not bound by the forms of criminal pro- 
 cedure, this judgment was worthless. 
 
 Amdt himself considered the truth of his relation to be 
 absolutely inviolable, and in the course of the long newspaper 
 controversy which followed the trial he made the suggestion 
 on one occasion that Wrede's misdeed might perhaps have taken 
 place towards the end of February, 1807, for at this time, 
 according to recent information from Silesia, Bavarian troops 
 
 698 
 
Appendixes 
 
 had been domiciled in Oels. This suggestion was now utilised 
 by a Bavarian officer (presumably Major Ehrhard) to prove 
 the innocence of his hero (anonymous pamphlet, The Accusa- 
 tion of Wrede by E. M. Arndt, Munich, i860). He showed 
 that while it was quite true that Wrede's division had, on 
 February 23, 1807, visited Oels, on the way through to Poland, 
 at this time Wrede himself was still in Bavaria, on a sick-bed. 
 Still, this was plainly not enough to refute Amdt's relation, 
 for, regarding the precise date of the robbery, nothing more 
 had been put forward than unsupported suggestions, and the 
 possibility remained open that Wrede might have committed 
 the offence somewhat later in the year 1807. It was a proved 
 fact that in this year Wrede had twice been in Silesia. The 
 first occasion was in the end of March, when, having recovered 
 from his illness, he was joume3dng to join the army ; according 
 to the memoranda of a contemporary, which are to be found 
 in the town hbrary of Breslau, he was at Breslau on March 
 26th. Then, after the peace of Tilsit, and down to December 
 2nd, he was for several months in Silesia with his troops ; and 
 since the French and their allies, during this peaceful occupation, 
 are known to have behaved almost as arrogantly as previously 
 during the war, it was quite possible that the robbery might 
 have been effected at this period. Consequently Arndt did 
 not allow himself to be misled by the fallacious arguments 
 of Ehrhard's pamphlet ; he considered that he could trust his 
 own excellent memory, and reprinted his account unchanged 
 in subsequent editions of his book. Knowing my beloved old 
 teacher as well as I did, I considered it indubitable that he 
 must have had excellent reasons to hold so firmly to so 
 strongly contested a report, and therefore had no hesitation, 
 in a casual reference in the present work, to speak of this 
 report of Amdt's as unquestionably accurate. 
 
 Since then, however, a Bavarian, Major-General Heilmann, 
 has pubhshed a biography of Wrede, a valuable and instructive 
 work, which would certainly produce a more pleasing impression 
 if the author had not endeavoured to place an excellent mer- 
 cenary soldier, a man without a country, in the same rank 
 with our national heroes, with Scharnhorst, Blucher, and 
 Gneisenau. General Heilmann gives a detailed account of this 
 episode in the hfe of his hero, but advances no new data, 
 merely repeating Ehrhard's contentions. Without giving any 
 reasons, he simply assumes that the act of robbery must have 
 
 699 
 
History of Germany 
 
 taken place (if at all) between February 23rd and March 8th, 
 and, on this assumption, has no difficulty in establisliing an 
 alibi for Wrede. The gaps in this remarkable demonstration 
 are then concealed by the author by showering over old Arndt 
 an abundance of elegant epithets, which have very little in 
 common with the customary forms of scientific polemic. When 
 Arndt is described as being, in questions where historical truth 
 is concerned, " a careless old man," " credulous in his pre- 
 judices," " obstinate," one " whose political associates had com- 
 pletely turned his head," I have nothing more to say in answer 
 than that I also have been honoured with epithets more vigorous 
 than graceful. 
 
 When I was recently preparing a new edition of the first 
 volume, I naturally subjected to a fresh examination all those 
 passages which had been specially exposed to criticism, and 
 among them my remark about Wrede. Heilmann's book did 
 not give me sufficient information, and I therefore determined 
 to do myself that which Wrede's biographer had unfortunately 
 omitted to do, and made enquiries in Silesia. After I had 
 knocked vainly at various doors, I received at length from 
 Breslau (through the kindness of Herr Griinhagen, director 
 of the archives), and simultaneously from Oels, various reports, 
 which, all agreeing in essential points, completely contradicted 
 Amdt's assertion. Every unprejudiced person will understand 
 that the old man cannot have created simply out of his own 
 imagination the story that he relates with such confidence. If 
 we may beheve in any man's good faith, we can unquestionably 
 beheve in that of Arndt. It suffices to read in Heilmann's 
 own work the incredibly brutal letters in which Wrede expresses 
 his fury against " this devil, this fool of a Stein " ; so measure- 
 less a hatred as this is hardly explicable solely out of the 
 poUtical hostility between the two men. But how was it that 
 Arndt fell into this error ? Had Wrede carried out elsewhere 
 some forcible acts of robbery which secured for him in Silesia 
 the nickname, at one time widely diffused, of the " stealer of 
 spoons " ? Or was this evil reputation entirely undeserved, 
 and had Arndt confused two quite distinct persons ? I cannot 
 decide here. I learn from Munich that at this time there was 
 also serving in the Bavarian army a lieutenant-colonel Wrede, 
 of whom nothing more is known. However this may be, this 
 particular accusation against Wrede must definitely be dis- 
 missed as false. 
 
 700 
 
Appendixes 
 
 I have before me the memoranda of a deceased ducal 
 official of Brunswick who, during the years from 1806 onwards, 
 when quite a young man, lived in the castle of Oels, memoranda 
 which were placed on official record in July, 1858, owing to 
 the newspaper controversy which followed the pubUcation of 
 Arndt's book. According to this report, which is entirely 
 confirmed by the utterances of other officials whose evidence 
 was taken at the same time. Prince Jerome Napoleon and 
 General Lefebvre made their headquarters at the castle of 
 Oels for some days in December, 1806, at the time when the 
 siege of Breslau was begun ; they had with them French and 
 Bavarian troops. In these days (that is to say, not in February, 
 1807) part of the duke's plate and his team of greys were 
 stolen. The perpetrators of the robbery remained unknown. 
 All the reports voiced unanimous complaints regarding the 
 roughness of the Bavarian troops, but no one is able to say 
 whether French or Bavarian soldiers were the robbers. This 
 much, at least, is certain, that Wrede was then still in 
 Bavaria. The same memorial goes on to give the most specific 
 assurances possible that after that date, no Bavarian general 
 was ever quartered in the castle. Consequently Arndt's relation 
 falls to the ground. 
 
 However much I may regret that these facts have only 
 come to light when it is too late for Arndt to disclose to us 
 the sources of his error, it is none the less a great pleasure 
 to me to be able to afford Wrede's biographer a small contri- 
 bution for a new edition of his book. Perhaps he will now 
 recognise that we Prussian savages are, after all, better men 
 than he imagined. After his gentle manner, he says that 
 Arndt's " infamous lies will continue to be repeated in defiance 
 of all historical truth, and in mockery of all morality." He 
 must excuse me for contradicting him ; the accusation will 
 be repeated no longer, since it has been proved groundless. 
 But as long as there was nothing stronger to set against Arndt's 
 relation than the arbitrary and false assertion that the robbery 
 must have been effected in February, 1807, so long was every 
 historian justified in regarding as truthful the account given 
 in a book which is numbered amongst the best and most trust- 
 worthy memoirs of our day. The crimes of that Napoleonic 
 epoch have long ago been atoned by a faithful brotherhood 
 in arms, and we need no longer dread the return of the old 
 fratricidal struggles. It is time that we should contemplate 
 
 701 
 
History of Germany 
 
 with a certain equanimity these days that have passed away 
 for ever. Even the Bavarians should at length learn to speak 
 of the sins of that Rhenish Confederate age just as frankly 
 as every reasonable Prussian has long ago learned to speak 
 of the year 1806. But in this respect, unfortunately, the 
 Bavarians still fall far short of what might be wished. When, 
 not long ago, Gustav Freytag, in the last volume of his Ahnen, 
 described the conduct of the Bavarians in Silesia in terms 
 of strict historical truth, he was grossly abused on this account 
 by the Bavarian press. Thus, also, the gentle Heilmann, by 
 his excessive zeal for Bavaria, has secured a success which I 
 cannot grudge to so diligent an investigator. If, in the eluci- 
 dation of this Silesian episode, he had displayed somewhat less 
 indignation, and a somewhat more diligent investigatory spirit, 
 he might himself have established the proof, which I have had 
 to establish in his place, that Wrede took no part in the 
 robbery at Oels. 
 
 II.— BLUCHER UPON THE MUTINY AT LIEGE. 
 
 (appendix to p. 167, VOL. II.) 
 
 Field-Marshal Prince Blucher to King Frederick Augustus of 
 Saxony. 
 
 Your Majesty, 
 
 By your earlier proceedings your majesty has brought 
 the profoundest disaster upon your subjects, a respected branch 
 of the German nation. 
 
 It may result from your subsequent conduct that this 
 branch will be overwhelmed with shame. 
 
 The rebellion in the army, which has been organised from 
 Friedrichsfelde and Pressburg, has broken out, has broken out 
 at a time when the whole of Germany is rising against the 
 common enemy. The criminal offenders have openly proclaimed 
 Bonaparte *as their protector, and have forced me, who during 
 five-and-fifty years of active service have been in the fortunate 
 position of never shedding any blood but that of my enemies, 
 for the first time to carry out executions in my army. 
 
 702 
 
Appendixes 
 
 By the enclosure/ your majesty will see what I have 
 hitherto done in the hope of saving the honour of the Saxon 
 name, but it is the last attempt. 
 
 If my voice is not heard, I shall be compelled, not without 
 pain, but with the repose of my own good conscience and 
 sense of duty fulfilled, to restore order by force, and, if it 
 should be necessary, to have the entire Saxon army shot down. 
 
 The blood that has been spilled will one day at God's 
 judgment-seat be visited upon him who is responsible : and 
 before the throne of the Almighty to have given commands, 
 and to have allowed commands to be given, will be regarded 
 as identical. 
 
 Your majesty is well aware that an old man of seventy- 
 three can no longer have any other earthly desire than to 
 make the voice of truth audible and to make the right prevail. 
 
 For this reason yoiu: majesty will have to receive this 
 letter. 
 
 BLUCHER. 
 
 Headquarters at Liege, 
 
 May 6, 1815. 
 
 III.— TREITSCHKE'S PREFACE TO THE SECOND 
 VOLUME OF THE GERMAN EDITION. 
 
 [In the English edition, the matter corresponding to this 
 volimie begins with the chapter entitled " Mental Currents of 
 the First Years of Peace " and ends with the close of the 
 chapter (in Vol. Ill of the English edition) entitled " The 
 Change of Mood at the Prussian Court."] 
 
 To my historical colleagues this volume will display more 
 evidence of new historical research than did the first. Lay 
 readers, I fear, will require to make an effort before they will 
 be able to read these dry materials. 
 
