GERMANY.
The people of Germany were ripe for revolt when the tidings of the French revolution came suddenly as a flash along the electric wire. No people had ever been more basely deceived by princes than the Germans. Constitutions were promised, and the promises shamefully violated, sometimes ostensibly conceded, but really never acted upon. The oaths of kings were synonymous for falsehood throughout the great fatherland. Schiller has sung—
“The human being: May not be trusted with self-government;”
but the poet and philosopher must have understood that the human being is as worthy to be trusted with self-government as with the irresponsible government of other men, no way his inferiors—perhaps, morally and intellectually, superior to him. The Prussian people could have governed themselves with as much ability as the king governed them. The Hanoverians could have managed their own affairs as morally as the English Duke of Cumberland, or his son George conducted them. Nor did the wisdom of the Austrian emperor, for matters of government, exceed the intelligence of the educated citizens of Vienna.
The first vibration of the great French earthquake was felt in the grand Duchy of Baden. The people, as one man, demanded liberty; the demand was too unanimously made to be resisted; the victory was won without a shot. On the 3rd of March the Rhenish provinces of Prussia felt the shock, and Cologne was in arms; on the 4th, Wisbaden; on the 5th, Dusseldorf; on the 8th, the Hessians of Cassel barricaded the streets, and flew to arms—their victory was won without blood. Early in March the people of Munich demanded their rights, which none but slaves consented to forego; they were refused; the people responded to the first cry “to arms” that was raised; the troops would not charge the people, but mingled in the shouts of “a republic! a republic!” The alarmed king conceded, tampered with his own concessions, and at last abdicated. His son and successor made a great flourish of proclamations and promises, throwing himself upon the popular sympathy until time enabled him to forswear himself. The credulous people who believed the oaths of kings, generally paid afterwards the penalty of their credulity in blood or fetters.
In Saxony there was no harmony between the court and people; the former were Roman Catholic, and the latter Protestant. The prudence of the monarch, however, prevailed over the solicitations of his court to treat his people with disdain, and he saved his throne and his honour.
The King of Hanover was less honest, as well as less compliant, but even he had to recognise, for the time being, a constitution.
Prussia proper was affected, as well as her less homogeneous provinces, by the grand convulsion. After a series of conflicts in the streets of Berlin, order was at last restored, and the constitution modified so as to satisfy a large portion of the people. The Poles in Posen revolted, and perpetrated the utmost atrocities, but were put down by the Prussian troops without obtaining any of the objects for which they so wildly fought, and so vaguely demanded. The people of Posen had been practised upon by their own nobles, and incited by their priests. Their insurrection was one of fanaticism, not of freedom; the revolters carried the symbols and images of their creed, not the banners of nationhood before them,—they deserved to fail. Their chief oppressors were the privileged classes of their own countrymen, from whom the Prussian government derived no aid in its efforts to meliorate the condition of the province. Education was resisted, industry discouraged, and the religious rights of minorities assailed by ignorant and fanatical mobs. The freedom required in Posen was an emancipation of the people from their own passions and prejudices.