 In an epoch of world-moving events such as the first 
 volume had to describe, the complex variety of German history 
 was still capable of being to some extent compressed into a 
 single view. But when it becomes necessary to demonstrate 
 
 1 Enclosed was the well-known proclamation ot Blucher to the soldiers of the 
 Saxon army-corps dated May 6, 1815. 
 
 703 
 
History of Germany 
 
 the almost imperceptible germs of new developments during a 
 quiet period of peace, the historian experiences in his own 
 flesh and blood the curse of a disintegrated national Ufe. It 
 is simply impossible to recount strictly in chronological order 
 events which took place on twenty or more petty stages simul- 
 taneously. I have therefore placed general German and 
 Prussian affairs in the lime-light, touching upon the history of 
 the minor federal states wherever this was significant in rela- 
 tion to the destiny of the fatherland as a whole. Consequently, 
 in this volume the South German constitutional struggles and 
 the literary and political movement in Thuringia are discussed 
 in detail. The right place for the consideration of the minor 
 North German states will be in the third volume, when the 
 question comes to be answered why it was that the South 
 entered the Prussian customs-union earlier than the North. I 
 need offer no excuse for giving a detailed description of the 
 opening proceedings of the Bundestag, notwithstanding the 
 futility of these proceedings. The subsequent course of events 
 would be incomprehensible without a vivid picture of the 
 character of the new federal authority. 
 
 The references in the notes are for the most part to 
 unprinted documents, for a complete reference to authorities 
 would have swelled the book to too great a size. As it is, 
 the work has become more comprehensive than I desired. So 
 confused a history, and one so much distorted by party fables, 
 can be mastered only by a very thorough treatment, and I 
 was forced to decide to distribute the events down to the 
 year 1830 through two volimies. 
 
 These pages contain the record of many painful experiences. 
 If I wished to peld to the mood of the moment, and to 
 write history as a partisan, I would gladly draw a veil over 
 many of the old sins of Austria and of the German thrones, 
 for in the present ordering of German affairs our high nobility 
 manifests itself more perspicacious and readier for sacrifices 
 than a great proportion of the bourgeoisie, and no one but a 
 fool would wish to disturb the friendship which unites our state 
 with Austria. My task was to give a faithful account of what 
 has actually happened. The position of the monarchy in our 
 fatherland can only be advantaged if Germany's princes should 
 not forget the gloomy days when their forefathers were on the 
 point of becoming completely estranged from the national life ; 
 on the other hand, our free alliance with Austria will stand 
 
 704 
 
Appendixes 
 
 all the more firmly, the more frankly it is recognised by both 
 parties that Germany was justified in refusing to accept any 
 longer the dominion of the court of Vienna. 
 
 Despite all its errors and disillusionments, the greatly 
 maligned epoch which the present volume describes was not 
 only rich in scientific renown, but was also fruitful for our 
 political life. Unless I have struck an entirely false note, 
 my readers will receive the impression that they have under 
 their eyes the history of a rising nation. 
 
 HEINRICH VON TREITSCHKE. 
 Rome, 
 
 October 20, 1882. 
 
 PREFACE TO FOURTH EDITION. 
 
 Few changes have been made, in this new edition. The 
 two concluding chapters, however, contain some supplementary 
 data, based upon materials derived from the State Archives 
 in Weimar. 
 
 T. 
 Berlin, 
 
 May 30, 1892. 
 
 IV.— SCHMALZ AND THE ORDER OF THE RED 
 
 EAGLE. 
 
 (appendix to pp. 367 AND 368, VOL. II.) 
 
 A LAMPOON which Professor H. Baumgarten has pubhshed 
 in Strasburg, under the title of Treitschke's German History, 
 contains, amid a desert of vulgarly expressed abuse and sus- 
 picion, which I will leave others to deal with, a few isolated 
 attempts at refutation in matters of fact. Among these there 
 is not a single one which need induce me to change a word 
 in my book, although I am quite willing to learn even from an 
 abusive opponent. 
 
 Baumgarten blames me for servile flattery of King 
 Frederick William III — this is the sum of meaning in all 
 his lengthy writing — because, concerning the world-famed order 
 
 705 2 z 
 
History of Germany 
 
 of the red eagle which was presented to Professor Schmalz 
 in the year 1815, I found nothing stronger to say than the 
 following words : " The turmoil now subsided, but everyone 
 felt that the bad seed sown by the accuser (who, at this junc- 
 ture was distinguished by a Prussian order and by one from 
 Wiirtemberg) had not fallen upon perfectly sterile soil." I 
 find it difficult to retain my gravity in face of an accusation 
 which shows so plainly that Baumgarten has occupied himself 
 with this epoch in so cursory a manner. Every historian 
 well informed regarding Prussian affairs must recognise imme- 
 diately that my words on this matter are based upon a 
 prolonged and arduous investigation. I expressed myself inten- 
 tionally with a certain reserve, not only because I am of opinion 
 that a historian who is unwilling to decline to the level of 
 such a scandal-monger as Vehse need not devote much time 
 to an order of the red eagle of the third class, but also 
 because, on this occasion, I was influenced by a critical 
 consideration which has completely escaped Baumgarten's 
 perspicuity. 
 
 This order of the red eagle could have historical signi- 
 ficance only if Schmalz had in truth received it as a reward 
 for his denunciations. Has this been proved ? Baumgarten 
 assumes it without full investigation, for nature has gifted him 
 with the fortunate talent of recognising historical truth a priori. 
 Since I myself lack this endowment, I looked for proofs, and 
 found as established this fact alone, that Schmalz had received 
 a Prussian order and a Wiirtemberg order at the time when 
 the literary disputes concerning his pamphlet were still in pro- 
 gress. Anything beyond this is gossip, collected from letters 
 and newspapers. Now it may be maintained without undue 
 levity that the Wiirtemberg order was a reward to the denun- 
 ciator for the writing which he had sent to the Swabian king, 
 for, as far as is known, Schmalz had never previously done any 
 service to the court of Stuttgart, and the Bonapartist sentiments 
 of King Frederick could not fail to be rejoiced by a work 
 which entered the lists against the reputed secret societies of 
 the Borussomaniacs. It was but natural that in the excited 
 State of public opinion people should assume without further 
 enquiry that the Prussian order also was a reward for the 
 denunciation. But is it legitimate for the historian of to-day 
 to accept without enquiry all the hateful rumours of a pro- 
 foundly disordered time? 
 
 706 
 
Appendixes 
 
 A dispassionate examination will readily show that as far 
 as the Prussian order is concerned, matters are not so simple 
 as might appear at first sight. Unfortunately the denunciator 
 was not a man of no account, but a useful official who had 
 done good service in connection with the foundation of the 
 university of Berlin, a professor of established reputation, of 
 whom his brother-in-law Schamhorst never failed to speak with 
 respect, a tried patriot who during the French occupation had 
 suffered for the Prussian cause, who during the wars of libera- 
 tion had made great pecuniary sacrifices, had given lectures 
 of general utility, and so on. Moreover, he was far from being 
 a man to hide his light under a bushel. Even in those days, 
 so efficient and vigorous an official could hardly escape the dis- 
 tinction of the red eagle, although this order was at that 
 time not scattered with so free a hand as to-day. Little as 
 this petty commerce interests me, I have none the less instituted 
 a search into all the comers of the Uterature of the subject, 
 in order to ascertain the reasons for which the order may 
 have been bestowed. Recently, I have had enquiries made in 
 the national archives, and finally also in the personal records 
 of the general orders committee. The enquiry was fruitless, 
 for the records of this epoch have already been destroyed. 
 Hitherto, only one document has been discoverable throwing a 
 certain light upon the personal relationships between the king 
 and Privy-councillor Schmalz, this being a cabinet order 
 addressed to Schmalz under date August 6, 1814, running as 
 follows : " The intention you have communicated to me, to 
 devote the sums gained by public lectures to providing comforts 
 for those invalided from military service who have received 
 the iron cross, is one which I treasure at its full value." 
 
 This document affords a characteristic indication of Schmalz's 
 activities, and anyone who knows in how thorough and deliberate 
 a manner preparations were made in the Prussian officialdom 
 before bestowing orders, can hardly fail to recognise it as prob- 
 able that the order given to Schmalz in October, 1815, may 
 have been the reward for the before-mentioned patriotic lectures. 
 But it is also possible that the order may have been given 
 in recognition of other official services. A few weeks later 
 than Schmalz, two of his colleagues in the academy of sciences. 
 Bode and Hermbstadt, two men with no inclination to political 
 activities, received the same order. Thereupon the opinion was 
 at once bruited abroad that this had been done only in order 
 
 707 3 A 
 
History of Germany 
 
 to conceal the true ground for giving Professor Schmalz the 
 distinction — and so on ad infinitum. Need I plunge any deeper 
 into this sea of gossip ? No, everything has an end, and there 
 must therefore be an end also to my researches concerning 
 this worthless red bird. May it continue in Baumgarten's 
 philosophy of history to play the same part as the momen- 
 tous fork in the fate-tragedy : as far as I am concerned 
 enough time has already been wasted on the matter. I take 
 my formal leave of it, and modestly declare that I really do 
 not know why Schmalz received the order of the red eagle 
 of the third class, and because I do not know, I have expressed 
 myself with extreme caution regarding this nauseating affair. 
 
 In any case it was unfortunate that the distinction should 
 have been granted at this precise moment ; but I have certain 
 reason to know that it was not the king's intention, when 
 bestowing the order, to humiliate Schmalz's opponents in any 
 way. For in the very days in which Schmalz was decorated, 
 the most notable of these opponents, Niebuhr, was officially 
 informed that the king had decided to appoint him to the 
 post of confidence in Rome ; and very shortly afterwards, E. M. 
 Arndt, the very man whom Schmalz had calumniated most 
 fiercely, was nominated professor in Bonn. Still more clearly 
 is the king's lack of partisanship manifested by the ordinance 
 which brought the dispute to a close. I stated in the text, 
 that this ordinance was " worthily conceived and amiably 
 worded." Since Baumgarten cavils at this judgment also, I 
 am compelled to feel serious doubt whether he knows the whole 
 wording of the ordinance. It is buried in the Prussian legisla- 
 tion of the year 1816, which is now but rarely disinterred, 
 and runs as follows : 
 
 " Ordinance concerning the alleged secret societies, January 
 
 6, 1816. 
 "We, Frederick William, etc., have noted with just dis- 
 pleasure the party spirit which displays itself concerning the 
 conflict of opinions regarding the existence of secret societies 
 in our state. When the fatherland, seriously visited by mis- 
 fortune, was in great danger, we ourselves at first approved 
 the foundation of the Society for the Promotion of Moral and 
 Scientific Progress, because we recognised therein a means for 
 advancing patriotism, and recognised therein also the possession 
 of those qualities which are competent to raise the spirits of 
 those in misfortune, and to give them courage to overcome 
 
 708 
 
Appendixes 
 
 misfortune. But in the proposals for the charter of this society, 
 which were submitted to us for approval, and in the then 
 existing political situation of the state, we found reasons for 
 the suppression of the society and for the prohibition of the 
 printing of all discussions about the matter. Since that time, 
 the same principles and sentiments which induced the first 
 formation of the society have come to animate, not merely 
 a number of the former members of the same, but also the 
 majority of our people, in consequence of which, with the help 
 of the Most High, there have resulted the salvation of the 
 fatherland and all the numerous great and beautiful deeds by 
 which that salvation has been effected. Now, when peace has 
 everywhere been restored, when every burgher of the state 
 can have but one spirit, but one aim, namely, by strict atten- 
 tion to duty to maintain so gloriously preserved a national 
 sentiment, and to live according to the laws so that the 
 benefits of the peace may be secured for all, and so that the well- 
 being of all, which it is our steadfast purpose to maintain, 
 may be brought to the greatest possible perfection — now secret 
 societies can have none other but a deleterious influence and 
 one which will counter-operate these aims." 
 
 Hereupon, the well-known prescriptions of the civil code 
 (T. 2, Tit. 20) and of the edict of October 20, 1798, regarding 
 secret societies, are recalled. The ordinance closes with the 
 words : "In view of the existence of these legal powers, the 
 dispute now carried on in the public press regarding the exist- 
 ence of secret societies and their aims, is useless, disquiets 
 our loyal subjects, and nourishes a deleterious partisan spirit 
 We therefore will and decree : 
 
 " That henceforward, subject to the aforesaid fines and terms 
 of imprisonment, no one in our states shall print or pubhsh 
 anything relating to the matter." 
 
 Now I ask whether that is the language of a monarch 
 who takes sides with the denunciators. Anyone who imagines 
 himself back amid the patriarchal views of absolute monarchy 
 must admit that the king could not have acted otherwise. 
 He was forced to put an end to a dispute which was disturb- 
 ing the public peace ; which on the one side was evoking 
 poisonous calumnies, and on the other the equally false opinion 
 which the Prussians had formed for themselves of the future 
 ccmstitution. No prosecution or investigation occurred as a 
 sequel to this royal ordinance, down to the year 1819. The 
 
 709 
 
History of Germany 
 
 king's policy was not reactionary for those days ; in all the 
 great matters in which he was then concerned, he regularly 
 decided for the cause of reform, and in taking over the new 
 provinces he formally declared on several occasions that, exclu- 
 sively concerned with the future of the state, he regarded 
 the past as past. In his secret heart he cherished suspicions, 
 which were fostered by Mettemich and Wittgenstein on the 
 one hand, and by members of the Burschenschaft and by the 
 press on the other ; but the change of policy did not begin 
 until after the murder of Kotzebue. 
 
 1 have recently discovered certain documents which confirm 
 what has been said above. In August, 1815, the representatives 
 of the town of Berlin put forward the quite unprecedented 
 claim that the companies of civil guards and riflemen which 
 during the absence of the army had undertaken the protection 
 of the capital should no longer, as was prescribed by the 
 ordinance of July 17, 1813, be commanded solely by their own 
 military chief and by the police president, but should be placed 
 under the supervision of the municipal authorities. The poUce 
 president, von Le Coq, reported on the subject from Paris 
 (police report of August 12th to 18th) expressing himself in 
 very severe terms regarding the spirit of the opposition, as 
 increased by arrogant writings. Thereupon the king drew the 
 chancellor's attention to the fierceness of partisan spirit (cabinet 
 order of September i, 1815), adding : " I trust that you, being 
 acquainted with the nature of influences disadvantageous to 
 the well-being of our subjects, will refuse to allow such 
 influences access to a people whose character has hitherto main- 
 tained itself so conspicuously free from the acceptance of foreign 
 principles, and which for this very reason has elevated itself 
 to such a height in the struggle against foreign oppression." 
 For the time being, this cabinet order remained without result, 
 for the necessary measures, as is expressed in a marginal note 
 of Hardenberg's, " must be specially designed to meet each 
 par/'cular case." But it served to show that the king was in 
 an uneasy mood, which had manifestly been rendered more 
 uneasy by the contemplation of the party struggles in Paris. 
 
 On the other hand, a confidential writing of the king, 
 dating from the same period, shows how thankfully he 
 recognised the patriotic attitude of his loyal people. When 
 the two friends had separated. Czar Alexander (under date 
 January 15/27, 1816) sent the king a letter containing exuberant 
 
 710 
 
Appendixes 
 
 assurances of " sacred friendship." The task now before them, 
 he said, was to secure the fruit of their labours, to maintain 
 peace. Consequently he thanked the king cordially for the 
 energetic measures he had taken against the secret societies. 
 (These measures, however, consisted solely in the reinforcement 
 of a prohibition which had long existed in Prussia as in all 
 the other states.) In March, Frederick William sent an answer 
 which contained the following reference to the Schmalzian affair : 
 " II ne faut aujourd'hui que calmer I'effervescence des esprits, 
 suite naturelle des agitations politiques. Je me felicite de 
 I'approbation que V. M. veut bien accorder aux mesures que 
 j'ai cru devoir prendre dans cette occasion. Mon unique ambi- 
 tion est comme la Votre, Sire, d'assurer le bonheur de mes 
 peuples. C'est une dette sacree que notre coeur se plaira 
 d'acquitter apres tant de preuves de leur amour et de leur 
 devouement. Vous voyez. Sire, que le desir de m'epancher avec 
 V. M. est devenu un besoin pour moi." 
 
 Is it likely that a prince who expressed himselfjj^in]|[such 
 confident terms regarding his people, would have rewarded 
 the calumniator of the War of Liberation for his calumnies ? 
 It remains conceivable that the current rumours were well 
 founded, and that it was not until subsequently that the king 
 regained his ease of mind ; but it is just as probable that 
 the granting of the decoration was no more than accidentally 
 coincident with the denunciation. 
 
 To sum up, I consider that regarding the king's conduct 
 I said in the text precisely what a conscientious historian was 
 entitled to say. 
 
 711 
 
INDEX. 
 
 A. 
 
 Abendzeitung , 258 
 
 Abd-ur-Rahman, Sultan of Morocco, 
 438 
 
 Adam Smith (see Smith) 
 
 Adalbert, Apostle of Prussia, 525 
 
 A Kempis, 339 
 
 Albert, Archduke, 673 
 
 Albini, 390 
 
 Albrecht, 451 
 
 Alemannia, 358, 395, 606, 642 
 
 Alexander, Czar of Russia, 12, 14, 31, 
 35. 36, 38. 39, 45. 47. 48, 49. 50. 
 61, 62, 63, 64, 74, 75, 77, 78, 89, 
 108, 118, 135, 146, 204, 205, 206, 
 207, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221, 222, 
 223, 224, 226, 329, 337, 339, 367, 
 373. 374. 375. 376. 382, 387, 389, 
 395. 437. 484. 499, 517. 635. 650, 
 671, 682, 683, 710 
 
 Alexander the Great, 348 
 
 Allgenieine Zeitung, 17, 352 
 
 Alopeus, 24, 37, 58 
 
 Alquier, 633 
 
 Alten, 177 
 
 Altenstein, 202, 209 284, 481, 508, 509, 
 510, 512, 514, 515, 516, 517, 579, 
 
 583. 585 
 
 Ambras, 9 
 
 Ammon, 523 
 
 Ancillon, 364, 414, 455, 456, 577 
 
 Anstett, 395, 398, 407 
 
 Anti-Pirate League, 438 
 
 Antony, Prince of Saxony, 33, 70 
 
 Arago, 324 
 
 Aretin, 55, 358, 359, 386, 395, 441, 642 
 
 Arndt, E. M., 6, 19, 58, 60, 85, 93, 96, 
 97, 212, 231, 232, 234, 246, 273, 
 334, 365. 366, 382,. 432, 448, 457, 
 500, 507, 513, 514, 566, 697, 698, 
 699, 700, 701, 708 
 
 Arndt, Ludwig, Pomeranian fanner, 534, 
 
 573 
 Arnim, Achim von, 260, 301 
 Arnim, Bettina, 238 
 Arnim, Sixt von, 457 
 Arnstein, 9 
 Artois, 372 
 Ascheberg, 553 
 Aster, 151, 195. 334. 419 
 Aubry, 275 
 Auerswa-ld, 471, 532 
 
 Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, 55, 682 
 Augustine, Saint, 267 
 Augustus, Prince of Prussia, 16, 506 
 Austria, Emperor of (see Francis, 
 
 Joseph II) 
 Aventinus, 623 
 
 Baader, 223, 328, 342 
 
 Bach, 291 
 
 Baden-Durlach, Margrave of (see 
 
 Charles Frederick) 
 Baden, Grand Duke of (see Charles) 
 Baden, Margrave of (see Charles 
 
 William) 
 Bailleu, 633 
 Barbarossa, 598 
 Barclay de Tolly, 149 
 Bardeleben, 174, 192 
 Baring, 187 
 Barsch, 456 
 Bartholdy, 288 
 Baruch, 17 
 Bassano, 635 
 Bassewitz, 447, 538 
 Bataille, 643 
 Baudissin, 359 
 
 Baumgarten, 102, 705, 706, 708 
 Baumgartner, 98 
 
 Bavaria, Crown Prince of (see Louis) 
 Bavaria, Elector of (see Maximilian I 
 
 and Maximilian III) 
 Bavaria, King of (see Maximilian 
 
 Joseph) 
 Bavaria, Prince of (see Charles) 
 Beauharnais, Eugene, 642, 643, 649 
 Beauharnais, Hortense, 140, 642 
 Beauharnais, Stephanie, 616, 668 
 Beck, 426, 427 
 Beckedorff, 337 
 Beethoven, 292 
 Beguelin, 485 
 Bekker, 238, 261, 314 
 Belle Alliance, 86, 142, 180, i8i, 182, 
 
 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 
 
 190, igi, 192, 193, 213, 227, 276, 
 
 351 
 Benecke, 311 
 Bengel, 331 
 
 Benvenuto Cellini (see Cellini) 
 Benzenberg, 500, 553, 558, 583, 586 
 B6ranger, 355, 371 
 
 713 
 
Index 
 
 Berckheim, 387, 423, 429 
 
 Berg, 431, 432. 441 
 
 Berg, Hero of (see Stacker) 
 
 Bergosse, 321 
 
 Berlepsch, 585 
 
 Bernadotte, 81, 82, 505 
 
 Bernard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, 169, 
 
 187, 188 
 Bernstorff, 253 
 Berstett, 388, 393, 394, 399, 400, 408, 
 
 416, 435, 672, 679, 681 
 Bertram, 271, 272 
 Besnardidre (see La Besnardi^re) 
 Beuth, 447, 554 
 Beyme, 481, 495, 498, 500, 551, 579, 
 
 580, 583, 584 
 Bianchi, 385 
 Bignon, 668, 687 
 Binzer, 295 
 Bismarck, 213 
 Bitter, 562 
 
 Blacas, 196, 654, 655, 657 
 Bleibtreu, 564 
 
 Blittersdorff, 388, 389, 400, 683, 684 
 Blucher, 5, 19, 65, 66, 90, 97, 142, 147, 
 149, 150, 151, 152. 153. 154. 155. 
 159, 160, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 
 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 178, 
 179, 185, 188, 190, 191, 193, 196, 
 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 205, 
 206, 220, 221, 227, 232, 271, 287, 
 348, 381, 398, 699, 702, 703 
 Blucher, Francis, 152 
 Bode, 707 
 
 Bodelschwingh-Plettenberg, 575 
 Boeckh, August, 237, 238, 307, 313, 
 
 314, 315, 324 
 Boeckh, Friedrich, 669 
 Boehme, 329 
 Bohlen, 86 
 
 Boisser6e, 271, 272, 339, 563 
 Bojanowski, 500, 582 
 Bol, 288 
 Bolley, 607 
 
 Bonaparte (see Napoleon, also Jerome) 
 Bonpland, 323, 324 
 Bopp, 237, 312, 317 
 Borowski, 449, 519 
 Borries, 576 
 Borstell, 151, 165, 500 
 Bottiger, 258 
 
 Boyen, 66, 151, 164, 216, 392, 418, 420, 
 423. 451. 453. 474. 480, 499. 5°!. 
 505. 506 
 Brandenburg, Elector of (see Joachim 
 
 Frederick, John Sigismund) 
 Brauer, 667 
 Bray, 388, 683 
 Brentano, 259, 260, 266 
 Brockhaus, 98, 256 
 Briihl, 252 
 Brunner, 434 
 Brunswick, Duke of (see William) 
 
 Brusasco, 78 
 
 Buch, 318, 324 
 
 Bucher, 627 
 
 Buchholz, 356, 540 
 
 Biickeburg, 440 
 
 Biickeburg, Princess of, 19 
 
 Billow, Friedrich von (Lord-Lieutenant 
 of Saxony), 543 544 
 
 BUlow, Friedrich Wilhelm von, Graf 
 von Dennewitz (General), 21, 56, 
 66, 95, 151, 168, 175, 184, 186, 
 188, 190, 199, 200, 287, 288 
 
 Billow, Ludwig Friedrich von (Finance 
 Minister), 53, 54, 435, 453, 454, 
 458, 460, 473, 474, 477, 480, 481, 
 500 
 
 Buol, 390, 391, 393, 398, 399, 400, 401, 
 402, 403, 404, 408, 409, 421, 423, 
 
 435 
 Buonaparte (see Napoleon) 
 Biirger, 237, 353 
 Burke, 488 
 Burkhardt, 596 
 Busche, 174 
 Butte, 213 
 Byron, 295, 375 
 
 C. 
 
 Cadore, 635 
 
 Calderon, 249 
 
 Calixt, 518 
 
 Callot, 261 
 
 Callot-Hoffmann, 243 
 
 Calonne, 477 
 
 Cambronne, 191 
 
 Capodistrias, 14, 36, 118, 206, 210, 217, 
 
 374. 376. 389. 683, 684 
 Carlowitz, 33 
 Carlshausen, 393 
 Carnot, 504 
 
 Caroline, wife of Max Joseph, 643 
 Caroline Augusta, wife of Emperor 
 
 Francis, 616, 652 
 Caroline Henrietta ("The Great Land- 
 gravine "), 692 
 Carstens, 282 
 Carus, 320 
 
 Castlereagh, 13, 28, 29, 37, 38, 39, 40, 
 41. 42. 43. 45. 48. 49. 50. 59. 60, 
 61, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 
 81, 158, 162, 206, 207, 208, 214, 
 215, 218, 225 
 Castlereagh, Lady, 13 
 Catel de St. Pierre (see De St. Pierre) 
 Catharine II, Empress of Russia, 599 
 Catharine, Grand Duchess of Russia, 
 wife of William of Wiirtemberg, 18, 
 617, 618, 619 
 Catharine of Wiirtemberg, wife of King 
 
 Jerome, 603 
 Cathcart, 14, 374 
 Cellini, 272 
 
 714 
 
Index 
 
 Censeur, 140 
 
 Cervantes, 259 
 
 Chamisso, 318 
 
 Charles II, King of England, 366 
 
 Charles XIII, King of Sweden, 86 
 
 Charles, Archduke, 207 
 
 Charles, Duke of Mecklenburg, 152, 
 
 _ 429, 454. 505 
 
 Charles, Grand Duke of Baden, 90, iii, 
 
 407, 420, 616, 668 
 Charles, Prince of Bavaria, 386 
 Charles Augustus of Weimar, 9, 10, 31, 
 
 59, 99, 352. 426, 428, 432, 667, 687 
 Charles Eugene, Duke of Wurtemberg, 
 
 597 
 Charles Frederick, Margrave of Baden- 
 
 Durlach, 662, 667, 668, 669, 670, 
 
 672, 680, 695 
 Charles Gustavus, King of Sweden, 628 
 Charles Louis, Elector Palatine, 664 
 Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavarian 
 
 Palatinate, 627, 666 
 Charles William, Margrave of Baden, 
 
 666 
 Charlotte, Princess of England, 84 
 Charlotte, Princess of Prussia, 383 
 Chateaubriand, 372 
 Chigi, 131 
 Choiseul, 71 
 
 Christian, Prince, Stadtholder of Den- 
 mark, 81 
 Christopher, Duke of Wurtemberg, 593, 
 
 595. 616 
 Clancarty, 398 
 Claudius, 336, 337 
 Clauren, 258 
 
 Clausewitz, 151, 171, 179, 195, 451, 456, 
 Cobbett, 378 
 
 Coburg, Duke of (see Ernest) 
 Cockerill, 541 
 Columbus, 318 
 
 Consalvi, 16, 127, 131, 340, 676, 679 
 Constant, 140 
 Copernicus, 318 
 Cornelius, 273, 288, 290 
 Corsican, The (see Napoleon) 
 Cotta, 17, 241, 616, 682 
 Cranmer, 520 
 Creuzer, 237, 238, 245, 273, 314, 315, 
 
 316, 328, 335, 343 
 Crome, 395, 696 
 Cromwell, 399, 488 
 Cuvier, 324, 325 
 Czartoryski, 14, 63, 74, 483 
 
 D. 
 
 D'AGLifi, 78 
 
 Dahlmann, 230, 239, 301, 305, 359, 360 
 
 Dalberg, 17, 30, 61, 127, 647, 649, 666, 
 
 675, 676 
 Daniels, 447, 498, 499 
 Dante, 259 
 
 Daru, 202 
 
 Daub, 335, 343 
 
 Davoust, 141, 198, 200, 201 
 
 Decazes, 372 
 
 De Groote (see Groote) 
 
 Delbriick, 171, 371 
 
 De Ligne, Prince, 3, 10 
 
 Delia Genga (see Genga) 
 
 De Maistre (see Maistre) 
 
 Deroy, 19 
 
 der Rauschebart (see Eberhard) 
 
 De St. Pierre, Catel, 5 
 
 Dessere, 305 
 
 De Stael (see Stael) 
 
 De Tolly (see Barclay de) 
 
 Deutsche Blatter, 98 
 
 Devreint, 243, 252 
 
 Deycks, 533 
 
 Diebitsch, 147 
 
 Diericke, 356 
 
 Diesterweg, 515 
 
 Diez, 237, 238, 311 
 
 Dillon, Countess, 449 
 
 Dinter, 515 
 
 Dobschiitz, 458 
 
 Dohna, 201 
 
 Dombrowski, 528 
 
 Don Labrador (see Labrador) 
 
 Dorow, 452, 505 
 
 Drais, 10 
 
 Dunoyer, 140 
 
 Durer, 271, 272, 284 
 
 Durutte, 187, 188 
 
 Dyhrn, 478 
 
 Eberhard III, Duke of Wurtemberg, 
 
 595 
 Eberhard der Rauschebart, 263 
 Eberhard Louis, 594 
 Eberhard the Whimperer, 594 
 Ehrhard, 699 
 Eichhorn, 58, 71, 202, 237, 284, 297, 
 
 300, 447, 472, 487, 491, 492 
 Einsiedel, 58 
 Ekhof, 253 
 Elector Palatine (see Charles Louis, 
 
 Charles Theodore) 
 Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, 389 
 Emil, Prince, 695 
 Emmerich, 266, 267 
 England, King of (see Charles II, 
 
 James II) 
 Ennemoser, 327 
 Ense (see Rahel, Vamhagen) 
 Enslin, 595 
 Erasmus, 548 
 Erdmannsdorfi, 562 
 Erlon, 177, 182, 184, 187 
 Ernest, Duke of Coburg, 56 
 Eschenbach, 623 
 Eschenmaier, 611 
 
 715 
 
Index 
 
 Eskeles, 9 
 Ess, 522 
 Excelman, 201 
 Eyben, 396, 441 
 Eylert, 520 
 
 F. 
 
 Fahrenkopf, 405, 406 
 
 Falck, 359 
 
 Falk, 336 
 
 Febronius (see Hontheim) 
 
 F6neloii, 676 
 
 Ferber, 53, 472, 485 
 
 Ferdinand III, Grand Duke of Tus- 
 cany and of Wurzburgf, 630 
 
 Ferdinand VI, King of Spain, 375 
 
 Feuerbach, 638, 640, 657, 659 
 
 Feuerlein, 607 
 
 Fichte, 93, 99, 234, 280, 305, 326, 468, 
 509 
 
 First Consul (see Napoleon) 
 
 Fleck, 252 
 
 Flinck, 288 
 
 Follen, 311 
 
 Fouch6, 197, 203, 223 
 
 Fouqu6, 329 
 
 Fox, 591 
 
 France, King of (see Henry III, Louis 
 IX, Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis 
 XVIII) 
 
 Francis, Count of Erbach, 693 
 
 Francis, Emperor of Austria, 4, 10, 33, 
 37, 41, 48, 59, 64, 69, 70, 95, 96, 
 109, 148, 161, 204, 207, 20g, 222, 
 224, 228, 340, 379, 380, 387, 409, 
 415, 416, 427, 439, 440, 614, 618, 
 634. 652 
 
 Francis. Saint, 275 
 
 Frankenberg, 73 
 
 Frankenhausen, 198 
 
 Frederick I, Duke of Wiirtemberg, 595 
 
 Frederick II, Duke of Wiirtemberg 
 (later King Frederick I), 598, 706 
 
 Frederick I, King of Prussia, 284 
 
 Frederick II, King of Prussia, 362, 474, 
 476, 524. 537. 552, 571, 572. 584. 
 591, 596, 599. 692 
 
 Frederick I, King of Wurtemberg, 18, 
 102, 107, III, 389, 393, 407, 439, 
 600, 601, 602, 604, 610, 617, 618, 
 619 
 
 Frederick, Crown Prince (later Fred- 
 erick William I, King of Prussia), 4 
 
 Frederick Barbarossa, 598 
 
 Frederick the Great (see Frederick II) 
 
 Frederick the Wise, 512 
 
 Frederick Augustus, King of Saxony, 
 26, 29, 30, 32, 33, 40, 41, 59, 61, 
 64, 68, 72, 73, 88, i6r, 162, 163, 
 164, 167, 545, 573, 702 
 
 Frederick Eugene, of Wartemberg, 595, 
 616 
 
 Frederick William I of Prussia, 240, 
 
 445. 474. 495. 518 
 Frederick William III of Prussia, 3, 15, 
 42, 48, 49, 57, 83, 8g, 90, 91, 118, 
 146, 150, 164, 205, 2r6, 222, 223, 
 224, 252, 281, 283, 287, 288, 351, 
 
 367. 371. 375. 383. 412, 413. 415. 
 
 419, 423, 429, 448, 449, 450, 459. 
 
 466, 494, 495, 517, 519, 522, 586, 
 
 618, 705, 708, 711 
 Frederick William, Crown Prince of 
 
 Prussia (later Frederick William IV) , 
 
 246, 281, 282, 283, 336, 362 
 Freiligrath, 260 
 Freytag, 702 
 Fries, 335, 403, 432 
 Friese, 52, 53, 474 
 Frimont, 66 
 Fugger, 425 
 Furstenberg, Princess of, 16 
 
 G. 
 
 Gagern, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 30, 61, 69, 
 87, 108, 109, 125, 129, 130, 134, 
 
 147, 210, 213, 396, 402, 409, 426, 
 441, 442, 443, 444, 613, 688 
 
 Gaius, 300 
 
 Galitzin, 510 
 
 Gall, 320 
 
 Gartner, i6 
 
 Qass, 333 
 
 Gassmer, 342 
 
 Gaudy, 52 
 
 Gauss, 325 
 
 Gauting, Hermit of (see Hallberg) 
 
 Gay-Lussac, 324 
 
 Genga (later Pope Leo XII), 647, 655 
 
 Gentz, 12, 15, 30, 31, 33, 36,- 41, 42, 45, 
 49. 55. 58, 75. 77. 96, 103, 120, 122, 
 135, 142, 205, 207, 229, 244, 246, 
 273. 297. 341. 364. 369. 402, 425, 
 432, 437. 684 
 
 Georgii, 599, 607 
 
 Gerhardt, 542 
 
 Gerlach, 246, 259, 336 
 
 Gersdorff, 114, 119 
 
 Geyersberg, Baroness von (see Hock- 
 berg) 
 
 Giotto, 275 
 
 Giovanoli, 540 
 
 Giustiniani, 288 
 
 Globig, 125 
 
 Gluck, 291 
 
 Gneisenau, 5, 56, 65, 66, 95, 97, 147, 
 
 148, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 164, 
 166, 167, i68, 170, 173, 174, 175, 
 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 186 188, 
 190, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198, 199, 
 200, 205, 208, 216, 217, 227, 233, 
 370. 373. 381. 386, 449, 451, 456, 
 457. 459, 472. 485. 499, 526, 527, 
 528, 539. 554. 699 
 
 16 
 
Index 
 
 Goethe, 73, 94, 97, 204, 212, 235, 237, 
 
 238, 242, 244, 246, 247, 254, 258, 
 
 259. 265, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 
 
 272. 273, 274. 275, 276, 277, 278, 
 
 279, 280, 282, 290, 292, 293, 313, 
 
 318, 319, 320, 323, 325, 326, 344, 
 510, 539, 665 
 
 Goetze, 336 
 
 Goltz, 38, 65, 372, 404, 405, 406, 409, 
 
 410, 413, 421, 422, 423, 424, 425, 
 
 427. 429, 437. 443. 679 
 Gonner, 300 
 Gorres, 5, 57, 64, 88, 94, 95, 96, 163, 
 
 228, 229, 314, 316, 365, 382, 431, 
 
 458, 459. 557 
 Gortz, 407 
 Gottschalck, 295 
 Gotzinger, 295 
 Graven, 586 
 
 Gravenitz, Countess, 594 
 Greiff, 554 
 Greisinger, 616 
 Gremp, 686, 687 
 Grillparzer, 254 
 Grimm, Jacob, 57, 237, 238, 300, 301, 
 
 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 314, 317 
 Grimm, Wilhelm, 237, 238, 301, 310, 312 
 Grimmelshausen, 665 
 Groben, 456 
 
 Grolman, 66, 151, 174, 190 
 Gronow, 568 
 Groote, 202 
 
 Grouchy, 181, 184, 186, 188, 195, 198 
 Griibel, 630 
 
 Gruner, 53, 453, 458, 459 
 Griinhagen, 700 
 Griinne, 443 
 Guizot, 236 
 
 Gustavus II Adolphus, 629 
 Gustavus IV Adolphus, 573 
 Gyulay, 95 
 
 n. 
 
 Hardenberg, Carl August von, 15, 16, 
 20, 24, 25, 29, 30, 34, 35, 36, 37, 
 38, 39, 40. 41. 42. 43. 45. 48. 49. 
 50, 51. 52, 53. 54. 56, 58. 59. 60, 
 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 
 73. 74. 77. 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 
 88, 90, 91, 92, 100, loi, 103, 104, 
 106, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 
 121, 122, 123, 128, 130, 134, 135, 
 146, 149, 161, 162, 164, 197, 203, 
 205, 206, 208, 2og, 211, 212, 214, 
 218, 219, 220, 221, 227, 251, 273, 
 283, 353, 367, 371, 372. 374, 375. 
 379. 380, 383, 385, 389, 390, 392, 
 395. 398, 400. 404. 405. 406, 409. 
 411, 412, 413, 414, 415, 418, 421, 
 422, 423, 425, 427, 429, 430, 431, 
 432, 440, 443, 446, 447, 448, 451, 
 453. 454. 455. 458, 459, 460, 463, 
 464, 465, 466, 469, 470, 471, 473. 
 474. 475. 480. 481. 483. 490. 493. 
 496, 500, 510, 513, 514, 515, 524. 
 526, 527, 536. 538, 549, 554. 558, 
 560, 562, 568, 569, 573, 575, 576. 
 577. 578. 579, 581, 585, 586, 610, 
 638, 641, 648, 649, 653, 654, 679. 
 681, 684, 710 
 
 Hardenberg (Hanoverian), 22 
 
 Hardenberg- Reventlow, 80 
 
 Hardinge, 173 
 
 Harless, 514 
 
 Harms, 336, 522, 523 
 
 Hartig, 447, 565 
 
 Hartmann, 612, 620 
 
 Hartung, 562 
 
 Hasselt, 87 
 
 Hatzfeldt, 443 
 
 Hauff, 617 
 
 Haxthausen, 14, 311, 457 
 
 Haydn, 291 
 
 Hebel, 665 
 
 Heeren, 397, 398 
 
 Hach, 396 
 
 Hacke, 108, 394, 440, 671, 673, 676, 679 
 Hadrian, 282 
 
 Haffelin, 651, 652, 654, 656, 661 
 Hafiz, 276 
 Hagen, 308 
 Hahn, 544 
 
 Hahnel, Friederike, 452 
 Hainbund, 343, 353 
 Halkett, 191 
 Hallberg, 553 
 
 Haller, 341, 343, 360, 361, 362, 363, 686 
 Hamann, 335, 510 
 Hamilton, 403 
 Hammer, 276 
 
 Handel (Austrian Privy-Councillor), 401 
 Handel (composer), 291, 293 
 Hans Sachs (see Sachs) 
 Hanlein, 104, 390, 391. 392, 398, 399, 
 400, 401, 411 
 
 __Hege l, 234, 300, 326, 509, 597, 615 
 «ege\ 
 
 Tegewisch, 359 
 Heilmann, 637, 699, 700, 702 
 Heim, 453 
 Heinen, 152 
 Held, 527 
 
 Helfferich, 16, 340, 660, 661 
 Hell, 258 
 Heist, 288 
 Hellwig, 456 
 
 Henry LXIV of Reuss, 16 
 Henry III of Valois, 603 
 Henry the Lion, 20 
 __^^^er, 275, 297. 302, 315, 327, 667 
 Hermann, 237, 245, 273, 314, 315, 316 
 Hermbstadt, 707 
 Hermes, 339 
 
 Hermit of Gauting (see Hallberg) 
 Hero of Berg (see Stacker) 
 Herz, 9 
 Hesse, Elector of (see William) 
 
 717 
 
Ind 
 
 ex 
 
 Hesse, Grand Duke of, 695 
 
 Hesse-Homburg, Landgrave of, 62 
 
 Hetairia, 14 
 
 Heubner, 523 
 
 Heydebreck, 471, 484, 485, 538 
 
 Hildebrand, 307 
 
 Hill, 182 
 
 Hippel, 447, 462, 531 
 
 Hochberg, Count of, 388, 671 
 
 Hochberg, Countess of, 669 
 
 Hofer, Andreas, 403, 634 
 
 Hoffbauer, 250 
 
 Hofmann (Hessian Landowner), 408, 
 409, 411 
 
 Hoffmann, Amadeus, 261 
 
 Hoffmann, Johann Gottfried, 15, 47, 
 58, 59. 73. 447. 479. 488, 494 
 
 Hohenlohe, Prince Alexander, 342 
 
 HohenzoUern-Hechingen, Prince of, 102 
 
 Holtei, 356 
 
 Hommer, 582 
 
 Hontheim, 346 
 
 Hormann, 55, 358 
 
 Hornthal, 642 
 
 Horst, 576 
 
 Hruby, 120, 427, 428 
 
 Hufeland, 320 
 
 Hugo, Gustav, 297, 298 
 
 Hugo, Victor, 237 
 
 Hiillmann, 514 
 
 Humboldt, Alexander, 235, 237, 246, 
 318, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325 
 
 Humboldt, Wilhelm, 7, 15, 27, 29, 30, 
 36, 40, 44, 45, 47, 51, 56, 58, 62, 
 72, 74, 88, 103, 106, 112, 113, 114, 
 115, 116, 117, 118, ng, 120, 121, 
 123, 127, 130, 134, 135, 146 148, 
 205, 210, 211, 214, 215, 221, 227, 
 237. 238, 242, 284, 288, 297, 307, 
 308, 312, 321, 322, 341, 370, 383, 
 398, 400, 401, 402, 404, 413, 442, 
 
 447. 450. 453. 472. 474. 475. 477. 
 480, 481, 510, 648, 650 
 Huskisson, 487, 488 
 
 I. 
 
 Ibell, 689 
 Ickstatt, 627 
 Ififland, 248, 253, 666 
 Immermann, 242 
 Imperator (see Napoleon) 
 Ingersleben, 338, 471, 562 
 Isenburg, 131 
 
 J- 
 Jacobs, 642 
 Jagow, 175 
 Jahn, 432, 458 
 
 James II, King of England, 339 
 Janke, 365 
 Janko Karadja (see Karadja) 
 
 Jay. 403 
 
 Jean Paul (see Richter) 
 
 Jerome, King of Westphalia, 410, 411, 
 454, 577, 603, 622, 701 
 
 Joachim Frederick, Elector of Bran- 
 denburg, 466 
 
 John, Archduke, 148, 203 
 
 John Sigismund, Elector of Branden- 
 burg, 518 
 
 Jordan, 15. 7^. 374. 4^4. 420, 432 
 
 Joseph II, Emperor of Austria, 347, 664, 
 674 
 
 Josephine, Empress, 643 
 
 Jouffroy, III, 407 
 
 Journal fur Deutschland, 572 
 
 Jung Stilling (see Stilling) 
 
 K. 
 
 Kalckreuth, 460 
 
 Kamptz, 510 
 
 Kant. 315, 328, 329, 330, 333, 335, 
 
 468, 519 
 Kappe, 367 
 
 Karadja, Janko, 12, 36, 75, 103 
 Kawiecki, 526 
 Keller, 190, 544 
 Kellermann, 177, 186 
 Kerner, Justinus, 266, 267, 615, 619 
 Kerner (Wiirtemberg Statesman), 621, 
 
 622 
 Kesselstadt, 586, 587 
 Kessler, 547, 551, 552 
 Kieler Blatter, 95, 359, 360 
 Kielmannsegg, 187 
 Kimsky (see Hahnel) 
 Kind, 258 
 King of Rome, 205 
 Kircheisen, 453, 458, 496, 498 
 Kleist, Heinrich von, 248 
 Kleist von Nollendorf, 56, 66, 151, 503, 
 
 504 
 Klenze, 290 
 Klewitz, 464, 465, 467, 470, 480, 481, 
 
 482, 495, 501, 513, 529, 560, 577, 
 
 578. 579. 581, 582 
 Klinkowstrom, 242, 341 
 Klopstock, 237, 667 
 Kliiber, 403, 677 
 KlUppel, 607 
 Knesebeck, 15, 32, 83, 106, 118, 148, 
 
 152, 201, 211, 506, 527 
 Knyphausen, 131 
 Kobell, 654 
 Koch, 677 
 Kockritz, 450 
 Kohlschiitter, 34 
 Kolnische Zeitung, 558 
 Konig, 256 
 Koreff, 320, 321, 452 
 Korner, Theodor, 33, 292, 351, 457, 
 
 610 
 
 718 
 
Index 
 
 Kosegarten, 533 
 
 Kosinski, 581 
 
 Kotzebue, 248, 271, 494, 710 
 
 Krafit, 173 
 
 Kraus, 476 
 
 Krauseneck, 66 
 
 Kretschmann, 611 
 
 Kreutzer, 293 
 
 Kriidener, 204, 212, 223, 273, 337 
 
 Kragi, 342, 494 
 
 Kruger, 53, 54 
 
 Krusemark, 337. 373, 374, 376. 377 
 
 379. 382, 395. 418, 424, 432, 653' 
 
 679, 680 ' 
 
 Kiihne, 482 
 
 Kunst und Altertum, 275 
 Kunth, 484, 485, 545 
 Kiister, 89, 106, 385, 386, 407, 605, 610, 
 
 613, 617, 618, 638, 642, 653, 654, 
 
 656 
 
 La BESNARDlfeRE, 3I, 56, 61, 98 
 
 Labrador, Don, 29, 213 
 
 Lachmann, 237, 311, 314 
 
 Ladenberg, 482, 485, 509 
 
 Laharpe, 41, 204 
 
 Lancizolle, 336 
 
 Lang, 637 
 
 Langenau, 33, 41, 146, 424 
 
 Lanjuinais, 141 
 
 Laplace, 324 
 
 Lavater, 320, 667 
 
 Le Censeur, 140 
 
 Le Coq, 163, 336, 710 
 
 Le Gros, 339 
 
 Lehmann, 171 
 
 Leibnitz, 323, 518 
 
 Leipziger, 582 
 
 Leonhardi, 406 
 
 Lerchenfeld, 630, 654, 655, 658 
 
 Lessing, 248, 330 
 
 Levin (see Rahel) 
 
 I^yen, 554 
 
 Lezay-Marnesia, 212, 560 
 
 Liebenstein, 352 
 
 Liebig, 319 
 
 Ligne (see De Ligne) 
 
 Ligny, Battle of, 86, 170, 171, 172, 173, 
 
 177, 204 
 Lilienstern, 119. 35i 
 Limburg (see Schenk von) 
 Linden, 63, 107, 122, 406, 439 
 Lingelsheim, 474 
 Lips, 97 
 List, 616, 622 
 Liverpool, 215, 224 
 Lobau, 185, 188, 190, 193 
 Lobeck, 243 
 
 Loh, 553 , „. 
 
 Louis (French Minister of Finance), 221 
 Louis IX, King of France, 371 
 
 Louis XIV, King of France, 4, 31, 90, 
 
 211 
 Louis XV, King of France, 372 
 Louis XVIII, King of France, 28, 29, 
 
 31. 33. 64, 78, 138, 143, 145, 196, 
 
 203, 208, 222, 371, 372 
 Louis, Crown Prince of Bavaria, 18, 89, 
 
 289, 290, 386, 387, 388, 6i8 
 Louis, Duke of Wiirtemberg, 593 
 Louis I, Grand Duke of Hesse, 695 
 Louis, Margrave of Baden, 671 
 Louis the Bavarian, 624, 657 
 Louis the German, 624 
 Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, 140 
 Louis Philippe of Orleans, 140, 146, 196 
 Louise, Princess of Prussia, 526 
 Louise, Queen of Prussia, 449, 454, 455 
 Lowlerbund, 646 
 Luden, 442, 494 
 Luders, 534, 573 
 Luther, 236, 250, 291, 316, 330, 333, 
 
 335. 337. 341. 521. 523, 542, 676 
 Ltitzow, 99, 173, 294, 350 
 
 M. 
 Maassen, 447, 472, 485, 486, 487, 488, 
 
 489, 554 
 Madison, 403 
 Mahmud II, 225, 376 
 Maistre, 362 
 Maitland, 189 
 Malchus, 475, 622 
 Mandelsloh, 437 
 . Manzoni, 237 
 Marcolini, 54 
 Marheineke, 520, 521 
 Marie Louise, 140 
 Marschall (Baden), 90, 672, 676 
 Marschall (Nassau), 108, 393, 687, 688, 
 
 689, 690, 691 
 Marshal Forwards (see Blucher) 
 Martens, 405, 411, 424, 441 
 Martin, 672 
 Marwitz, 362, 447 
 Massdna, 697 
 Massenbach, 56, 607, 672 
 Matthieu, 31 
 Maucler, 620 
 
 Maurice, Elector of Saxony, 636 
 Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria, 625, 
 
 628 
 Maximilian III, Elector of Bavaria, 627 
 Maximilian, Joseph, King of Bavaria 
 
 (Max Joseph), 16, 17, 32, in, 385, 
 
 386, 407, 618, 628, 633, 635, 636, 
 
 641, 646, 653, 656, 657, 661, 669, 
 
 680, 681, 684, 685, 686 
 Mazarin, 377 
 Meckel, 325 
 
 Mecklenburg, Duke of (see Charles) 
 Melanchthon, 630 
 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, 280 
 Mendelssohn, Dorothea, 341 
 
 719 
 
Index 
 
 Mendelssohn, Fanny, 268 
 Mengs, 275, 288 
 Merck, 692 
 
 Merckel, 447, 471, 485, 535, 537 
 Mercy, 652 
 Marian, 35 
 Merveldt, 576, 577 
 Mesmer, 320 
 
 Metternich, 10, ij, 12, 13, 14, 15, 24, 
 29. 30. 35. 37. 39, 40. 41. 42. 43, 
 44. 47- 48, 49, 51, 59, 60, 61, 62, 
 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 74, 
 75, 76, 78, 79, 81, 89, 95, 100, 103, 
 104, 105, 107, no, 113, ij6, 117, 
 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 129, 130, 
 131, 145, 161, 204, 205, 206, 211, 
 214, 219, 220, 224, 225, 337, 340, 
 372, 373, 374, 375, 376. 377, 378, 
 379. 380, 381, 385, 387, 388, 389, 
 39°, 399, 401, 404, 406, 409, 412, 
 414, 415, 418, 423, 427, 428, 429, 
 432, 443, 444, 452, 456, 458, 610, 
 623, 639, 650, 652, 653, 675, 679, 
 680, 683, 684, 710 
 Meusebach, 457 
 Michelangelo, 292 
 Mignet, 236 
 Milhaud, 174 
 Milosch, 376 
 Miltitz, 33, 54 
 Milton, 268 
 Minerve, 371 
 Mirbach, 458, 576 
 Molifere, 248 
 Moltke, 305, 359 
 Moniteur, 61 
 
 Montesquieu, 245, 357, 360 
 Montgelas, 19, 31, 55, 57, 88, 106, 385, 
 439. 636, 637, 638, 639, 640, 641, 
 643, 644, 646, 647, 650, 651, 652, 
 
 653. 654 
 Montmartin, 594 
 Morawski, 527, 528, 582 
 Moreau, 599, 627 
 Moreto, 254 
 Morocco, Sultan of, 438 
 Moser, Carl Friedrich von, 692, 695 
 Moser, J. J., 591 
 Moser, Justus, 297, 546 
 Motz, 383, 418, 419, 472, 473, 544, 580 
 Mozart, 291, 292 
 Muffling, 201, 202, 206, 233, 320 
 Muller, Adam, 55, 145, 204, 341, 343, 
 
 362, 363, 364 
 Muller, Carl, 34 
 Miiller, Johannes, 397 
 Mullner, 251, 254 
 MUnchener Alemannia, 55 
 Munster, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 41, 43, 66, 
 
 70, 82, 83, 84, 98, 105, 107, 108, 
 
 109, no, 112, 113, ng, 123, 149, 
 
 155. 215. 217 
 Murat, 26, 27, 78, 147, 148 
 
 N. 
 
 Nagel, 582 
 
 Nageli, 294 
 
 Nagell, 72 
 
 Napoleon, 6, 8, 10, 14, 17, 25, 28, 56, 
 71, 78, 84, 90, 91, 99, 118, H9, 135, 
 137, 138, 139, 140. 141. 142, 143, 
 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 153, 
 155, 156, 157, 159. 160, 167, 171, 
 172, 173, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 
 184, 185, 188, 189, 190, 191, 197, 
 202, 213, 235, 270, 292, 337, 344, 
 
 350, 351. 369. 370. 381, 525, 544, 
 564, 588, 605, 618, 628, 633, 635, 
 637, 640, 643, 644, 645, 647, 662, 
 671, 693, 694 
 
 Napoleon II (see King of Rome) 
 
 Nassau, Duke of (see William) 
 
 Nebenius, 437, 669, 684, 685, 690 
 
 Nemesis, 95, 494 
 
 Nesselrode, 14, 206, 218, 219, 455, 683 
 
 Netherlands, King of (see William I) 
 
 Newton, 319 
 
 Ney, 171, 176, 177, 180, 186, 189, 190, 
 209 
 
 Nicholas, Grand Duke, 383, 449 
 
 Nicolai, 274, 540 
 
 Nicolovius, 510 
 
 Niebuhr, 56, 58, 59, 96, 235, 237, 257, 
 269, 276, 288, 297, 300, 302, 306, 
 307, 314, 321, 334, 346, 354, 360, 
 367, 368, 447, 468, 512, 514, 649, 
 708 
 
 Niebuhr, Carsten, 305 
 
 Niethammer, 639 
 
 Noggerath, 514 
 
 Nostitz, 55, 174, 179 
 
 Novalis, 307, 314 
 
 O. 
 
 Oberlin, 336 
 
 Oesierreichischer Beobachter, 142 229 
 341 
 
 Oken, 95, 319, 432 
 
 Olevianus, 556 
 
 Oppell, 33 
 
 Oppositionsblatt, 469 
 
 Orange, Prince of (see William I, Wil- 
 liam III, William Prince of Orange) 
 
 Orleans, Duke of (see Louis Philippe of 
 Orleans) 
 
 Otho Henry, The Reformer (Electoral 
 and Rhenish Palatinate), 628 
 
 Overbeck, 288, 290 
 
 Overberg, 339 
 
 Palm, 403 
 
 Pappenheim, Countess, 452 
 Paul, Duke of Wurtemberg, 606 
 Paulus, 330, 343, 344, 615, 664 
 Pericles, 282 
 
 720 
 
Index 
 
 Perponcher, 176 
 
 Perthes, 337, 356, 566 
 
 Pfeffel, 31 
 
 Pfuel, 202 
 
 Philip II, King of Spain, 11, 370 
 
 Philomusic League, 14 
 
 Picton, 176, 177, 182, 185 
 
 Pilat, 341 
 
 Piquot, 79 
 
 Pirch, 165, 170, 171, 186, 190, 195 
 
 Pitt, 376 
 
 Pius VII, 338, 339, 342 
 
 Plessen, 108, 109, 396, 399, 441 
 
 Poland, King of (see Sigismund) 
 
 Politz, 494 
 
 Ponsonby, 185, 191 
 
 Pontius, 304 
 
 Pozzo di Borgo, 196, 204, 206, 223, 372, 
 
 375 
 Preussische Staatszeitung, 494, 495 
 Prince de Ligne (see De Ligne) 
 Prince Regent (later George IV, King of 
 
 England), 84, 107, 119, 144, 197 
 
 215. 225 
 
 Prisoner of Elba (see Napoleon) 
 
 Prittwitz-Quilitz, 478 
 
 Propyl&en, 275 
 
 Prussia, Crown Prince (see Frederick 
 William) 
 
 Prussia, King of (see Frederick I, 
 Frederick II, Frederick William I, 
 Frederick William III) 
 
 Prussia, Prince of (see Augustus, Wil- 
 liam) 
 
 Puckler-Muskau, 452 
 
 Puffendorf, 99, 518 
 
 Putbus, 583 
 
 Puys^gur, 321 
 
 Pyrrhus, 304 
 
 Q- 
 QuATRE Bras, 167, 168, 169, 170, 176, 
 
 177, 178 
 Quiot, 187, 190 
 Quotidienne, 57 
 
 R. 
 
 Radetzky, 148, 415 
 
 Radziwill, 36, 525, 526, 527 
 
 Rahel, 244, 279, z8o, 681 
 
 Raimund, 2(55 
 
 Ranke, 455 
 
 Raphael, 244, 292 
 
 Rauch, 275, 283, 286, 287, 288 
 
 Raumer, 307, 432, 438, 479 
 
 Rauschebart (see Eberhard) 
 
 Rechberg, Aloys, 129, 130, 212, 427, 
 
 654, 655, 657. 659, 686, 687 
 Rechberg, Xaver, 655 
 Reck, 52, 575 
 Rehberg, 21, 356 
 Rehfues, 514, 540 
 Reichard, 295 
 
 Reiche, 151 
 
 Reichenbach, 53 
 
 Reille, i8z 
 
 Reinhard, 394 
 
 Reizenstein, 679, 680, 682, 685 
 
 Rembrandt, 288 
 
 Rentzau, Countess, 359 
 
 Repnin, 33, 35, 52 
 
 Reuss (see Henry LXIV) 
 
 Reventlow, 359 
 
 Rhediger, 568 
 
 Rheinische Merkur, 5, 14, 32, 57, 64, 93, 
 94. 95. 96, 142, 228, 229, 431, 469 
 
 Ribbentrop, 153 
 
 Ricard, 70 
 
 Richelieu, 223, 226, 369, 371, 372, 684 
 
 Richelieu, Cardinal, 377 
 
 Richter (Jean Paul), 257 
 
 Rinckart, 542 
 
 Rindeschwender, 667 
 
 Ringel, 635 
 
 Ritter, 237, 317, 319, 324, 328 
 
 Ritter Lang (see Lang) 
 
 Robespierre, 394 
 
 Roeder, 336, 351 
 
 Roland, 263 
 
 Rome, King of, 205 
 
 Romberg, 560 
 
 Rother, 481 
 
 Rothschild, 424, 425, 436 
 
 Rotteck, 245, 256, 345, 346, 347, 348, 
 349. 350, 351. 352. 356, 357. 358, 
 359. 360, 364, 378, 500, 664, 672, 
 
 673. 677 
 Rousseau, 245, 267, 269, 346, 357 
 Royer, 371, 527, 528 
 Ruchel, 5 
 
 Riickert, 94, 228, 289, 360, 611, 615 
 Rudhart, 646, 657 
 Rumohr, 359 
 
 Russia, Czar of (see Alexander) 
 Russia, Empress of (see Catharine, 
 
 Elizabeth) 
 
 S. 
 Sachs, 255 
 Sack, 88, 447, 457, 458, 459, 461, 466, 
 
 467, 471, 480, 514, 519, 521, 533, 
 
 535. 554. 558 
 Sailer, 338, 339, 343, 675 
 Saint-Andre, 694 
 St. Augustine (see Augustine) 
 St. Francis (see Francis) 
 Saint Louis (see Louis IX) 
 St. Pierre (see De St. Pierre) 
 Salzmann, 317 
 Sambuga, 652 
 Sartorius, 55, 98, 599 
 Savigny, 237, 238, 245, 247, 297, 298, 
 
 299. 300. 301. 302. 307, 315, 317, 
 
 321, 328, 333, 334, 345, 466, 495, 
 
 496 
 Savoy-Carignan, 78 
 
 721 
 
Index 
 
 Saxe-Weimar, Duke of (see Bernard, 
 Charles Augustus) 
 
 Saxony, Elector of (see Maurice) 
 
 Saxony, King of (see Frederick Augus- 
 tus) 
 
 Saxony, Prince of (see Antony) 
 
 Schaar, i6 
 
 Schadow, 287, 288 
 
 Scharnhorst, 93, 199, 233, 287, 297, 
 365, 468, 499, 506, 699, 707 
 
 Schelling, 315, 319, 326, 327, 328, 333, 
 
 597. 615 
 Schenk von Limburg, 263 
 Schenkendorf, 228, 280, 337, 457, 512 
 Schies, 16 
 Schildener, 583 
 Schill, 456 
 Schiller, 9, 236, 241, 243, 246, 248, 277, 
 
 278, 292, 302, 312, 321, 322, 326, 
 
 510. 594. 597. 630 
 Schlayer, 616 
 Schinkel, 281, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 
 
 289, 290, 452 
 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 239, 308 
 Schlegel, Friedrich, 16, 242, 259, 279, 
 
 302, 312, 340, 341, 355, 363, 312 
 Schleiden, 339 
 Schleiermacher, 331, 332, 333, 337, 
 
 360, 367, 318, 321, 323 
 Schleiermacher, Nathanael, 332 
 Schlosser, r7, 340 
 Schliiter, 282, 285 
 Schmalz, 363, 366, 448, 705, 706, 707, 
 
 708 
 Schmalzian Pamphlet, 366, 431, 436, 
 
 457. 459 
 Schmid, 96 
 Schmidt, A., 117 
 Schmitt, 522, 657 
 Schmitz-GroUenberg, 362 
 Schneider, 534 
 Scholer, 66 
 Scholl, 452 
 Schon, 281, 300, 307, 316, 447, 449, 
 
 455, 467. 468, 470. 472. 480. 500, 
 
 S32, 536, 568 
 Schonberg, 544, 374 
 Schott, 344 
 Schreyvogel, 254 
 Schrotter, 468 
 Schubert, Franz, 293 
 Schubert, Heinrich, 321 
 Schuckmann, 433, 438, 464, 473, 477, 
 
 479, 480, 481. 485, 300, 310, 313. 
 
 362 
 Schulenburg, 33, 68, 70, 464 
 Schultz, 510 
 
 Schulze, 437, 514, 544, 563. 566 
 Schwarzenberg, 47, 63, 70, 93, 146, 
 
 147, 149, 173, 179, 192, 206 
 Schwerin, 188 
 Schwerz, 560, 622 
 Scott, 237, 236 
 
 Senefelder, 288 
 
 Senfft-Pilsach, 336 
 
 Sethe, 7, 447, 496, 497, 498, 354, 383 
 
 Shakespeare, 237, 248, 232, 238, 259, 348 
 
 Sickingen, 672 
 
 Siegmann, 52 
 
 Sieyfes, 357 
 
 Sigismund, King of Poland, 372 
 
 Simon, 496 
 
 Smidt, 17, 108, 396, 397, 398, 441 
 
 Smith, Adam, 314, 476, 479, 483, 488 
 
 Soemmering, 323 
 
 Society of Friends (see Hetairia) 
 
 Sohr, 201 
 
 Solly, 288 
 
 Solms-Laubach, 100, loi, 102, 116, 477, 
 
 497. 500, 523, 562 
 Somerset, 191 
 Sophronizon, 343, 344 
 Soult, 697 
 Spain, King of (see Ferdinand VI, 
 
 Philip II) 
 Speckbacher, 351 
 Spener, 318, 540 
 Spiegel, 127, 466 
 Spittler, 302, 591 
 Staatsanzeiger, 343 
 Stackelberg, 374 
 Stadion, 47, 59 
 Stael, 236 
 
 Stagemann, 15, 33, 65, 76 
 Stefiens, Hendrick, 319, 321, 329, 336, 364 
 Steigentesch, 374, 376, 382, 418, 623 
 Stein, 7, 13, 16, 20, 21, 34, 36, 43, 53, 
 38, 60, 62, 68, 70, 78, 88, 89, 96, 
 97, 100, 102, 103, 103, 106, 108, 
 109, no, 113, 114, 117, n8, 134, 
 143, 200, 204, 203, 207, 212, 213, 
 231, 273, 279, 297, 303, 305, 307, 
 334. 339. 353. 365. 382, 390, 448, 
 455. 458, 465. 466, 467, 468, 469, 
 471. 508, 347, 348, 362, 368, 576, 
 381, 383, 613, 640, 641, 644, 660, 
 671, 691, 697, 698, 700 
 Stein, Frau von, 277 
 Steinmetz, 188, 382 
 Sterne, 236 
 
 Stewart, 13, 60, 206, 217 
 Stilling, 336, 337, 667 
 Stolberg, 242, 243, 337. 340. 343, 344 
 Strabo, 317 
 Strauss, 338 
 Stubenberg, 631 
 Stiicker, 533 
 Suarez, 493 
 Sultan (see Abd-ur-Rahman, Mahmud 
 
 11) 
 Summerau, 16 
 Sviss, 394 
 
 Suvern, 510, 513, 515 
 Sweden, King of (see Charles XIII, 
 Charles Gustavus, Gustavus II 
 Adolphus, Gustavus IV Adolphus) 
 
 722 
 
Index 
 
 Swedenborg, 320 
 Sybel, 513 
 
 T. 
 
 Taillefer, 263 
 
 Talleyrand, lo, 15. 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, 
 
 29. 30. 31. 32. 39. 41. 45. 49. 56. 
 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 
 7". 72. 74. 77. 78, 138, 144. 161, 
 202, 205, 220, 221, 222, 223, 371, 
 
 633 
 
 Tatschtschew, 375 
 
 Tauentzien, 66, 151 
 
 Tettenborn, 685 
 
 TeiUsche Blatter, 347 
 
 Thadden, 336 
 
 Thaer, 537, 538 
 
 Thibaut, 245, 297, 360 
 
 Thielmann, 151, 164, 170, 171, 186, 
 188, 195 
 
 Thierry, 236 
 
 Thiersch, 639 
 
 Thomasius, 338, 517 
 
 Thorn, 99 
 
 Thorwaldsen, 282 
 
 Thiirheim, 654, 658 
 
 Tieck, 258, 259, 286 
 
 Tilly, 202, 637 
 
 Times, 367 
 
 Tiroler Boten, 55 
 
 Tischbein, 275 
 
 Toll, 147, 179 
 
 Tolly (see Barclay de) 
 
 Truchsess, 611 
 
 Tugendbund, 365, 368, 378. 457, 623 
 
 Turkey, Sultan of (see Mahmud II) 
 
 Tiirkheim, 62 
 
 Tuscany, Grand Duke of (see Ferdi- 
 nand III) 
 
 Twesten, 359 
 
 Tzschirner, 342 
 
 U. 
 
 TJhland, 238, 247, 261. 262, 263, 264, 
 265, 266, 293, 347, 609, 610, 615, 
 619 
 
 Ulfilas, 312 
 
 Ulricb, Duke of Wiirtemberg, 591, 594, 
 
 615 t 
 
 Uvaroff, 274 
 Uxbridge, 179 
 
 V. 
 
 VAcgUANT, 385 
 
 Valentini, 151 
 
 Valois (see Henry III) 
 
 Vandamme, 172, 20J 
 
 Van der Heist (see Heist) 
 
 Varnbliler, 596, 607, 621 
 
 Varnhagen, 57, 73, 344, 671, 672, 676, 
 
 681, 682, 684 
 Varnhagen, Rahel (see Rahel) 
 Vauban, 419 
 
 Vehse, 706 
 
 Veit, 288, 341 
 
 Vieth, 33 
 
 Vincke, 82, 303, 360, 447, 470, 471, 472, 
 
 546, 547. 548. 549. 550. 553. 56t, 
 
 568 
 Vitalie Brethren, 437 
 Voigt, 306 
 Von Bulow (see Billow and similarly 
 
 with other names beginning with 
 
 " von ") 
 Von Ense (see Varnhagen) 
 Von Ense, Rahel (see Rahel) 
 Voss, 245, 315, 316, 343, 344, 353, 354, 
 
 356, 540, 664 
 Voss-Buch, 447, 466, 584 
 
 W. 
 
 Waldburg-Zeil, 439, 440 
 
 Waldeck, 605, 607, 614, 615, 672 
 
 Wallraf, 512, 564 
 
 Wamboldt, 16 
 
 Wandsbecker Bote (see Claudius) 
 
 Wangenheim, 320, 399, 428, 429, 430, 
 441, 611, 612, 613, 614, 615, 616, 
 620, 621, 622, 678, 679 
 
 Waterloo, 194, 227, 371 (see also Belle 
 Alliance) 
 
 Weber, C, 434 
 
 Weber, Carl Marie von, 292 
 
 Weech, 685 
 
 Weimar (see Saxe- Weimar) 
 
 Weinbrenner, 666 
 
 Weinmann, 566 
 
 Weishaar, 607 
 
 Weitzel, 557 
 
 Welcker, C. T., 359. 5^4 
 
 Welcker, F. G., 95. 5I4. 696 
 
 Wellesley, Henry, 155 
 
 Wellesley, Marquess (see Wellesley, 
 Richard) 
 
 Wellesley, Richard, 165, 156 (see also 
 Wellington) 
 
 Wellington, 13, 38, 87, 145, 147, 149, 
 150. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158, 
 159, 160, 161, 165, 167, 168, 169, 
 170, 173. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 
 180, 181, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 
 191, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199. 202, 
 203, 206, 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 
 220, 222, 369, 370, 372, 382, 419, 
 684 
 
 Welser, 425 
 
 Werkmeister, 677 
 
 Werner, 249, 250, 259, 325, 335 
 
 Wessenberg (Austrian Privy-Councillor), 
 17, 116, 117, 121, 124, 127, 128 , 
 206, 391, 392, 398, 650 
 
 Wessenberg, Heinrich (Vicar-General of 
 Constance), 127, 128, 338, 649, 
 650, 651, 656, 673, 674, 675, 676, 
 677, 678, 679 
 
 723 
 
Index 
 
 Westphalia, King of (see Jerome) 
 
 Wieland, Christopli, 275 
 
 Wieland, Ludwig, 367 
 
 Wilhelmina, Margravine of Baireuth, 
 
 21 
 Willemer, Marianne von, 277 
 William I, the Silent, Prince of Orange, 
 
 688 
 William III, Prince of Orange and 
 
 King of England, 23 
 William I, King of the Netherlands, 133, 
 
 443 
 
 William, Crown Prince (later King of 
 Wiirtemberg), 18, 43, 119, 212, 420, 
 421, 423, 428, 429, 616, 617, 618 
 
 William, Duke of Brunswick, 54, 176 
 
 William, Duke of Nassau, 690 
 
 William, Elector of Hesse, 408, 410, 417, 
 420, 422, 424, 425, 436, 433 
 
 William, Prince of Orange (later Wil- 
 liam II, King of the Netherlands), 
 182, 443, 617 
 
 William, Prince of Prussia, 16, 37, 192, 
 
 193 
 
 Winckelmann, 272, 275. 282, 290, 335 
 Wintzingerode, 63, 122, 212, 428, 429, 
 
 440, 602 
 Wintzingerode-Bodenstein, 585 
 Wittekind, 546 
 Wittgenstein, 118, 373, 381, 453, 455, 
 
 458, 468, 480, 710 
 Wittleder, 594 
 Witzleben, 414, 415, 449, 450, 451, 470, 
 
 504. 505. 506 
 Wochenblatt, 494 
 Wohlfart, 320, 321, 432 
 Wolf, 311, 313, 314, 315 
 Woltmann, 358 
 Wolzogen, 418, 421, 423, 424, 316, 689 
 
 Wrede, 18, 19, 33, 42, 44, 63, 70, 88, 
 106, 385, 386, 422, 637, 643, 644, 
 653, 654, 682, 697, 698, 699, 700, 
 702 
 
 Wiirtemberg, Duke of (see Charles 
 Eugene, Christopher, Eberhard III, 
 Eberhard Louis, Eberhard the 
 Whimperer, Frederick I, Frederick 
 II, Louis, Paul, Ulrich) 
 
 Wiirtemberg, King of (see Frederick I) 
 
 Wiirzburg, Grand Duke of (see Ferdi- 
 nand II) 
 
 Wussow, 173 
 
 Wylich, 562 
 
 Y. 
 
 York (Prussian General), 56, 66, 151, 
 351, 381, 584 
 
 York, Heinrich von, 201 
 
 Ypsilanti, 14 
 
 Z. 
 
 Zacharia, 97 
 
 Zahn, 607 
 
 Zastrow, 656, 657, 638, 682, 686 
 
 Zeitschrift fiir geschichtliche Rechtswis- 
 senschaften, 300 
 
 Zeitschrift Hermann, 553 
 
 Zelter, 293 
 
 Zentner, 637, 638 
 
 Zerboni, 36, 471, 325, 526, 527, 551, 582 
 
 Zeschau, 54, 163 
 
 Zeune, 311 
 
 Zichy, 15 
 
 Zieten, 151, 170, 171, 186, 188, 190, 191, 
 201, 538 
 
 Zirkel, 631 
 
 Zschokke, 236 
 
 Zuccalmaglio, 553 
 
 Zwackh, 632 
 
 Printed by Jarrold & Sons, Ltd., Norwich, England. 
 
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